DataSync Business News

Developing open source software is a very unique and rewarding experience. The economic landscape is changing and is conducive to high-velocity open source development projects. We’ve been publishing our development builds (a big release is on the docket), launching our forums, and getting some velocity and automation behind our efforts. Zimbra and SugarCRM are products we’re watching grow extremely quickly, and hope to contribute more to in the future. We’re also watching Alfresco closely, and may include it soon in DataSync Suite.

Even though we’re in the early stages of developing DataSync Suite, it’s been fascinating to see early participation from the community. I was very apprehensive at first that we’d be on our own with development until we had a stable production package out the door. However this has not been the case. We have developers from around the world looking at our code, giving us great feedback, and participating in our thinking process.

We’re still in the early stages of building this product. We have solid development efforts devoted to the project, and are adding capacity (our next developer is starting in a couple weeks!). It’s still a challenge to pick which features to write first, balancing the desire to move forward with the financial restraints of a young company, and releasing code early and often. However through it all the project is moving forward, and we’re growing as a company. I’m excited as ever about the future of open source and how DataSync Suite will impact the world.

Regards,

-Mike

This came off the wires over the weekend. It looks like Balmer and the people at Microsoft have abandoned their bid for Yahoo. We think this is great news for Zimbra, one of our finest software tools. Ballmer threatened an ugly proxy fight for Yahoo, but it now seems that was mostly an intimidation attempt. Microsoft’s exit from this deal may also be related to the fact that earnings fell this quarter for Microsoft, making the stock portion of the deal more expensive.

Overall this is great news for the advertising and open source world. Consolidating search engines won’t be good for the common internet user, choice is always a good thing. Because Zimbra was right in the middle of this deal, it’s also good for this high-growth entity. Zimbra competes with Microsoft Exchange, and has done extremely well at doing so. DataSync has moved countless users from Exchange over to Zimbra with solid results. We think that Yahoo has a strong position to win against the software giant, and we look forward to watching from a front row seat.

Go Yahoo!

We’re finally ready to commit to a timeline for our first landmark feature for DataSync Suite: Zimbra email archiving to SugarCRM. You’ve been asking for it, we’re going to deliver. It’ll be open source and up for grabs in a couple months.

We’ve been focused on developing the single sign-on and account management portions of DataSync Suite. Now that we’ve made some progress there, we’re going to focus on a cool new feature over the next few weeks: developing a plugin that allows users to archive their email in Zimbra to SugarCRM.

We’ve already seen this done in desktop clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook, but no one has done it in the web interface of Zimbra. We’re doing this to remove the need for a desktop client to move information between SugarCRM and Zimbra.

In the future we’re also going to add contact, task, and calender syncing to the plugin. We’ll probably take a break and work on some other aspects of DataSync Suite (such as the integration bus) before we tackle that. However if there’s a group out in the community who would like to help us out, that would be much appreciated

DataSync is excited to launch full BlackBerry BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) support for Zimbra and SugarCRM. We’ve been in testing for a long time (thanks to all you beta testers!) and have confidence in our backend systems. BlackBerry support is a key part of our ongoing strategy to mobilize our applications, and Zimbra and SugarCRM are the first apps to jump on this trend.

Zimbra is currently in “beta” BlackBerry support mode, however we have had a very solid response over the past 30 days in our test environment. We’ve decided to offer this service commercially because of the overall stability of the system. Even though it isn’t 100% solid yet, it’s a massive improvement over NotifyLink’s software (which regularly angered DataSync and our users). So in light of the move forward, we’ve decided to pull support for Notify and move our users exclusively to BES.

On the SugarCRM front, we now have numerous options for managing CRM on your BlackBerry. If you’re in a high-speed mobile network, you’ll really appreciate the funcionality. If you’re still on 1x or a slower mobile network, the connectivity will be slow. We don’t have EVDO here just yet, but I still take advantage of the ability to look up contacts, log cases, and track accounts on my BlackBerry. If you’re interested in mobile SugarCRM options contact us and we’ll give you the scoop on our experiences.

