After several months of development I'm happy to announce first, VEA (Very Early Access) version of EmForge Portal.

What is EmForge Portal?

EmForge portal is a project hosting solution. Currently is it in very early access stage, so, not all functionality is ready or avialable.

But, then it will be finished it is supposed to be:

• Project hosting solution on emforge.net with wide range of tools to support distributed teams like blogs, wiki, forums, version control (svn and others), task management, project planning and many many more;
• Social network for developers;
• Open-Source project to allow people to setup same software in local environment;

EmForge Portal based on experience, got during many years of EmForge Project development, and great open-source portal platform - Liferay.

What functionality available right now?

Same as for EmForge Project, I will try to host EmForge Portal on own platform as earlier as possible. So, for now you can see available functionality on EmForge Portal project itself. Actually - it is only one registered project for now, and it is not allowed to register other projects (at least for "normal" users).

At current moment for each project followed tools are available:

• Wiki - based on same JspWiki used in EmForge Project;
• Blogs - project team-members may write blogs specific for project (like this one);
• Forums - powerful forums to discuss any questions related to project;
• Calendar - to keep project related events;
• SVN Browser - to browse project sources;

Even it is not allowed to register new projects on emforge.net, it is allowed to register (for example to write in EmForge Portal Forums). As well, it is allowed to play in Sandbox - there users an rgister and create new projects to play with EmForge Portal functionality.

What functionality planned to be implemented in nearest time?

In nearest time we are planning to:

• Stabilization and bug-fixing for currently available functionality;
• Task Management (probably based on jBPM 4.1), Team Management, Private Projects;
• Later we will add SVN Hosting and many many more.

I hope to release Beta version at the end of year - from this moment for any users it will become possible to use emforge.net to host their projects. During 2010 I hope to pass beta-stage and release full-functional stable version

What about price?

Until EmForge Portal is in beta-stage, all EmForge services will be absolutelly free. After Stabe version will be released I'm planning to:

• Keep free plan for "open" projects, so, open-source projects will able to use emforge.net absolutelly free;
• Keep free plan for limited private projects (limitation will be for team-members and svn size) - so, small teams will also able to start hosting of their projects without any charges;
• For rest plans I hope to keep competitive prices;
• Enterprise version with advanced functionality and hosting options will be available.

Since it is planned to be open-source project, all interested people may install EmForge Portlets in their local

Interested?

If you interested in EmForge Portal, you can help me to make it better and faster:

• Register in emforge.net, write your questions and comments in forums;
• Register in sandbox, test current functionality, again, write your questions, suggestions, bug-reports in EmForge Forums;
• If you feel you can help in development side by contributing your job - you are always welcome - write in forum, we will discuss what you can do and I will give you commitment rights - I hope together we can do really great product!