Hello community.
We are soooo happy to finally be releasing the first Beta of Feng Office 2.0! It is hard to put on words how much.
We have been working on it for over a year now, and it has been a great team effort.
The Summary
Feng Office 2.0 biggest changes lie on its architecture revamp, which bring it another step forward to becoming the ultimate Collaborative Project Management Platform (for thousands of customers, it already is!).
This means a simple installation of Feng Office 2.0 will not look much different from the 1.7.X series (though there are some GUI changes we are still working on – the main one being an easier way to customize the look and feel of the app).
So, without further ado, let’s dive into what makes Feng Office 2.0 different.
A Platform
To simplify our messaging, we call Feng Office a Project Management Software.
But if you use Feng Office, you know it is much more than that.
At its core (we’ll be talking a lot more about the core from 2.0 and forward) Feng Office is a Collaboration Platform. Much more so with the latest changes.
Information is going to be centered around people, and the way each teams work.
Your team will be able to organize and share the information that they use, the way that they use it, with the tools that better fit their work.
The Plug-ins
The ability to include specific features and behaviours for different teams and businesses needs is a very desirable one. And Feng Office has always favored the addition of such functionality.
But one of the main issues we had with the previous system was the lack of formal definition and standardization of the Plug-ins system. We had a mixture of Plug-ins and “hooks”, which we used for specific cases for specific customers, using different integration techniques.
Feng Office 2.0 core system will be stripped off the consequences of this procedures, and will make for a solid and minimalist Platform System.
Multiple Dimensions (for every business need)
Probably the most interesting change in Feng Office 2.0 is the further extension of the Workspaces concepts into ‘Multiple Dimensions’.
Workspaces have proved a popular concept amongst the most savvy users of our community. Workspaces can represent a customer, a project, a folder, company division, or any other ‘entity’ that would contain an important amount of information.
But Workspaces (along with tags) had two limitations:
- They were limited to ‘two dimensions’ (Workspaces and tags)
- ‘Workspace’ is not a straight-forward name for what you were representing
With the evolution of Workspaces into ‘Dimensions’, system administrators and integrators will be able to customize Feng Office at each businesses, calling customers ‘customers’, projects ‘projects’, etc.
This is better explained on the following image:
User Roles
Depending on who you are collaborating with (a customer, a co-worker, a Company’s Director), you will want to present information differently, prioritizing what matters most to that person. Also, it may be the case you have confidential information that you would not want to disclose.
Feng Office already lets you configure all this for each user, but the administration of it is rather difficult. Feng Office 2.0 will let you pre-configure ‘roles’, so that you can easily grant the set of access permissions and set the configuration that makes the most sense for everybody.
API
Developers rejoice! We are developing an API! This means you will have a way to easily integrate your apps and add-ons onto Feng Office, without having to mess with its core.
This means easier maintainability, and extended business opportunities.
The API is still under development, but Feng Office 2.0 has been developed with this requirement as a top priority.
Mobile Access
Last, but not least, Feng Office 2.0 is a better platform for Mobile Access. Mobile Access is still under development, but we will be sharing more news on this… really soon!
So this is it for now. We hope you help us test Feng Office 2.0. All your feedback and comments are more than welcome.
Ah! To download (and remember this is a Beta release… so no production installations please!) follow this link.