Mobile devices are a growing part of our client’s lives. Managing email, calendars, contact lists are becoming a regular part of business. We’re committed to doing our best to provide our clients with the latest mobile technology to set their workforce free.

DataSync is proud to publish our updated DataSync Suite architecture document in our wiki. This document is currently under heavy modification as we start publishing our strategy for future development of DataSync Suite. Right now we’re working hard on our understanding of Zope and how it ties into our application, and are finding that our “DataSync Core Services” application will be split into two parts:

1. Application Server - This will be heavily powered by Zope, and will be focused on communication and managing plugins with supported applications.
2. Integration Bus - This is the ground-level communication layer. We’re working to make this a scalable protocol that allows our application to scale to enterprise levels.

Overall the document is a skeleton model for how we’ll be building our application out. Right now we’re still looking to the community for input, so we’d like to hear your thoughts about the direction we’re taking. Also check out or roadmap for information on what we plan to build and when.

After a ton of research, we’ve decided to use Zope as the application framework that will drive the future of DataSync Suite. Zope is a widely accepted standard in the open source world that has an army of developers working on improving it. It’s also extremely flexible, actually one of the most flexible application frameworks out there in our opinion.

Our internal guys have already started working on moving some of the portal over to Zope, and will be working on layering in the Integration Bus. Our transition to Zope will probably be done over the next few months gradually. However our move to Zope is an important strategic decision that will help us make DataSync Suite more flexible and robust. One of the biggest features we’re looking forward to utilizing is Zope’s plug in features. We want to make it extremely simple to add applications to the suite, and Zope allows us to do that.

If you’re interested in more about ongoing development of our suite, feel free to contact us.

In the last few years there have been a number of open source groups which have created free and inexpensive open source alternatives to many of the major business productivity tools available to companies. There’s Open Office to replace Microsoft Office, Yahoo’s Zimbra to replace Exchange, SugarCRM to replace Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com and other proprietary CRM solutions, GIMP to replace Photoshop and a number of other great open source alternatives that allow companies to do many of the same things they can do with expensive commercial software tools for next to nothing.

Open source software often gives much better bang for your buck, unfortunately if you don’t have a very tech-savvy IT guy, these solutions can be somewhat difficult to implement. Recently the South Dakota Board of Regents was evaluating new course management tools and their first decision was to rule out open source solutions because they simply did not have the Linux expertise to make good use of any of them. Many companies and organizations find themselves in similar dilemmas. There’s great software out there to use, but no one in the company or organization knows how to implement it. So what do you do?

Many organizations choose to opt for the proprietary solution that comes with great support and installation help and end up spending much more money than they need to. Instead of caving in and paying full price for proprietary software, instead consider getting an IT consultant to help your company leverage open source software. There are many companies which are called Application Service Providers (ASPs) that can do the setup of the servers, installation of the software, and manage it for you for a very low price. For example, DataSync offers a complete Zimbra-based email solution that’s much cheaper than Exchange and is technically superior as well. DataSync also offers a superb SugarCRM Hosting service that’s much less expensive than SalesForce.com.

DataSync and application hosting companies like it can help your company leverage the great open source applications available and you don’t need any of the advanced technical know-how to make it happen. It’s still a lot cheaper than proprietary software, and you get all of the great benefits of using open source tools.

If you’re looking to host Desktop Application, you might want to find a more traditional IT consultant. Chances are any for-hour IT consultant can help you install GIMP, Open Office, and desktop applications like that for a relatively low one-time fee. It’ll be much cheaper than paying for expensive proprietary solutions.

Just because your small or medium sized business doesn’t have an open source technologist on staff doesn’t mean that you can’t make use of these great pieces of software. Application service providers and IT consultants can help you leverage these great software solutions for next to nothing.