EmForge Portal

EmForge on Google Apps Marketplace

2010-05-13T14:05:13Z

In the beginning of March Google Launched it's Marketplace for applications, integrated with Google Apps. Via this Marketplace, Domain Administrator may now add new applications, integrated with Google Apps and extended functionality, available for Google Apps Users.

And today I'm happy to announce EmForge Portal on Google Apps Marketplace!

Integration for now very simple - we only implement Single-Sign-On with Google Apps and added special feature, allowed project admins to invite users into project with using their Google Contacts or Domain Users.

But many features we are planning to add very soon.

To add EmForge into your Google Apps Domain simple go into EmForge on Marketplace and click on "Add It Now" button.

Files tool to share binary releases

2010-03-23T07:33:27Z

Hi!

Last week we started to get responses from users via User Voice service, and today I'm happy to announce first request completed.

Now, each project hosted in EmForge has "Files" tooll. This tool (placed on separate page) allowed users to keep files (like ibnary releases of project) with description, organize them into folders.

There are many additional nice featues like:

WebDAV access;
Comments on files;
Ratings;
Powerful Permissions configuration.

Hope it will make EmForge Portal more comfortable for our users.

Happy EmForging!

EmForge and Liferay on SunTechDays 2010 Saint-Petersburg

2010-03-20T21:54:31Z

Sun (Oracle?) TechDays - is a global developers conference, organized by Sun Microsystems in several cities in the world and joined many developers to discuss about latest news in Java/Solaris (and other Sun technologies) world.

In Russia, usually this conference organized in Saint-Petersburg. More than 3500 visitors attended Sun Tech Days 2009 in St.Petersburg, I'm not sure about planned amount for this year, but, I can say it is biggest developers even in my city (probably in Russia???)

And I'm happy to announce 2 my presentations I will do on SunTechDays this year: one about EmForge and another about Liferay.

During first presentation I'm going to talk about problems, usually meet by Distributed teams, about important of communication and how EmForge help in this case.

Second will be about Liferay, how Liferay help us during developing EmForge Portal, as well as how it is possible to build site with many functionality (web-content, blogs, forums, social network) in 20 minutes. Actually, I'm going (during my short 20 minutes presentation) simple run Liferay from downloaded bundle and build sample site - I'm sure, any PowerPoint Presentation cannot replace this life-demonstration.

Will be happy to see you on SunTechDays 2010 Saint-Petersburg!

Integration with Gravatar

2010-03-17T08:20:59Z

EmForge designed to be not only Project Collaboration platform, but we have a plans to make it a Social Network for developers. We are not going to implement own new Social network, but want to integrate with many already existed Social Services widelly used by developers.

We already simplified login with using Google, Yahoo (and any OpenID in general) account. Now, we providing integration with Gravatar - service kept user avatars in one place.

Now, if you have avatar there - no need to define new in EmForge - EmForge will just reuse it. Of Course you can change it to some EmForge-Specific (if you want).

It is only first steps, many more social features planned in the nearest feature, first of all integration with Google Services, LinkedIn, Friends Connect.

New Release with Subversion Hosting, Admin Tool, Localization and Many More

2010-03-10T11:53:12Z

I'm very happy to announce new version of EmForge Portal with great imrpovements we did during February

Subversion Hosting

First of all - it is subversion hosting. Now, during creation of new project you may create subversion repository for it. Access to repository controlled from EmForge Portal:

only team members have rights to commit into repository;
for restricted and private project - only team members has access to repository even for read-only

Subversion hosting is free for open-source projects. During beta-stage - it is free for any project, IN future, we will provide free plan for small teams/repository, for bigger team plans will start from $5 per month.

We are going to continue improvement Version Control hosting on EmForge Portal. Next plans are:

Access Control for Folders and Roles;
Git Hosting;

With Subversion hosting we started provide full set of tools required for distributed software development teams

Admin Console

Admin Console added to allow project owner/manager to edit different project settings, team membership and role assignment.

Localization

Use EmForge Portal with your native language. We added support for Russian, Polish, Brazilian. We need contributors to add support for more languages. Please write into our Forum if you like to see EmForge in you language and may help us!

Tasks/Burndown/Filters improvement

We improved our main tool:

better and faster tasks managment,
Detailed bunrdown chart;
You may save your filters of tasks to use later;
and many more.

EmForge Portal team hoped with all these imrpovements EmForge Portal become more and more useful and comfortable for teams. But we are not going to stop - we have many plans and hope to continue add new features and make EmForge more and more comfortable.

Happy EmForging!

Improved BurnDown, Stored Filters and Simplified Google and Yahoo users login

2010-02-08T23:05:44Z

We released beta version a week ago. Of course this week was spent for different issues related to beta-release, but we did not stop to improve our EmForge Portal.

So, new version were deployed - during this week followed changes were implemented:

Improved Release BurnDown Chart - not it is possible to see 'detailed' version of Release BurnDown (in case some release is selected in tasks filter). Detailed BurnDown displayed chart separatelly for low, high and normal tasks, as well as allow to select date range, release and user;
Task Filters , selected by user in projects are stored between sessions. Now, then you back into some project task-list, you see same set of tasks as last time you visited this project;
Now it is much simpler to login with using your Google and Yahoo account. Simple click on Google or Yahoo button in login dialog;

I hope al of these changes will make working with EmForge more comfortable!

