Editorial
Dear Readers!
Some of you know it already, but especially those of you I did not meet within the last two months might not know yet and I wanted you to know first - before we are going public about this: Onepoint Project will become a commercial open source product.
What does this mean? It basically means that there will be two versions of Onepoint Project:
- The Open Edition will be released under the GPL license and will feature a subset of the functionality you know plus a few things from the upcoming release 06.1
- The Team Edition will come with all the functionality and will continue to be a commercial product
We think that this will create a win-win situation for everyone: Very small companies and open source project teams will be able to work with the Open Edition at no costs, Onepoint Project will get a much broader installed base and will get really “battle tested” which in turn will benefit our commercial customers which will get an even more stable and reliable product.
Other things which are going on at the moment: We have started to produce a "real" Onepoint Project user guide in English (there will be also a German one in the future), the 06.1 release will be slightly delayed due to additional features and the open source strategy, our new website is online (please check out the comments section), our first business breakfast was a big success (12 attendees, a very interesting discussion, super feedback) and I was finally able to start my weblog "task1" about practical project leadership last week.
Enjoy reading & all the best,
Gerald Mesaric (CEO)
Solution
Open Source: Dual Licensing Strategy
As already outlined in the editorial we are going to have a dual licensing strategy for Onepoint Project 06.1, meaning that the upcoming next release will be the first version of the product to be released both under the GPL and under a commercial license. The GPL version will be called the "Open Edition" and will feature a subset of the functionality of the closed-source product which will continue to be named the "Team Edition".
The Open Edition will ship with sufficient features in order that a small project team can plan and control an average project without having to invest in license fees. However, it will not be possible to purchase support for this edition, i.e., Open Edition customers will have to rely on the community for support. We also think that the Open Edition will provide a great way of trying out Onepoint Project on a small project first without the timely limitations of a trial version.
In order to master more complex projects or for getting support and maintenance, customers will want to turn to the Team Edition instead. The overall pricing will be the same as it is today, but we will drop the minimum user limit (1 manager user, 5 standard users) once our online store will be opened.
Delayed: Onepoint Project 06.1
Due to the changes required in order to implement the open source strategy and some new features we are currently adding due to customer requests we will have to delay the shipment of the 06.1 release until at least end of September. One of the more interesting changes will be the possibility to enter and view resource assignments also in hours and not just in percentages which we are currently implementing for a customer test installation.
Decided: Task Behavior
The task behavior problem we outlined in the last report has now been solved: We will stick to our general bottom-up planning and progress tracking approach and change the behavior of tasks in order to be consistent with this strategy. In practice, this means for tasks that it will be possible to enter a base effort, but you will no longer be able to mix tasks and other activities under the same collection activity. The changes will part of Onepoint Project 06.1.News
- Our first success story is now online on our new website in both English and German language versions. Big thanks to our first reference customer "Customer Experts" and their CEO, Thomas Weitzendorf for his nice quote
- On September 7 our founder and CEO, Gerald Mesaric will give a talk about the challenges in IT project leadership on the German language Industry Track of the i-Know Conference in Graz, Austria
- Due to the big success of our first business breakfast, our partners (Codemart and the Know-Center) and we have decided to repeat this event at the IBM Forum in Vienna on October 6; we are also considering a similar event in Stuttgart by the end of the year. For more information and reservations please contact business-fruehstueck@codemart.de.
On a private matter I am very happy to announce that my weblog called "task1" is now finally online at blog.task1.info and I really hope that all of you will take a look and bookmark the RSS feeds. It is all about practical aspects of project leadership - primarily in medium-sized IT and related businesses. Gerald
Comments
A Guide to the New Onepoint Website
By Gerald Mesaric
This time we are "abusing" the comments section for providing some details about our new website which we are very proud of. Personally, I also want to take the opportunity at this point to thank Wolfgang Bartelme of Bartelme Design for his great support and for doing such a tremendously good job on designing our new corporate identity.
Beside the new, more professional look, the Onepoint website got a lot of new functionality and interesting content:
- Nearly all content is now available in German and English; exceptions are the Onepoint Report which is published in English and the press releases which are currently only available in German (future press releases will be issued in both German and English). Switching between languages is simply possible by clicking on the link in the top-right corner if each page
- The front page got a new dynamic element: The event ticker – providing information and dates of upcoming events
- Upcoming press releases and the Onepoint Report are available as RSS feeds – both direct and via feedburner.com
- The product area now provides more information about the product and there is more content still to come once the Open Edition is released and the new data sheets are ready
- We have improved the partner directory in order to reflect our three different partner types: Solution, consulting and technology partners
- Our customer area now features our first success story with more to come
- We have introduced a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) in the services area which will be continuously extended and is fully integrated with the search functionality
- You can now read all past issues of the Onepoint Report online: We have added a report archive featuring all issues ever, reformatted in order to resemble the most current (English issues) and the previous designs (older German issues)
- Finally, we also added an explicit download area featuring all the Onepoint documents and software packages
About
About the Onepoint Report
The Onepoint Report is a quarterly, electronic publication, issued by Onepoint Software GmbH. In order to subsribe to or unsubscribe from the Report, please simply send us a short e-mail to report@onepoint.at.About Onepoint
Onepoint is the first vendor of Project Leadership Software focusing on Hi-Tech companies. We provide a simple, practical and integrated solution for planning, progress tracking, controlling, monitoring and reporting of projects. Our unique smart client technology combines the benefits of both traditional Web-based and desktop-oriented client-server software.