Newsletter October 2009

Welcome to our newsletter for the month of October, compiling essential news from the Open Source world and our company.

This month, we have:

Table of contents

As always, do not hesitate to send your comments through our contact form. Happy reading!

Editorial - Practical workshops

Last month we announced a set of new training courses. They were 1 day practical worshops, aimed at practical recommendations and work sessions on a given topic.

The first workshop sessions will take place in November and will cover the Drupal CMS, the Xen virtualisation solution and the VoIP tool Asterisk:

To have a description of the workshop and to register, please consult our training schedule. Please note that there are only a few seats left for the Drupal session.

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Linalis News

The demand for the services and training we are providing around the Pentaho BI suite are popular is high. That's why we are now a Pentaho Silver Reseller.

In addition to practical workshops, we listened to our customers and added several Pentaho training courses in our schedule. You will find below the date and place of the upcoming sessions:

Your can register online on our training schedule page.

As for the LPI training courses, we are still offering a rebate up to 25% on training packs.

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Partners News

Alfresco

Alfresco announced Alfresco Records Management, a records management module for businesses and institutions. It's the first open source solution of its kind to be certified by the Department of Defense of USA.

Alfresco Records Management will be integrated to Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2, to be available at the end of the year. In the meantime, it can already be tested in the latest Alfresco Community Edition.
(Source: toolinux.org)

See the services we provide around Alfresco

Pentaho

Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.5 is available. It improves all the components of the suite. For the occasion, the company launches the Escape programme, aimed at migrating from proprietary BI tools to Pentaho.

In addition, Pentaho announced in a recent press release that they acquired the OLAP viewer LucidEra Clearview, which will be renamed Pentaho Analyzer Enterprise Edition and added to future versions of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition. This component will replace the current JPivot OLAP viewer.

See the services we provide around Pentaho 

Canonical

Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed "Karmic Koala", will be released on October 29th. A list of new features is available on the Ubuntu wiki. The Ubuntu Server edition will include Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, a tool for creating private clouds using the same API than Amazon EC2. Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is using the Open Source project Eucalyptus.

Those looking for stability would rather wait for the next release, Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx", which will benefit from long-term support.

See the services we provide around Ubuntu

Red Hat

The interoperability aggrement signed between Red Hat and Microsoft in February proved successful. Technical support from both companies is now available for businesses using Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux in mixed environments. Virtualisation of Windows Server on a Red Hat system and conversely is now supported and certified.
(Source : redhat.com)

Moreover, Red Hat confirms its leadership as an Open Source software provider, as its latest financial results were better than expected : with a revenue of $ 184 million in the 2nd quarter of 2009, it's 17% more than for the same quarter a year ago.
(Source : redhat.com)

See the services we provide around Red Hat

Jaspersoft

A new release of JasperReports Pro is available. Among the new features, an embedded Java engine, geo-visualisation of data and new graphic elements for reports.
(Source : ostatic.com)

See the services we provide around Jaspersoft

Zimbra

Zimbra launches Zimbra 6. The open source collaborative suite listened to its customers and includes numerous improvements in terms of new functionalities and ease of use. Some of the main features are:

  • better mobile devices support
  • more fine-grained administration permissions
  • opened to third party applications through Zimlets
  • integration with social networks like Twitter or Facebook
  • and many fixes and additions in the interface

At the same time, Zimbra reached 50 million users (spread over 100'000 organisations), which is 10 million more in just 6 months.

See the services we provide around Zimbra

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Open Source News

Oracle / Sun / MySQL / Java

Oracle's acquisition of Sun is problematic for some. MySQL co-founder, Michael Widenius, states that the best solution would be that Oracle resell MySQL to a third-party company Le co-fondateur de MySQL, Michael Widenius, affirme que la meilleure solution serait qu'Oracle revende MySQL à une société tierce. He wishes Sun "all the best, but MySQL needs a different home than Oracle, a home where there will be no conflicts of interest concerning how, or if, MySQL should be developed further."

(Source: monty-says.blogspot.com)

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference the company wanted to reassure Sun customers by stating they will remain committed to MySQL, Solaris and Sun hardware. However Java is Oracle's most important software acquisition ever, said Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO.

(Source : ostatic.com)

OpenBSD 4.6

A new release of the most secure Open Source OS, not bringing any revolution but welcomed improvements in hardware support. The project just turned 14, and is also developing OpenSSH and OpenSSL, 2 widely used components for online security.

(Source: openbsd.org)

Integrity of Open Source software

The company Coverity published a report about the integrity of 280 open source programs, studied over 3 years.

Results show that the number of bugs went down by 16% during this time. OpenPAM, Ruby, Samba and Tor are ranked the best. Also, most of the project are now more active than 3 years ago.

In short, the report is very positive on the quality and the durability of Open Source software.

(Source: philippe.scoffoni.net)

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At the periphery

What is Google Wave ?

Announced during the Google I/O Summit 2009, Google Wave is currently generating a lot of buzz. It would allow real-time communication and collaboration on all kinds of documents. A beta version was recently made available for testing.

But what exactly is Google Wave ? Yet another social network a la Facebook? A geek tool? Or is it a corporate tool allowing to work more efficiently by solving the problems with email?

(Source: dannieltenner.com)

SVN for web projects: be careful!

SVN is a widely used tool for team working on a project. When the project is a website, you'd better to be careful.

SVN stores its data into a hidden folder .svn in every folder of the project. These folder are frequently forgotten and left accessible; for a website it means that it will be possible to access a lot of confidential information only by typing the right URL.

A Russian company, 2comrades, ran tests and discovered thousands of major websites with this flaw. If your web team is using SVN, it's very easy to forbid external access to .svn folders.

(Source: smashingmagazine.com)

10 usability findings for your website

A usable site is not only a site on which browsing is pleasant. It's also an efficient site, where the visitor is instantly driven to the most important information and actions to take.

Even if the topic is broad, it is possible to improve a website's usability by following some basic recommendations.

(Source: smashingmagazine.com)

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Tip of the month

From our technical blog contrib.linalis.com.

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