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Topics - nachico

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News and Announcements / Agenda for ZCC meeting 16 May 2012
« on: May 15, 2012, 10:12:22 pm »
Hello everyone,

this topic is just to inform publicly that tomorrow evening there will be a new Zentyal Community Council meeting which is by the way open.

You can have a look at the agenda details at http://trac.zentyal.org/wiki/Structure/CommunityCouncil

Although there are quite a few topics to discuss, if you have any other topic, please feel free to reply to this post.

Sorry for the short notice! I was supposed to announce it with a few more days but it has not been possible :-[

Cheers

2
Hi everyone,

you might have already seen the news in the .com site about the repackaging of our commercial offering. Until now it was based on Professional and Enterprise subscriptions as well as a series of extra services such as security updates and technical support.

We have realized that although our offering was very flexible and allowed to select just the needed services, it was actually too complex for our customers. So we have simplified it and bundled most services together in two options, targeting very different customer profiles: Small Business Edition for small businesses using Zentyal as a standalone server, and Enterprise Edition for medium businesses with more complex IT environments.

The other change has been semantic: many of our customers did not understand very well the concept of an open source, community software that got commercial services in the form of a subscription. So, despite the fact that we are not eager to separate community from commercial editions, we need to call them that way in order to make our offering understood. The good news is that it is just a semantic change: a commercial edition uses the same source code than community edition but it is bundled with commercial services (support, software and security updates, disaster recovery, etc).

In short, we have repackaged our commercial offering and changed its name, but that's all. I know it is not such an important announcement for the community forum but I just wanted to make it clear. If you have any questions or doubts please ask.

Cheers,


3
Hi everyone,

as many of you have probably seen in TechCrunch or many other sites, Zentyal has received a $1M+ investment from Open Ocean Capital. In our opinion, Open Ocean is by far the best investor in Zentyal at this stage, given their knowledge in open source and their experience making MySQL such a great success.

Many of you are probably wondering "ok, so what's next?". Well, it is business as usual. Although we signed the deal just last week (by the way, exactly 6 years after Zentyal/eBox became open source; isn't that destiny?) they have been unofficially part of the team for quite a long time. They are going to help the project move forward continuing the same direction, but with more resources and opening new opportunities. In fact, the 3.0 roadmap was prepared considering that the deal was going to be signed, so we could commit specific resources to the development of the product, instead of counting on sporadic availability of our guys. There you can see one of the positive effects of the investment :) You can also expect more people joining Zentyal, more promotion on the project and more presence in the main community and commercial events.

But anyway, I prefer not to promise the earth but to prove it with results :)

Cheers,

4
Installation and Upgrades / Voice for a screencast (English)?
« on: October 25, 2011, 04:27:56 pm »
Hi everyone,

we have prepared a 2-min screencast on Zentyal installation and all we are missing is a nice voice that could read the script. Written communication in the forum hides the fact that none at Zentyal team is a native English-speaker, so our voice in the screencast would show an awkward accent.

Is there any native English-speaker here who could spend some time reading and recording the script we have prepared?

Thanks in advance :)

5
Hi everyone,

it's been quite a long time since I wanted to write this post, but never found the time. I will try to keep it relatively short so that it is easier to engage in an open conversation.

As you have all probably realised, Zentyal is becoming increasingly popular as the project matures. However, the development team has remained the same and our resources are becoming increasingly stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. As an example, there has been an extremely interesting thread on Zentyal Desktop, with a lot of bright ideas of all the things we could develop. However, the reality is that there are so many things the development team needs to do, that only a tiny fraction can be done for the next version. A poll on where our priority should be shows a strong demand on everything related with desktop integration, as well as disaster recovery, UPS support and IPv6 among others. It would take us years to cover the most demanded functionality. Unless...

