OpenGoo is now Feng Office

Today we will officially start the rebranding of the OpenGoo software as Feng Office Collaboration Platform.

There are some mixed feelings to the rebranding, as we have grown fond of the ugly name. But there are stronger reasons in favor of doing the change.

This post attempts to give light on a few of the reasons for changing the name, and a bit on the process we’ll be following.

Economics

The first reason to do this move is an economic one. We better advertise our services at the Feng Office site. People and Businesses that subscribe to our services are vital to keep developing and improving the product towards our shared vision.

We hope that having an easier access to our services will drive more people to subscribe.

Simplicity

Having two names (brands) increases the complexity when explaining what we do. It is especially baffling for customers that we send them to the OpenGoo forum when they have a question about Feng Office (What is OpenGoo?). We sometimes found ourselves on the need to duplicate information too.

This all will be simplified by maintaining just one site.

The name

To some people (native English speakers, mainly), the word “Goo” sounds disgusting. Not that ‘Feng’ doesn’t have its detractors (my friend Keith Teare just hates the name). But we’ve tested it, and it does get more acceptance.

There was also the connotation that OpenGoo was an Open Source alternative to Google products. We believe our product to be unique and with merits of its own. We want it to be regarded as such, and not as an alternative to any product (There is not one product with the exact same characteristics as ours). The name just wasn’t helping.

The migration process

We will start by redirecting each OpenGoo webpage to the corresponding Feng Office page, when applicable. Some sections (the forum, the Goo blog, the wiki) will remain the same for a while. We will gradually adjust the content to fit to the new name.

Please bear with us during this process. We are thankful for your support, and hope that you soon start benefitting from our simplified approach.

OpenGoo 1.6 final released!

Download here.

This release has been thoroughly tested by developers and the community for over a month. The new features include:

• Archive objects and workspaces.
  • When you no longer need an object or workspace you can archive it to remove it from your every day views, while it still is searchable and accessible through the “Archived Objects” workspace.
• Mark as read/unread for all types of objects.
  • Until now the read/unread functionality was only available for emails. Now it is also available for all other types of content objects. If an object was modified since your last view it will be marked in bold for you to quickly notice that it has changes. Once you view the object it will be marked as read.
• Tons of improvements to the email module.
  • Share mail accounts among several users. This allows several users to read or write email from one common email account.
  • Assign a workspace to a mail account to automatically classify email to that workspace.
  • Group emails into conversations. Quickly access an email’s replies or original message from the email’s view.
  • Attach files directly from your computer when writing an email.
  • Send other emails as attachments. Just attach an email and mark the “Attach contents” checkbox.
  • Email Junk folder. Mail classified as spam by your mail server is sent to the “Junk” folder.
  • Emails are sent asynchronously. You can continue working on OpenGoo while an email is being sent. Useful if sending email through a remote SMTP server.
  • Create task from email. Shortcut to quickly create a task from an email.
  • Insert inline images into OpenGoo emails.
  • Pre-configurations for known emails (GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo) when setting up an email account.
• Upgraded the document editor.
  • Improved loading times. The new version loads much faster on all browsers.
  • Improved cross-browser compatibility.
  • Improved functionality. Insert images into a document, from the computer or from OpenGoo.
• Lots of other improvements
  • Improved workspace permissions edition.
  • Events can now span more than one day.
  • Basic editing concurrency. A user is warned if an object being edited was edited by someone else.
  • Improved password recovery procedure.
    Option to autodetect timezone.
  • VCard contacts importing.
  • Filter the Object Picker (the popup control to pick objects when linking) by text.
  • Plus more.
• Lots of bug fixes since 1.5.3
  • Fixed file uploads on Opera 10.
  • Fixed events “Holiday” repeating.
  • Forwarded emails and drafts didn’t keep attachments.
  • Could not send emails to addresses with apostrophes.
  • Fixed some issues about repetitive tasks and templates.
  • Received emails with account’s email address as “From” were marked as read before being read.
  • Pressing enter on a header field in IE and Opera would send the email.
  • Plus more.