Kenai Users: Welcome to EmForge Portal!

2010-02-08T10:04:48Z

As you probably know, Oracle decided to do not support Kenai.com project, provided by Sun as project hosting service for open-source project.

I will be happy if Kenai users will found EmForge Portal useful for them and will be happy to help in migration process

Features provided for Open-Source projects

For open-source projects EmForge Portal provided:

Totally Free Services;
Own "workspace" for each project with own set of pages;
You can assign own domain-name to this workspace, own theme (Liferay themes used) and own logo - so, it will looks like your own site, provided wide range of tools for end-users;
Powerful, but simple to use Task-Management to plan your activities for project;
Time-Tracking tools and Burndown chart to check the progress of project;
Wiki to share information;
Blog to publish project related news;
Forum for communication with end-users, as well as discussing different issues inside the team;

Blog you currently reading is part of such workspace for EmForge Portal project.

It is very easy to Start New Project .

EmForge Portal - Open Source project

EmForge Portal itself - open-source project. We just started few months ago and already providing wide set of features. We hope to provide much more in the nearest months - and, if you like - you can join us and help to make best hosting service for projects!

Project itself hosted on EmForge: http://www.emforge.net/web/emforge-portal and you can use own forum to discuss any questions related to the project.

New features coming soon

During this month we are going to start Subversion Hosting. Actually - we already have it - but just some UI to control Subversion from EmForge Portal UI are missed. If you need it, or want migrate your repository from Kenai - please write to our forum - we will provide you tools.

Also - we are woring hard on many other improvements, including:

Closer integration with Google Services and Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn first of all);
Tasks Collection - to collect tasks from different places in your profile;

Many more features comes!

EmForge Portal Beta Released

2010-02-01T13:15:12Z

Today I'm happy to announce EmForge Portal Beta Release!

Starting from today it is allowed to any registered users to host own projects on EmForge.net.

As project hosting service we provide wide set of tools:

Task Management;
Time Tracking;
Wiki;
Blogs;
Forums;
SVN Browser (for now it allow only to browse some external svn repository - SVN hosting service coming soon).

With EmForge you can manage both Open (visible for anyone) and Private (visible only for project members) projects.

Beta Stage

We tried to make our services as simple to use as possible. Since not all functionality 100% finished - we are in Beta-Stage. What means, sometimes Portal may work unstable or have some bugs - we will try to resolve all issues as fast as possible.

For us also very important to get your responses - for any problem you meet, as well as for any functionality we need to improve or add. First of all - we want to make Portal be very comfortable to use.

Our plan for Beta-Stage is up to 6 months.

How much does it cost?

During beta-stage all services provided by EmForge Portal are free. After completing beta-testing:

All Open (Open-Source) projects will be hosted for free;
Small/Personal projects (up to 2 members) will be hosted for free;
For other projects price will be started from $5 for project per month - we will try to make it very competitive comparing to other services;
All projects registered during Beta-period will get a discount - first 12 months of hosting for free!

What features coming next?

We have many plans. Some of them we will implement in nearest time:

Subversion hosting (probably Git or Mercurial will be added later);
Close Integration with Google services and other Social nets (Facebook, LinkedIn, Friends Connect);
Task Collector - to collect tasks from other sources;

If you like to see something else - we will be happy to see any your response in our forum.

Join to our Open Source Project

EmForge Portal - is open source project. It is hosted on emforge.net itself (http://www.emforge.net/web/emforge-portal) and all it's sources available at SVN (https://emforge.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/emforge/EmForgePortal/) under LGPL License.

What means - you can install same Project Hosting software in your local environment (if by some reasons - like security - you cannot use emforge.net services). Installing own copy not so easy as simple use services on emforge.net - it is required expereince in Liferay Portal and general J2EE development.

If you like - you can improve EmForge Portal - we will be happy to new members and contributors!

How to start?

To start use EmForge Portal services you need login or register new account, and simple create new project.

Happy EmForging!

Huge improvement in task management

2010-01-19T13:11:49Z

I did not post any announcements for more then 1 month. But - it doesn't mean EmForge team relaxed for winter holidays. We worked hard providing new features and make our beta at the end of January - and (I think) we did a good progress.

We deploying new versions into production quite often and I do not post announcement for each new deploy, but today I think it need to be done.

