OpenPaaS Newsletter 3 - May 2017
April and begining of May have been very rich for OpenPaaS project: OpenPaaS::NG review, new features added into OpenPaaS, barcamps organized… Let’s see all this in details.
OpenPaaS User Interface
As a potential OpenPaaS user you’ll find here a quick insight of Application grid and User profile buttons common to the entire platform and allowing you to access most of OpenPaaS features.
- Application Grid button: symbolized by 4 small white squares (becoming yellow when selected) this button contains Home button and user operational modules buttons :
- User profile button: symbolized by the user’s avatar, it gathers user’s profile, Control Center (Settings) and the Logout button:
OpenPaaS::NG is the research side of OpenPaaS project (OP::NG wiki). Started in 2015, OP::NG involves 5 partners: Linagora (7 persons), LIX, Loria, Nexedi and XWiki for a total duration of 4 years.
Every year, the review is time to present advances done to our funders, BPI France, and to reaffirm our commitment. Thus, on last 20th April, Research team demonstrated new features as Speech to text, integrated CryptPad and OnlyOffice that all seduced funders and will be part of OpenPaaS on a near future.
Go barcamp go!
OpenPaaS team likes barcamps! They are team building sessions out of the every day routine, very welcome to get focus on particular topic.
First, from 26th to 29th April, the Lyon Linagora division welcome the Hadoop barcamp. It’s goal? Building a Hadoop cluster in order to run the A.I . service of emails classification on a larger scale that it was at the beginning of the service (see Data Science Team part just below).
Then, from 3rd to 5th May, SDK Barcamp took place in a friendly private place in Paris.
What did we do? We provide a dev-friendly API website (explaining how to add a new module on OpenPaaS, how to handle integration with the platform and so on) and create an OpenPaaS service on IFTTT platform. Learn more about this awesome barcamp by reading If OpenPaaS then Todoist article and following Linagora Engineering on Medium to read more .
Data Science Team
Since mid-April, Inbox module has integrated the A.I. service of emails classification for a 10 users sample.
Firstly, the service was working with Spark directly launched on the OpenPaaS server and the model was stored in memory.
Then, following the Hadoop barcamp, the team is actively working on deploying the service now on a 3 servers Hadoop cluster.
Spark will be executed in this cluster and managed by Hadoop YARN.
For data management we’ll use Hadoop HDFS.
For a few months, Inbox changes its icon module from Mail to Inbox as it receives, in addition to emails, messages from social networks accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Google ans GitHub.
As an OpenPaaS user you configure your social accounts via the Control Center module. Currently, you can for instance choose to have a message from Twitter each time you are mentioned or each time you receive a direct message.
This advancement has prompted the Inbox team to reorganize the Inbox UI left aside:
> Unified Inbox (Boite de réception unifiée on the picture):
emails + social messages
> @SocialAccount:
social messages of this account
> @ your email address: emails only. You’ll find here system and custom mailboxes.
James Team
James team brings good news!
The new James website is online!
James team and Neoma by Linagora, the dedicated service of experts in UX and design within Linagora (see blog & references), spent long hours on the content and design and the result is rewarding. This launching is intimately linked to the upcoming James 3.0 release.
For now, the team has worked hard to submit to the James community the first version of 3.0 Release Candidate!
Let’s see what will it lead to in our next newsletter :)
As a reminder last newsletter introduced the platform admin role - the most powerful application role, able to manage domains and configurations at platform level - as an in progress topic. Today it is added in OpenPaaS! You can now use OpenPaaS CLI to manage platform admin and go to Admin Center under platform mode. The team is still under investigating ABAC model to integrate it in a near future.
In parallel, Admin Center also adopted a James panel, inside Domain admin panel, thanks to the awesome work achieved by members of James and Admin teams during Vietnam Barcamp, which took place from 8th to 10th March.
Other interesting Admin module news:
- JWT configuration is now included in Platform admin panel! The dedicated JWT page enables you to choose key generation algorithm, generates new keys or downloads keys as text files.
- OAuth configuration for social connection now can be configured in Admin Center, allowing you to set up connection with Facebook, Google, Twitter and Github!
Want to find a good illustrated summary of this work?
Have a look at Admin Sprint#5 demo video :)
As a Conclusion
In this newsletter, you were told about: OpenPaaS::NG (the research side of OpenPaaS), awesome barcamps, OpenPaaS UI and the news brought inside the various modules of our project.
Today, we can already tell you that good things are coming in June: desktop barcamp by the sea, new features in Calendar and Social module to present you and so on.
Keep in touch with OpenPaaS on Twitter, Facebook, GitHub.
Interested joining Linagora? Apply to job offers.
