OpenPaaS Newsletter 9 - November 2017
Here we are in November :)
In this 9th newsletter we will focus on three of our modules: Calendar, Group and Ticketing. We will also talk about our second Vietnamese barcamp that took place at the end of October.
Happy reading!
Our Awesome Barcamps
From 25th to 28th October was held our second Vietnamese barcamp. Quynh, Luc, Benoit, Sang, Dung and Dien worked on adding JWT resource delegation between James and OpenPaaS as well as handling Alias based operation in James. Our barcampers published articles:
In addition to these technical articles, for his first time in Vietnam, Luc offered a funny testimony about Crossing street in Hanoi.
Our Awesome Modules
In the past month, Group module has been developed further in term of usability. Now, from a Group display page, a domain administrator can:
- remove members by selecting them in the list showcase
- add members by selecting them among the OpenPaaS users or among his contacts or by entering a single email address.
These new abilities are nicely integrated into Group module UI:
The Admin team has also made several improvements on Group form, that includes:
- fixed domain name for Group email input
- email validation for group creation and update.
Final part and also the most important one, the Group module is now linked to James: all the groups created inside Group module can be used by James. That means a user can send emails to all the members of a group just by addressing the Group email. Not only James integration, the synchronization between James and OpenPaaS is also covered in this sprint.
The Calendar team worked a lot since several weeks to provide new business level features such as resources and groups support.
Resources
Booking a room or some other material resource for a meeting is a really common use case on a company daily basis. This is why we implemented the resources support in the Calendar module. Any user can now create a resource and define a list of resource managers. When a user creates an event in the calendar, he now has the choice to also book resources from there. This is ‘just’ another full-text search field in the event creation form.
Once created, the event is added to the calendar of the resource and an email is sent to resource managers so they can validate or decline the booking. Thanks to the Unified Inbox framework, when the manager receives the email, he directly knows what is the current resource status, and validates from here without having to go in the calendar itself.
Groups
As described above, the group of users just landed in OpenPaaS, so we decided to integrate them quickly to be able to create events with groups of users quickly. This is something we worked on during the last weeks: When a user creates an event, he can search for groups directly in the attendee search field. Once a group is selected, all the group members are added as attendees to the event.
We plan to add more advanced features with calendar group soon: each group will have its linked calendar, so users joining/leaving groups will automatically have their calendars updated.
Other improvements
The team took some time to work on the UI in order to polish the way events are displayed in the calendar view with better colors. They also worked on some new ‘widget’ to provide a new ‘today planning’ view on the right.
All these new features and improvements are demonstrated in the video the team shown during the last demo session:
Ticketing
Ticketing aims to build a new helpdesk tool for Linagora OSSA support team. The goal is to provide a centralized platform for our customers to exchange with us on Open Source Software. Ticketing is currently an OpenPaaS module but will be packaged as a separated solution. It will rely and contribute to OpenPaaS Core.
The expected features of the Ticketing platform are:
- Issues, Dashboard, Workflow
- Contracts, SLA timer, Permissions
- Software, Alerts, Analysis
- Organization, Entities, Users
- Comments, Chat, Videoconferencing, Forum
The MVP is planned for Q1 2018 with the goal to migrate all Linagora customers by Q2 2018.
The targeted users are:
- Linagora Business and Support Managers
- Linagora and Partner Support Engineers
- Client Support Beneficiaries
- Client Contract Managers
The team is composed for now of :
- Quang based in Paris as product owner
- Chien and Tuan based in Hanoi as developers
- 3 students from Telecom Nancy Engineering School as part of their industrial project
For the first 2 sprints we have been working on building the concepts of Organizations, Entities, Users, Contracts and Permissions. In particular, we adapt Users model in OpenPaaS Core to meet the business requirements. We also implement Elasticsearch to search for Organizations and Entities. We plan in the next sprint to complete Contract model by adding Software and Request types. Discover our Sprint 1 and Sprint 2 videos.
As a Conclusion
Today you have discovered progress achieved on Calendar, Group and Ticketing. For the upcoming newsletter, we will detail you the new features inside Inbox, James and LinShare ;)
Now and until early December all our OpenPaaS teams are focusing on tracking and fixing bugs to provide you the first OpenPaaS version very soon ;)
Keep in touch with OpenPaaS on Twitter, Facebook, GitHub.
Interested joining Linagora? Apply for job offers.
