OpenPaaS Newsletter 4 - June 2017
As a foretaste of holidays, June, with its warm and sunny days, puts us in a good mood :) So, today we are really happy to present you the significant advances done in OpenPaaS. This newsletter is particularly Calendar and Chat oriented as many new features has been brought on these two modules. Moreover, you’ll also learn what’s new in the OpenPaaS User Interface, in the Admin module and on the side of our James server.
What’s up about OpenPaaS User Interface?
Global Search input
On desktop, OpenPaaS adopted the Search input directly in its header! So, now, from any visited OpenPaaS page you have a quick access to global search!
On mobile, changes have been done too! Filtering options on global search are clearer. In the previous version you needed to reopen the burger menu, which was hiding then the searched expression, whereas now, you use the dropdown menu next to the search field to display clearly and select your filtering options. Just have a look at these comparatives screenshots.
Password Management
In the Control Center, Password is a new added submenu that allows a user to manage his password from his desktop or his mobile.
April newsletter learned you delegation rights on OpenPaaS Calendar: as a calendar owner I can allow chosen users to see my free/busy time slots, to read, to write or to administrate it.
Today Calendar team is happy to announce the effective implementation of realtime updates on shared calendars and to present you the public calendars feature as well as the sidebar U.I. improvements.
Before giving you more details about progress made within the Calendar module, let’s have a quick look at some useful vocabulary:
- a Sharer: a calendar owner sharing one or several calendars.
- a Sharee: a user to whom a sharer shares his calendar(s). It can be a read (see events content), a write (modify events) or an admin access (e.g.: add sharees).
- a Shared/Delegated calendar: a sharer shares one/some of his calendar(s) with a sharee.
- a Public Calendar: a calendar is said public when any user has at least permission to read its events.
- External Calendars: these are the external calendars to which a user has access. They are composed of shared calendars and public calendars.
Since April, the Calendar team first simplified the code of shared calendar rights management to improve the reliability of the application.
Following this refactoring, the teammates added the realtime updates on shared calendars. With realtime the sharee’s calendar views is now updated as soon as the sharer modify anything inside his shared calendars: creation of a new event displays this event to the sharee, revocation of shared rights removes the calendar from the sharee… The Sprint #20 Demo video illustrates realtime update by displaying 2 different users on 2 browsers.
The team then continued its progression by improving the U.I. sidebar in order to unify it with the others OpenPaaS modules and make it clearer. So: icons and fonts are the same as others modules, the calendar owner’s name appears below each external calendar, the calendar lists can be collapsed and a new dropdown menu has been added for all my calendars.
And last but not least, any OpenPaaS user can now subscribe to public calendars offered by other OpenPaaS users. Once a user has subscribed to a public calendar, he is able to modify its name and color in his own workspace only. He can also unsubscribe from it with the standard calendar removal, from configuration page, so this calendar will therefore become available again for subscription.
As you can see Calendar team did a great job!
Social Team
Since April, the Social team essentially worked on Chat module to enrich it with many new features:
- Starring Chat messages inside a conversation: just click on the star icon of the messages you want to star.
Once it is done, click on the star icon at the beginning of the conversation to see all the starred messages in the right aside.
- CHAT message button added inside a user’s profile
It allows you to easily reach one of your OpenPaaS contacts for a chat. First, open a user’s profile from the Members submenu of your Control Center by clicking on his avatar or name and finally click on the CHAT button below his avatar (a little further, you we’ll also see other means to open a user’s profile).
- Notifications for unread message(s)
Each time a new message arrives in one of the conversations, a notification appears directly in the current open conversation or on the channel displayed in the aside:
- Beginning message of confidential conversation is customized with the avatars and names of its participants.
- A click on Avatar or Name of a member displays his Profile
- Chat Results in Global Search have been organized
As a reminder, Global Search gives a reverse chronological list of results providing from all the OpenPaaS modules. Previously Chat results was displayed at the bottom of this list and not sorted. Today, Chat results are included in this list of results as any other module.
Find all these features in Sprint 6 demo and Sprint 7 demo videos.
Since mid May, the Admin team completed 2 sprints. Here is a our summary:
- Business hours in Calendar: a user can now configure his business hours from the General submenu of his Control Center and his calendar so emphasizes them with different background color. Administrators can also change the default business hours for domain/platform.
- Thunderbird extension Auto-configuration: administrators are now able to configure the autoconf attributes for Thunderbird extension in the Autoconf submenu of the Admin Center.
Watch the Sprint#6 Demo for more illustrations of these 2 first features ;)
- LemonLDAP::NG Single sign-on integration: LemonLDAP::NG is an open source web Single Sign On (SSO) module we use at Linagora to handle a set of applications we daily need. Team Admin have begun the LemonLDAP::NG integration for OpenPaaS and planned to finish it in 1 or 2 next sprints.
- Consistent date and time format in OpenPaaS: user can choose the date and time format in his Control Center.
The following Sprint#7 demo video details LemonLDAP::NG integration and the date/time format harmonization.
- French and Vietnamese frontend translation is being finished: OpenPaaS core, Contacts and Calendar modules are done and the Admin team is currently translating Inbox, Chat, Admin and Communities modules. OpenPaaS will be soon fully translated to French and Vietnamese!
James Team
The first version of 3.0 Release Candidate is out!
Now James team is working on a final 3.0 Release oriented sprint!
Since last newsletter, the teammates also had the opportunity to address performance issues on our production. The sprint #27 video shows the improved performances, the deployment of a new Kibana board to analyze logs and the addition of Cassandra metrics to our existing Grafana instance.
In parallel, the team decided to write two articles, one about Tuning Cassandra performances and another about Checking your IMAP server compliance, in order to share what they learned.
As a Conclusion
You’ve just learned a lot about progress made in OpenPaaS. Be a little patient and you’ll soon discover even more, as for example, news about our Desktop Barcamp that is happening right now in the south of France.
Keep in touch with OpenPaaS on Twitter, Facebook, GitHub.
Interested joining Linagora? Apply to job offers.
