OpenPaaS’ Newsletter — July 2018

Behold the new star in the sky

OpenPaaS v.1.1.0 Antares is now on orbit!

Introduction

Earlier this year, while we could still be greeted with snowflakes on our way to work, OpenPaaS — the open source web-based collaborative platform — was officially launched. Six months and more than 2400 commits later, we are releasing the first major upgrade, version 1.1.0 dubbed Antares. It represents the work of more than 50 contributors.

For the first time, we have decided to name our release: astronomical objects will be used as a theme. Welcome to OpenPaaS Antares, one of the brightest star in the sky, and which is also designated as Alpha Scorpii. Let’s take advantage of July’s newsletter to introduce recently added features to our product.

From wishful thinking to reality

That is an understatement to say that we would like OpenPaaS to be widely adopted, and at the same time just wishful thinking if we don’t make our solution easy to adopt and deploy. With this release, importing and exporting data is now available, as well as user quotas and email redirections; another main focus has been interoperability with proprietary software, a must-have in many environments; finally, it is now easy to deploy OpenPaaS on top of Kubernetes. Those are the main points we have worked on to make OpenPaaS deployments go like a breeze.

From a development perspective, we have now switched from feature to time-based releases. What does that mean? As a consumer, you will have a better visibility into our product life cycle, which will allow you to better plan upgrades if you are running OpenPaaS on premises. From our side, we will be able to plan releases more in advance and maintain a steady pace to our development. Now, let’s dive into our new features!

• Advanced Search. The search engine now supports specific search criteria, and allow the user to filter emails by sender, recipient, subject, to exclude words or to only look for emails with attachments. The very content of your email attachment is now indexed and can be searched!

• LinShare integration. The LinShare file sharing software is now integrated to OpenPaaS. It is now possible to save an email attachment to LinShare — something that will happen automatically if it exceeds a certain threshold — or to add a file stored in LinShare to an email.

• Quota. Using the web interface, administrators can now set a mailbox size quota on a per domain or a per user basis, a must-have feature for professional deployments.
• And also. You can now write an email in a dedicated window; OpenPaaS can now be set as the default program for managing emails; read receipts have been added; visual indicators are being triggered when an email is sent or received; a refresh button to fetch latest emails has been added; finally, in the Sent mails folder, the recipient rather than the sender is now being shown.

• Address books. A users can now have multiple address books, as well as the ability to move and copy contacts between them.

• Address books sharing. Users can now share their address books with read or read and write access, either with all domain members at once or just with one user at a time, in the latter case also with full administrative mode.

• vCard Import and Export support. Contacts can be imported and exported using the vCard standard, such as contact.vcf.

• Availability (Free-Busy). If an attendee is busy for a selected time frame, the platform will notify you.

• Gorgeous attendees list for events. The attendee list is now clearer, more responsive, display people avatars including their answer’s state.

• Suggest a new time. Any person invited to an event can suggest a new date to the event’s organizer.

• iCalendar import and export support. Users are able to export or import their calendar using the iCalendar format, such as the calendar.ics.

• Interoperability. OpenpaaS’ calendar is now compatible with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office 365 as well as with the Google G Suite. It is a significant feature which has required a lot of efforts, something that isn’t suprising considering the closeness of those solutions. For instance, timezones, which are difficult to implement because every external providers have peculiar ways to handle them, are now supported across the board. Last but not least, the OBM events interchange format is now also supported.

• User interface and experience improvements. The community module has a brand new look. The right panel, which is displaying community members and the widget to invite new members, has been improved. Embedded media elements, like videos and presentations, now look awesome on any type of display.

• Remove, remove. Community managers are now able to remove a member from a community. Communities and their associated data can now also be deleted.

• Notifications. This update brings real-time notifications to the chat module. Users can see channels were new messages have been posted, and messages in which a user is mentioned now trigger a more visible highlight. Notifications for chat messages are now available platform-wide.

• New emojis ! The emoji library has been updated to use the beautiful ones provided by Twitter (thanks!). We have also added emoji groups, to give you an easy and quick access to that very icon you’re looking for.

Conclusion

The next trove of features will happen October this year. Please do not hesitate to suggest new ones, for instance on the General section of our Forum.

We hope you have enjoyed reading this newsletter! As usual, you can install OpenPaaS on your favorite Linux distribution or try it by using Docker Compose.

Keep in touch with OpenPaaS on Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, and our dedicated Forum.

Interested in joining LINAGORA? We are hiring!