OpenPaaS Newsletter 5 - July 2017
In this July newsletter we are happy to show you the great experience we enjoyed during OpenPaaS Desktop Barcamp by the sea! We will also introduce people who work in Vietnam and won’t forget either to highlight what’s new inside our awesome modules. Let’s go! ;)
OpenPaaS Desktop Barcamp
Our awesome desktop barcamp took place the week from 12 to 16 June. This team building session was in a lovely peaceful house in the south of France. The Barcamp team was composed of 10 members. It was the first time that one of our barcamps included people from other projects - in this case: 3 persons of the LinShare Team: the Linagora collaborative solution for secured files sharing. They enjoyed the barcamp so much that they wrote a beautiful article:
Why did we choose to invite Linshare teammates? Because they were eager to discover our barcamp formula and their product is close to OpenPaaS from a technical and a functional point of view.
Two main topics during this barcamp: Desktop app with electron and Offline mode. Let’s go into details.
The Desktop app with Electron:
- making OpenPaaS run as desktop app:
- use the integrated component of the OS for a better user interaction:
The Offline mode:
we wanted to add offline feature to our product. For instance, letting the user organize his emails and his calendars while his Internet connection isn’t available. Details in the article below:
Zoom on our Vietnamese Team
Opened in April 2015, Hanoi Linagora office is composed of 11 people working on OpenPaaS. Let us introduce the members of our Vietnamese team:
- Sang, Tuan, Dung, Chien representing the whole Admin team
- Quynh and Benoit of the James team
- Giap and Thuan, 2 members of the System Admin team, also doing deployment for OBM (OpenPaaS father)
- 3 trainees joined the Vietnamese team for a few months: Hien and Son for the Admin and Tien for the System Admin team.
Recently, the whole team moved to a beautiful place!
In our last newsletter we introduced the beginning of the work complete on the LemonLDAP::NG Single Sign On (SSO) module integration for OpenPaaS. Today, the Admin team is happy to announce that the LemonLDAP::NG integration is complete!
LemonLDAP::NG module now supports logging out from the SSO service and its behaviour can be configured in Admin Center by platform administrators. Have a look at the LemonLDAP section of our OpenPaaS documentation website and read the followed well documented medium article:
The Admin team also added the domain creation feature into OpenPaaS. From the U.I. Admin module any administrator platform can now create a new domain by filling the domain creation form.
Once the domain creation succeeds, the corresponding domain in James server is also created, meaning the mail feature is ready to use for the new domain.
Let’s watch the short Sprint #8 Admin demo:
During its last sprint, the Calendar team added the realtime support to public calendars. This means that now, when a user subscribes to a public calendar, events which are created by the calendar owner are displayed in realtime in all the subscribers calendars. Even better, if the calendar is public and writable, the subscribers can create events in it which are also displayed in realtime for all other subscribers and for the owner.
The team also reworked the way calendars are delegated: When a user delegates his calendar to other users, it will not be visible to the users until they add it to their calendar list.
Finally, the team also created a new management page, improved the U.I. and U.X. at several places and you can see all of this in the video below:
At the dawn of the Apache James 3.0. release our James Team is preparing a meet up set which will take place within Linagora agencies. These sessions will be opened to all interested people and will explain: what is James, why Linagora chose it, what are the main features of its 3.0 version, how it can improve your business and so on. Stay in touch, we will soon give you more information.
Data Science Team
Since the end of June, the Data Science team deployed the emails classification service in its Yarn cluster.
And now, for the last 3 weeks, the Data Science team has been working on monitoring the Artificial Intelligence service and improving emails classification.
About monitoring the A.I. service: the team added new logs in its Kibana dashboard in order to check:
- service answers times,
- models accuracies,
- prediction accuracies,
- the Spark Machine Learning pipeline.
About improving emails classification: the teammates decided to integrate Word2Vec Spark Transformer in the model creation process.
But, what is a transformer and what is Word2Vec?
- A transformer is an abstraction that includes feature transformers and learned models. Technically, a transformer implements a method
transform(), which converts one DataFrame into another, generally by appending one or more columns. - Word2Vec is an interesting modeling technique on Machine Learning that transforms text data on word vectors based on the context of each word in the text.
Thanks to Word2Vec we reduced the number of features for classification from 30000 to only 300! Local tests on the improved service showed a gain of 2% of accuracy and a reduction to time model processing. The integration on the cluster has been planned for the next month.
Currently, the Data Science team are investigating on the next OpenPaaS feature. The team will use deep learning techniques used from Spark. Please see more details about this on the following article:
As a Conclusion
A great barcamp, new features now available on our beloved OpenPaaS… Very soon, the whole team will take a well deserved vacation and maybe, in our August newsletter, you will even hear about the destinations selected by some of our teammates ;)
Keep in touch with OpenPaaS on Twitter, Facebook, GitHub.
Interested joining Linagora? Apply to job offers.