You can view the full changelog here.

Enjoy!

OpenGoo 1.6 RC released

Warning: This version is not suitable for production environments.

A new release of OpenGoo 1.6 is out. RC fixes some bugs from version 1.6 BETA 3.

For details check here.

Download here.

OpenGoo 1.6 BETA 3 released

Warning: This version is not suitable for production environments.

A new release of OpenGoo 1.6 is out. BETA 3 fixes some bugs from version 1.6 BETA.

For details check here.

Download here.

Enjoy!

OpenGoo 1.6 BETA 2 released

Warning: This version is not suitable for production environments.

A new release of OpenGoo 1.6 is out. BETA 2 fixes some bugs from version 1.6 BETA.

For details check here.

Download here.

Enjoy!

OpenGoo 1.6 BETA released

Warning: This version is not suitable for production environments. Download.

This is the first beta release towards version 1.6 final. The most important changes for this version are:

(more…)

What is the Feng Office team doing?

…Or getting more communicative, step 2.

The OpenGoo/Feng Office team has been always focused on one main goal:

Building the best Online Office

Now, trying to achieve this goal we realized:

1. We have to figure out what ‘Online Office’ means.
1.1 In order to make the “best”, one needs to know the “what”, right?
2. Whatever it is, it is hard (to be fair, we always knew this one)
2.1 It takes money. So we need to have a profitable business to make money.

The first catch will be addressed in a post of its own, coming soon. It deserves it.

The second issue, the fact that we need resources to make this happen, lead us to found a company in early 2008. Having a company lead to customers. Having customers means greater responsibility, and change of priorities (The customer always comes first).

So we are now dealing with business issues, which weren’t a concern previously.

Following is a brief description of what the team is dealing with.
(more…)

Feng Office Team visits Madrid

Great news for our OpengGoo Community and Feng Office users in Madrid: November 10 to 13 our team will be there to seek partners interested in working with us.
We´ll be glad to know you and talk about whatever you want:

Ideas | How to become our partner | New Features

If you are interested, please register by email so we can keep you updated on the event’s schedule. Looking forward to seeing you!!

Getting more communicative, step one

It’s been a while since my last ramble at this blog.

I intended to do a long post about my month-long trip to Europe and the US, but as time passed, it seemed increasingly out of time. At least I did write about it on my ‘geek blog’.

Then I wanted to post this beautiful picture of the Feng Office team (some members missing), and take the time to introduce each one. But again, the work load has prevented me from doing that. The picture is not even up to date anymore as Oscar has moved to work at another company.

Then yesterday we got notice of a CNET article that feels like it should get a response from us (I don’t want to write it just yet).

And like these, there are many bits about OpenGoo and Feng Office that we want to share.

Too many things are stacking up already, so we should at least get started.

OpenGoo 1.5.1 is now available!

Download OpenGoo 1.5.1 now.

OpenGoo 1.5.1 has just been released. Several bugs from version 1.5 were fixed for this release, including:

• Tags permissions. Now a user can only see tags applied to objects that the user can view.
• Some milestones were showing in wrong workspaces.
• Custom properties defined in Administration are now searchable.
• Memory exhausted error when rendering repetitive tasks with an old date in the calendar.
• Fatal error when copying a milestone.
• Fatal error “undefined function saveFileAttributes” when uploading a file.
• Fixed the permissions control when editing a workspace’s permissions.
• Fixed a small rendering problem with invited users in event edition.
• Fixed error when sending emails to empty recipients.
• Fixed default user preferences’ rendered value.
• Fixed a rendering problem in comments and descriptions that would skip a character before an email address or link.
• Tags query was using a hardcoded ‘og_’ table prefix.
• Translate OpenGoo tool now includes subfolders of language folders. Checklang also improved.
• Files of type audio/mp3 are now correctly identified as MP3.
• Updated langs.

You can download at Sourceforge.net.

You can report bugs at our forums.

Enjoy!