Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category

VisionTEN Releases Vtwitter – Twitter client for Zimbra Collaboration Suite

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Twitter is a new microblogging and communication service by Obvious Corp. that has been taking the Internet by storm. There are many channels (blog, web, SMS, PC, Mac, Browser, etc.) that Twitter can be used from but we found there was not yet a client for the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS). We decided to build one. Today we are releasing the initial version of Vtwitter to the community. Vtwitter gives the ability for users of Zimbra email to send update messages to Twitter directly from their email in Zimbra. It is packaged in the Zimbra Zimlet format for ZCS administrators to be able to install it quickly and easily.

Vtwitter is released as open source software and the code will be available to anyone that wants it. We have set up a Vtwitter project page for more info, licenses, downloads, source code and documentation.

We will maintain the app / source code and provide periodic releases to the public but we encourage everyone to make suggestions, comments, report bugs and submit ideas (and code) to make it better. We have set up a dedicated Vtwitter discussion forum on the Twitter Community site over at TwitTown. Please direct any questions, comments or support issues there.

There are some screenshots in the Vtwitter User Tutorial for those interested.

Happy Twittering!!

Note: This is Beta software, do not install on production systems. Currently, Vtwitter is only working with Windows IE 6 and Windows Firefox 1.5 browsers. There is a problem in the Twitter API that, when we find a workaround, should enable all other Zimbra compliant browsers.

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Open Source software acceptance in government and the enterprise

Friday, March 30th, 2007

Open source allows us to provide flexibility in the solutions we deploy for our customers and we have been providing enterprise open source solutions to them for some time now. Not all companies however see open source as a option due to many different factors, mainly perception. The fact is however, open source is already deeply embedded in the enterprise and now a days even more so in government and education.

The USA government has been on a “bug hunt” in open source sofware, they have been reviewing the code of 50 selected open source software packages over the last year or so. Their findings so far have concluded that open source code is actually better quality (based on flaws per line of code) than most propriatary software. Not only has the evaluation efforts identified the specific bugs, but the bugs have then been put back to the community to be fixed resulting in even higher quality code.

There has just been an announcement that the initial 50 software packages has been expanded to 200! (here is more info on this http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-6171105.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news )

We don’t know exactly what the implications for use or future use in the USA government will be yet, but can only assume that they are doing this in an effort to embrace, employ and maybe even mandate more open source software in their agencies, cities and states in the coming years.

In the meantime, this is great news for the quality of open source software and for enterprise open source software solutions.

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