... well, Zentyal is an open source project, and probably just by getting better organized we can make the most of the little time we all have available. On one hand, there is the current development team, with deep knowledge on the framework and with a company behind them sponsoring their time to continue the development and improvement of Zentyal. On the other hand, there are plenty of much needed, time-consuming tasks, that do not require so much knowledge on the framework, but that can sometimes drain most of the available time and energy from the core developers and bog down the progress of the project.

One of these tasks was, precisely, supporting this forum. Luckily, we have now the forum moderators, a team of seven members who heroically support other members and help keeping the forum alive. Zentyal developers are still participating actively in the forum, but thanks to the moderators, Zentyal can have both a forum AND a product alive and kicking. But there are many other small tasks that can easily be managed by other community members, freeing up time from the developers that can be better invested in improving Zentyal. I can see three clear examples:

  • Bug squad: handling the stream of bugs reported by Zentyal users (removing duplicates, documenting the bug case, setting the priority, etc). You cannot imagine how much valuable time could be spared if a there could be some people ensuring that bug reports are filtered, well-documented and ordered by priority
  • Documentation team: maintaining documentation for Zentyal, howtos, use cases, wiki, etc. We can only do the bare essential in documentation, but this is a task that can easily paralyse the whole development team for several weeks every year
  • Localization team: Zentyal is partially translated to close to 40 languages, far from complete, however. One of them, Spanish, is directly maintained by the development team

Apart from that, there is the possibility to create specs/blueprints teams, that work together with the core developers to design user cases and write specifications, help with alpha and beta testing and identify usability issues. A good example of such a team could be Zentyal Desktop team, to help define what to develop in the desktop-server integration and help testing it.

I could continue summarizing my thoughts on how to articulate all this, but I would prefer getting some feedback at this point and learning whether this whole thing makes sense, whether there would be people interested in giving a hand, whether someone has already thought about it and where are the pitfalls that should be avoided.

Waiting for your comments.

6
News and Announcements / Poll on Roadmap 3.0
« on: September 24, 2011, 12:43:08 am »
Hi everyone,

there is a poll to request opinions on which features are the most important to include in Zentyal 3.0 (due in September 2012). Which way should Zentyal go?

Thanks stuartiannaylor for starting the poll!

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Spanish / Zentyal Summit 2011 (11-12 de noviembre, Zaragoza, España)
« on: August 30, 2011, 02:38:05 pm »
Hola a todos,

El equipo de desarrollo de Zentyal acaba de anunciar el primer Zentyal Summit, que tendrá lugar en Zaragoza (España), ciudad natal del proyecto, los días 11 y 12 de noviembre 2011.

El programa del Summit incluirá presentaciones sobre casos de uso de Zentyal, proyectos de migración e implementación, iniciativas y colaboraciones de la comunidad, así como experiencias de partners y clientes y talleres prácticos de formación. Además, habrá una sesión para debatir el roadmap de la próxima versión y un examen de certificación ZeCA.

La convocatoria para presentar propuestas de charlas y las inscripciones ya están abiertas - Esperamos que muchos de vosotros podáis asistir: nos encantaría recibir vuestras propuestas de charlas y encontrarnos en el evento!

El Zentyal Summit se celebrará justo después de la Libre Software World Conference 2011, el principal evento de software libre empresarial de España, que tendrá lugar en Zaragoza los 9 y 10 de noviembre.

8
Dear all,

The Zentyal Development Team just announced the very first Zentyal Summit - It will be held in Zaragoza (Spain), hometown of the project, on the 11th and 12th of November 2011.

The Summit program will include presentations on Zentyal use cases, migration and integration projects, community collaborations and initiatives, as well as partner and customer experiences and practical training workshops. There will also be a session to discuss the roadmap of the next release and on-site ZeCA certification exam.

The call for talks and registration are now open - Hopefully many of you can attend: we would be thrilled to receive your talk proposal and have you attending the event!

Zentyal Summit will be held right after the Libre Software World Conference 2011, the main open source business event in Spain, that will take place in Zaragoza on the 9th and 10th of November.

