(openPR) - The Tine 2.0 project just passed Milestone 3 on the road to a next generation open source collaboration product. Milestone 3 marks two goals, not yet visible to the end-user, but with an enormous impact on the further development of Tine 2.0:
At first a lot of fundamental work has been completed which was essential for building up a flexible, reliable and secure foundation for the development of future applications. Moreover we modified our way of coding into a user centric and test driven development cycle. We are pretty sure that the positive influence of these paradigms will be clearly visible in a medium term.
The most important improvements at a glance:
=Usability=
The essential requirement for the successful operation of groupware in a company is the acceptance of the software by the staff members using it. So we investigated the needs of the end-users and extracted this needs into virtual personas. We want to make sure that all of these personas like to use Tine 2.0 and recognize its benefit for their own and the company’s work.
On the other hand, Tine 2.0 also has to be productive for enhanced users who work with it on a daily basis. So usability also means to ensure a productive workflow e.g. by optimizing the interfaces for keyboard usage.
For us usability means to support the user to do his tasks and not to patronize him from important features.
=Back end=
* Under the hood we upgraded our libraries to Zend Framework 1.5 and Ext JS 2.1. The new Zend Framework comes with important enhancements in the Database component and Ext JS brings further well known desktop user interface elements to the browser.
* The source code documentation was massively improved. This makes day to day coding a lot faster and shortens the time new contributors need to commit. According to ohloh.net we are one of the 10% best documented php open source projects – a fact that we are really proud of.
* For automated tests we chose the PHPUnit framework because it ensures that the classes do what they were intended to do. Moreover we use unit-tests for documentation. In doubt about a classes performance, we just have to take a look at the tests. This is much easier than to search a piece within the code.
=New Features=
Initially Milestone 3 should not comprise new functions; nevertheless we implemented some useful features:
* Tine 2.0 received an own setup. The installation starts with an empty database using the setup.php to create all tables and initial data needed. Depending on the configuration you can either start with an empty system or import data from an existing groupware server.
* The new ldap authentication driver allows using Tine 2.0 within an existing ldap infrastructure. You just have to assign the admin rights to an existing group in the ldap tree.
* Last but not least Tine 2.0 was connected with the asterisk phone server. At the first step it is possible to initiate a call directly out of the address book. As Tine 2.0 uses a service structure itself, it is very easy to integrate Tine 2.0 as a service or to integrate other services in it.
So far for the update, thank you all for the enormous interest in Tine 2.0. Please keep us provided with your ideas and feedback which help us redefining collaboration open minded and open sourced.
Your Tine 2.0 dev team
=What Is Tine 2.0?=
Tine 2.0 redefines collaboration by activating synergies through high acceptance in your whole organisation. We achieve this by providing an easy to use interface and enjoyable user experience on the basis of a stable, secure and scalable infrastructure.
Tine 2.0 is an open source business collaboration software. The Server component is build as a service provider where the client run as Rich Internet Applications in the any web-browser.
Tine 2.0 was started by former eGroupWare core developers which now work full-time on Tine 2.0. The efforts are fully backed by Metaways GmbH.
=Metaways=
Metaways GmbH is an internet service company which backs large scale sites in a fail-safe server environment. One of these sites is OfficeSpot.Net, which provides the current stable version of eGroupWare as an ASP solution.
At Metaways more than 40 experienced developers create large scale web-service solutions for international customers, focused on Typo3, ZendFramework and eGroupWare in their technical realizations.
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