Great work guys, it’s been a privilege to follow the project this past couple months.
I am ready to deploy 6.8 in a production environment but now I’m wondering if to wait for the official long term release of nethserver 7. The new additions are very welcomed.
One of the best “addons” that I personally found to the project was the ability to install alfresco on it, as per the tutorial here: Alfresco Share 5.0
I wasn’t even aware of Alfresco, and now I cant live without it! The main issue I had with is the minimum 4GB RAM requirement and in the end I had ti install it on a different dedicated VPS.
In the same line of thought, I would like to suggest the inclusion of a couple other pieces of business software that I believe would be a great addition to Nethserver without the need for heave resources:
A CRM solution - after researching extensively all the self-hosted, open-source solutions available, I ended up choosing SuiteCRM; It is largely based in SugarCRM but with a lot of added functionality that brings it closer to SugarCRM Pro 7. This is a great piece of Software and much needed in my opinion.
Another missing business software package is accounting/invoicing. I have managed to deploy an instance of invoice plane, a self-hosted invoice generator that I really like. Invoice Ninja is another open-source alternative but I still haven’t managed to get it working. Webzash is a really simple accounting package that could easily be included as an optional deployment.
Finnally, I’m still looking around for a communication platform to enable web video conferencing. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be many open-source self hosted options out there - BigBluebutton was the only one I found interesting but it seems to be very much education oriented. I still think google hangouts beats the competition in this respect and the ability to incorporate google hangouts in the server would be priceless!
My idea is that with the addition of the VirtualHosts panel, it would be very straightforward to include the scripts with a pre-defined vhost configured in sites-available and just easily activate the site by making a symlink to the sites-enabled directory. I’m still quite new in sysadmin and linux, and perhaps I’m oversimplifying the procedure, but no doubt the inclusion of the packages above (or of similar functionality) would be a great addition to the package.
Back to my original point, do you have any kind of ETA for the official release of v.7? If we are talking about a couple months I may wait to deploy it, but if the roadmap aims at an official release for next year i may just go ahead and deploy it now and go through the upgrade process after.
Finally, thank you and many congratulations for achieving an excellent package, I look forward to what the future will bring.