9
Hi everyone,

as you have probably noticed, during the past couple of months, due to requests from community members, we opened a Dutch board and a French board. Results are impressive, with a lot of activity in both boards and further petitions to open wiki sections for Dutch and French community documentation (which are progressing at an astounding pace).

So, I know there are quite many Russian-speaking members in the forum and from time to time there has been the question of whether there should be a part of this forum for Russian members. Well, as we made clear before opening the Dutch and French sections, there are only two conditions before opening a Russian board:

1) We would need a Russian-speaking member who could become responsible for coordinating the board.

2) As the official language of the forum is English, we should try to avoid dispersion of discussions in multi-language boards. In order to do so, whoever takes responsibility of coordinating the board should be also responsible of sharing any valuable contribution in the English boards or in the community documentation.

If that is fine and there is one or more members volunteering to coordinate the board, there is no problem in creating it. Opinions?

Cheers,

10
News and Announcements / Zentyal Community Documentation launched!
« on: June 13, 2011, 09:09:25 pm »
The Zentyal Development Team is glad to announce the launch of the Zentyal Community Documentation! This initiative, proposed by Zentyal community members, aims at offering community members a space where they can share useful how-tos, tips, scenarios, screencasts and any other type of information considered useful to other Zentyal server users.

The Zentyal Community Documentation is made available in wiki format and anyone registered in the Zentyal Forum is free to add new wiki pages or to modify them in the Community Documentation Repository. Please note that by contributing you accept the Zentyal Contributor Agreement (ZCA) and your contribution is published under Creative Commons “Attribution-Share Alike” license.

Zentyal Development Teams believes that the community documentation offers a great chance to complete the official documentation with practical use cases, as well as to gather together and structure all the information that until now has been scattered in Forum boards or blogs. In the next weeks we will be going through the documentation we could add and we’re also looking forward to receiving your contributions!

P.S: On a personal note, I would like to thank robb, for lighting the fuse of this project, Sam Graf, for kicking our butts to actually work on a Zentyal Community Documentation project, christian for helping in the definition of the project, and the NetSol team, for writing the first HOWTO without waiting for the announcement. You really encourage us to continue working on Zentyal. Cheers! :)

11
News and Announcements / New forum levels
« on: September 27, 2010, 10:19:15 am »
Hi everyone,

just to let you know that we have replaced the default forum levels with new ones, more Zen-like, that better suit our new name. Also, the default level icon, a star, has been replaced by the yin yang.

It's been quite fun to come up with all the different levels and we have learned quite a lot of Japanese history, oriental philosophy and kung-fu principles (Zen Apprentice, Monk, Warrior, Samurai and Hero). We hope you like them!

12
News and Announcements / Opening up to the community
« on: August 11, 2010, 02:35:20 pm »
As we pre-announced in some posts before in this forum, we are planning to change the way eBox Platform is developed. During the past seven years the project has followed a classic in-house development approach, where a company (us) has taken most of the responsibility. And as eBox Platform is an open source product, it has benefited from the help of a community of users: you :-) The community contributions have been very valuable, specially when it comes to product feedback, localization, testing and debugging. And thanks to all of us, eBox Platform is becoming a real alternative to Windows Small Business Server.

However, during the last few months, quite a bunch of community members have proposed to become more involved in the project, assuming some of the responsibilities that we are doing (or should be doing) now. From the start, back in 2004, we believed this was the right approach: to take the project to a stage where the community can lead its development, a true open source product. And now we think is that moment! Of course this does not mean that we are stepping out. Quite the contrary, our involvement can only increase from now on. But we believe that more people, not just the employees of one single company, should have the chance to get involved in the project and have the right to assume responsibilities, give their opinion and help taking decisions.

So, following the spirit of the Ubuntu community teams we are launching the Localization Team, a combination of language-specific, self-governed groups which will collaborate to achieve native-quality translations of eBox Platform. This team is just the first step towards a true Ubuntu-like community, with boards governing the community and the technical development and specific teams working on particular areas.

