This year has taken a good start for us at BeezNest worldwide, and between writing around 3 times more offers than usually and launching new projects, we have been busy on a series of important missions that I’d like to take the opportunity to mention.

Gallery 2 and slow disk accesses

First of all, we’ve been busy trying to debunk a really well hidden flaw in an install of Gallery 2, whereby the “Comments” feature was so quickly getting spammed that the server could just not handle the number of requests sent by the application and a lot of other applications were slowing down.

Trees management

Second, we’ve been working a lot (in terms of development) on a system to manage… trees! What? Yes, trees (and green areas as well). You know, trees are like medical patients after all. Although they tend to fall less ill, there tends to be a whole lot of trees in our cities. Well, we’ve got one great system to do that, that we are working on with one of our partners. Thanks to the system, you can easily plan lifespans of the trees in a city or a larger entity, pinpoint them on a map, and make sure their illnesses and history is stored on something else than an easily lost/stolen/burnt piece of paper. Of course, you can assign tasks, classify trees by street or park, take photos, specify their height, level of danger, or protection put in place. It’s even compatible with Oracle Locator databases! Contact us if you’re looking for something like that.

For a bunch of philosophical and practical reasons, we have decided to migrate the task management system of Dokeos from Flyspray to Redmine.
This is the result of a short time of analysis and of months of small problems. Our reasons to go to Redmine:

• integrated time management, allowing for the evaluation of time per project
• integrated Gantt charts support, allowing for a better planning of human resources over projects
• more flexible management by project (including sub-projects)
• easy links to (code) version management systems like Git, Subversion, Mercurial, etc
• possibility to execute commands via e-mail (which permits, indirectly, to work offline using a stack of e-mails)
• a more appeasing visual look (we developers are already stressed enough by the urgent tasks to have to bear red glowing urgent notifications)
• more complete and visible dashboards (although this could still be improved a lot)
• a friendlier community (this is a subjective parameter, but has influenced a lot our will to improve Flyspray)

Despite these positive elements, we still miss the per-task visibility feature (current visibility is by project), which we understand is under way but is a omplicated conceptual matter.
We are currently working on the publication of a neutral version of the migration script to GPL, so that others can benefit from the effort.
The new task management system of Dokeos will be available from this Monday at https://support.dokeos.com
While the thing is still warm, we will also help two other businesses get their Flyspray migrated to Redmine in a matter of weeks.

 That's it, we are officially OpenERP (previously TinyERP) partners. We are very optimistic about this new course we are taking in our business model.

OpenERP is a very powerful, adaptive, complete and easy entreprise management software and it's the most downloaded opensource ERP project. We plan to offer a wide variety of services around this succesful ERP.

You will find more information about this product here.

As usual, we'll post commercial updates here and technical updates on http://beeznest.wordpress.com/

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some Free Software projects which we significantly contributed [1] to over our company's existence:

• apt-proxy
• Asterisk
• Auto Nice Daemon (AND)
• AWstats
• Bacula
• Cedar Backup
• Claroline
• COnfigurator for GNOME (COG)
• Crystal Space
• DCL
• Debian / Debian Education / Debian-Edu
• Debian-Installer
• Dokeos
• Dolibarr
• dotProject
• Drupal
• Etherboot
• Evolution
• Evolution mail template plugin
• EXACT (POP- and IMAP-before-SMTP daemon)
• FreeCiv
• FreeNAS
• FreeRADIUS
• Fwanalog
• Galeon
• Glasnost
• GNOME
• Gnoppix
• InitNG
• IPblocker
• JFFNMS
• Knoppix
• LAM
• Librassoc
• LTSP
• MnoGoSearch
• Netatalk
• Netsaint/Nagios
• Ntop
• NVU
• OpenOffice.org
• Open ERP
• OpenC2C
• p910nd
• Pancho Project
• Pessulus
• PhpCompta
• PHPiCalendar
• phpLangEditor (Firefox extension)
• PhpLdapAdmin
• Plume
• PostgreSQL
• qemu
• Replicator
• SER
• Sip Express Router (SER)
• Swocket
• TORCS
• Tulip (Editor written in PHP-GTK)
• Ubuntu
• UmiGumi / DLS
• Webalizer
• Webcalendar
• Widelands
• XAMS
• Zebra / Quagga
• Xapian
• …

See also our BeezNest’s Free Software Specialities

[1] code, documentation or suggestions which have been applied

2008-07-20 update:

This year is the first time the BxLUG organises a duely longed-for event in Brussels to promote Open Source software to a wide public of people that want to know what is Open Source software or that already know it but would like to know how it can help them.

This event, called Journées du Libre and happening on the 6th and 7th of June 2008, will address a French-speaking community more than anything else as most of the conferences are given in French. Nevertheless, you will find us at the event, where we will have a reasonable stand and Arnaud and Jérôme will be there to answer your questions or transfer them higher if you manage to find a tricky one.

More than just a stand, however, we will participate to the event as speakers, with the short presentation (10 minutes each) of two of the products we promote: Dolibarr and FreeNAS.

You can find the full program of the event on the website: http://journeesdulibre.bxlug.be/

We hope we'll see you there!

After a few weeks of analysing the best open-source products on offer, we have finally released the new version of our website. We have chosen Drupal to achieve this, for various reasons that seemed to be the right ones for us

1. nice code structure
2. acceptable documentation
3. ease of use
4. huge community
5. various services providers available
6. direct contacts with official developers
7. great open-ness
8. large repository of modules
9. good management of multi-lingual elements (menus, pages, stories, ...)

We plan on developing this website and making a good deal of technical articles available here for reference, as well as increasing the list of solutions we specialise in.

BeezNest will be at the REWICS event in Belgium as a visitor this 23rd of April 2008.

If you're looking for us, look for Arnaud Michotte, our marketing representant, who will answer all your questions and discuss solutions for your company with you. Don't miss out!