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Glow - the Groupware client
IntroductionGlow is an OpenOffice.org project to develop a full-featured groupware client application using Java, eventually covering group calendaring, mail, instant messaging, folders & web whiteboard and P2P content exchange (see Feature Plan below). Glow will function as a network client as well as provide full offline support, including synchronization.The project was launched at OOoCon with the following key objectives:
Glow is a standalone application, though it will offer some dynamic features that provide additional support for OpenOffice.org users to communicate and collaborate. In a later milestone, we will begin to offer a signed applet configuration that will offer the same Glow functionality but suitable for embedding within a web site or portal. LicenseTo be compatible with the rest of OOo, we use the open-source LGPL license for the project,
which is friendly to both open-source and commercial use; while the Glow
application and core extensions will be 100% available to the community, we
know that some contributors to Glow may want to make some money from products
that includes commercial or closed-source Glow extensions; this is fine
because the Glow project and community still benefits from their open contributions
to the core. Getting started - using/contributing to GlowGlow is a 100% open-source project, so it is very easy to contribute and to start using Glow! Please see our Getting Started page for more information.We are very interested in ensuring that Glow meets the requirements of
users who depend on groupware every day, so please send us feedback on
users@groupware.openoffice.org if we are not giving you what you need
in a particular milestone or in our roadmap. StatusThe current pre-alpha release of Glow is 0.1, offering core calendaring functionality with both server-based WCAP support and iCalendar-based files. We have a number of bugs in 0.1 which we will resolve in the next release See also our roadmap for some of our next steps.We encourage users who want to try out Glow and give the developer team
feedback or bugs to check back with us for the Glow 0.2 (Spark) release
later this year. This will be provided using a technology called Web Start;
you will be able to start the download and installation from this web page,
and thereafter you can start Glow (and download updates) using an icon on
your desktop. RoadmapThe next release Glow 0.2 (Spark) is scheduled for later this year and will include more complete calendaring and also introduce support for contacts with support for Outlook/Exchange, Mozilla and LDAP addressbooks. Glow 0.2 will also be available for web installation and local launching via Web Start, which will make Glow even easier for users to try and to update. We will send announce each milestone on the announce@openoffice.org and announce@groupware.openoffice.org mailing lists, but you can find more detailed status and interim milestone downloads here.There is a small team in place working on enhancing calendaring/contacts.
The Glow developer community is interested in the next weeks to work with
related open-source groupware projects such as Columba and Hamsam to provide mail and instant
messaging support. Our target is to release a product-quality 1.0 in the
first 2 months of next year, with several localized versions available about
3 months later; every additional contributor helps us to ensure we make
this target and either bring in the date or add more functionality. When more of the sub-projects are up and running, we will publish a more
detailed roadmap with milestones and projected dates. Feature planThe following application features are highest priority:
Release FrequencyA key measure of a successful open-source project is the frequency with which it provides stable releases to users. Our goal is to provide a stable feature release to users every month, with daily builds for developers and other kinds of active contributors. If we discover any bug that reduces functionality from a previous release, we will also provide an update release within one calendar week.Some history; it took 3 months from our launch at OpenOffice.org for the
original team at Sun to create the first milestone Glow 0.1 with core group
calendaring functionality. With 0.1, Glow became a fully functioning open-source
project and the Sun team continue to work on helping the community to participate
in Glow while developing the calendaring and contacts features. We plan to release Glow 0.2 about 8 weeks after 0.1, but our goal is to continue to drive down the period between releases to help our community try out important bug fixes and provide continuous feedback to help the much expanded community-driven Glow developer team to create the best possible groupware client. You can help us to do this by trying Glow and sending us bug reports and feature requests for anything that does not work as you expect it to. You can contribute to Glow in an even more active way by sending us code for bug fixes and offering to accept responsibility for open tasks or even entire Glow modules. We are beginning to put in place the initial core project teams but there is plenty to do! Groupware clientA groupware client has to deal with internet standards but sometimes it is important to support a proprietary interface so that Glow can reach the largest number of users. We use some terms below to define what kind of support we current offer; our goal is always to support interoperability and a staged migration, but at early stages of development we may initially offer a less complete solution such as access and import/export.
$Revision: 1.14 $ $Date: 2004/06/24 16:27:35 $ $Date: 2004/06/24 16:27:35 $ |
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