In order to coordinate the Localization Team, we have developed an initial set of simple rules which we consider logical and positive for the organization of translation groups. The team consists of a Localization Leader, elected for two years, as well as a Language Leader and a Quality Supervisor for each language, together with any translator who wants to join a translation group. The Localization Team will coordinate through the Forum and language-specific mailing lists and will meet via IRC once every three months to establish goals and take the main decisions. None of these rules are written in stone and we will be more than happy to see groups adjusting their functioning to maximize their own efficiency. Initially Mateo Burillo, from the eBox staff, will take the lead of the Localization Team, but we hope to see soon candidates from the community interested in coordinating the whole team.

So, if you want to help in localizing eBox to your language, you just need to register in our translation platform and start posting. It is advisable to register in the general translation mailing list too, in order to coordinate with other translators. And if you consider becoming Language Leader, do not hesitate to contact Mateo Burillo (mburillo at ebox-platform dot com) so that he can set up the needed infrastructure (mail lists and such).

Feel free to leave any comments to this post!

13
News and Announcements / Changing the name of eBox Platform
« on: August 05, 2010, 04:31:06 pm »
Hi everyone,

I am excited to break the news on behalf of the whole eBox team: We are going to change the name of eBox Platform! And although this is positive news, the decision was not taken lightly nor it has been easy to say goodbye to our former identity and find and embrace a new one. However, we have found that this decision was necessary, and the sooner we took it the better

As you can imagine, any name change is a complex process and there should always be a very good reason to do it. So, why do we do it? Why did we think that eBox is not a good name for us anymore? Well, basically because there is no box! Although our initial idea, when we started with the project seven years ago, was to embed the software in a particular appliance and sell boxes, we soon realized that it was much more interesting to focus solely on the software and develop a well-integrated, semi-automated, versatile open source server.

But this change in our approach has lead to a growing difference between what we do and what our name means. In fact, many people are convinced that we sell boxes when they first hear about us. Only once we explain what eBox really is and what is our subscription-based value proposition, they start to become interested in the product.

We have been thinking about making the change a number of times earlier, but as you can imagine, it is never a good time for something like this. However, during the past year the number of downloads, community members and general interest in eBox Platform has started to grow exponentially and we’ve become even more painfully aware of the faults of our current name. This has made us feel that it is kind of “now or never” momentum, and that the problem will not be solved by waiting longer.

Something that we would like to stress above all, is that only the name changes. We are still the same team, with the same goals, same open source license, and same everything. In fact, we are working on increasing our commitment on open source and adopting a more community-driven development model, but I will come back with that in a different post.

The new name will be made public in a few weeks and there will be additional information regarding the change in the Planet eBox and here in the Forum. Feel free to leave any comments to this post and stay tuned!

Update: It has been disclosed, the new name is Zentyal!

14
Spanish / Uso de eBox Platform
« on: August 24, 2009, 05:44:30 pm »
Hola miembros de la comunidad de eBox,

Estamos comenzando una serie de encuestas sobre el uso de eBox Platform con el objetivo de conocer mejor quién usa eBox, para qué, cómo mejorarlo, que características son las más útiles, cuáles faltan, etc.

Estaríamos muy agradecidos de todos aquéllos que pudieran disponer de 30 segundos para responder a esta encuesta y ayudarnos a recoger esta información. Ni que decir tiene que la información recogida será compartida con todos aquéllos que voten. Si tienen sugerencias para nuevas encuestas no duden en dejarlas en los comentarios más abajo.

¡¡Gracias!!  :)

15
News and Announcements / Usage of eBox Platform
« on: August 24, 2009, 05:24:21 pm »
Hi dear eBox community members,

We are starting a series of polls regarding the use of eBox Platform in order to better know who uses eBox, for what, how to improve it, which features are the most useful, which ones are missing, etc.

We would really appreciate anyone spending some 30 seconds to answer the poll and help us gathering this information. Needless to say, the information gathered will be public for all those who voted. If you have suggestions for more polls please just leave a message below.

Thanks!  :)

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