Last weeks we improved alot our Task Management tool, and now it:

Task Ordering - very important feature - now users allowed to change task order by simple Drag & Drop them in the list. It is not affected on priority, but allow to set tasks in order we are going to work on them. Yes, sometimes it happens, even we have some high-priority tasks, some lower priority tasks done first (just for example because we are working on them together with another high-priority task). Now you can simple set order of tasks in the list like you want;
Displays burndown chart for last 30 days or for release (if Release selected in the filter);
Task Management simplified in general to make it easy to create and work on specific task;
Simplified Project planning - we have only releases and releases managed from Tasks Filter (you can plan new release directly from Tasks Page);
Tasks Permissions - you can assign permissions for tasks for different roles in project. For example you may allow to view some tasks for all project members except "Customer"

Another bug step forward - private and restricted projects. Private projects visible only for project members (other people is not able even to know what some private project exist). On restricted project only first (home) project page visible for anybody - rest pages and infromation available only for team members. Later we planning to add more flexible permissions management for team, to allow display/hide specific page on project site.

We also started to use EmForge Portal for some commercial projects, what give us good feedback (and bugs).

Many other imoprovements were done, and we are going to release Beta at the end of January. After beta-launch it will be possible to host own projects on www.emforge.net - until then it is only possible to play with emforge on Sandbox: sandbox.emforge.net

Improved Tasks and Basic Planning

2009-12-01T16:10:51Z

No any news in EmForge.net for a long time - but we used this time to improve EmForge.net.

So, today new version was deployed into production - in this version 2 major changes:

Improved Tasks Management;
Basic Project Planning.

Improved Tasks Management

Task Management portlet was improved dramatically during this month - many thanks to Marek for great job. Major changes:

Improved filtering for tasks - now it is possible to filter tasks by many criterias like type, creator/assigner, task status - and many more
Improved Task View/Edit page
Time Tracking
Different Task types supported: Epic, User Story, Task and Bug
Different actions for different different types and statuses

So, in general we have support for basic task types and workflows used in XP - and now task management portlet is ready for real use

Basic Project Planning

We added portlet for project planning - currently it supports only basic functionality to create/edit releases and iterations. Our nearests plans is to improve this portlet to make planning process (including task assignment for releases/iterations) comfortable to use.

Infrastructure changes

During this month - to reduce support cost we moved emforge.org into emforge.net Portal. Now EmForge Portal is used to host information about previous version of EmForge (now called EmForge-Lite). As well as some content (wiki-pages) were moved from emforge.org into emforge.net

As always you can test all these functionality in sandbox.emforge.net or check how we are using it in emforge-portal project.

As always any comments and suggestions are really welcomed in our Forum.

EmForge.net with new navigation, tasks and project invitations

2009-10-27T11:22:38Z

One more week and more features on EmForge.net!

Including:

Simplified navigation;
Reworked Task Management;
Project Invitations.

Improved navigation

We changed a little bit navigation on the site. Now it is quite easy for user to come into own home-page via link "My Home".

There is list of user's projects available now on user's home-page - you can simple navigate into any your project.

To edit you account data - click "Edit" on the summary (under the photo) - there are basic properties available as well as link to "My Account" provided.

I hope all of these will make your live in EmForge.net more comfortable

Reworked Task Management

Task Management become to be one of the most important tool on EmForge.net - so, we are going to improve and improve it with adding new features. During this week we started to work on it:

Added new fields: Description and Type;
Changed navigation to the tasks;
Added permission checking - now only team members may edit tasks in project;

As result currently Tasks tool provided basic functionality. Users can create task in some project (on project's Tasks page) as well as create own private tasks (on User's Tasks page). Project tasks may be assigned to project users, personal tasks may be assigned to friends.

During next week we are expecting bookmarkable links and many more improvements.

Project Invitations

Now it is possible easily to add more users into your project (without going deep into Liferay Control Panel!)

Project Manager (currently it is person created the project) may invite on the project's "Team" page somebody from friends into project, as well as some user already registered in portal (user-name should be provided).

Social Request will be created and sent to invited person - social requests displayed on user's home-page. As soon as user will accept invitation - he will become a part of Project Team.

There is another way to add users into project. Some user may "ask" to join into project - it is possible by clicking "Join Project" on project's Home-Page. Social request will be sent to "Project Managers" and as soon some of them will accept request user will become a part of the team.

Future plans

For next week we are planning to continue improve Tasks tool. I hope new features will be added every week.

Also during next week I'm going to improve default project configuratino (for newly created projects):

2 Forums Categories (for users and developers) will be created with required permissions;
Setup correct permissinos for blogs and wiki by default;
Improvement in Summary portlet (for both - user and project) to include more information.

I hope very soon emforge.net will become stable andusable enough and we will enable projects registration for everyone!

Until that time you can play in Sandbox or ask any questions in project forums

EmForge.net with socialnet, tasks and activities functionality

2009-10-19T12:49:53Z

Only one week ago we launched emforge.net and already have some some good news and progress: emforge.net integrated with default liferay WOL & TMS portlets 9with some improvements), first users and first forum messages, new member is joined the project. Lets look a little bit more detail

New functionality in emforge.org

During this week we added a lot of new functionality on emforge.net (and sandbox.emforge.net):

Project members and project acitivities

Now it is possible to see list of project members on "Team" page (you can check emforge-portal project as example). It is not easy to add new members - we will improve during nearest time.

Also now it is possible to check project-related activities on "Acitivities" page (again - you can check emforge-portal acitivities as example)

Simple Task Management Tool

Simple task management tool was added into "Tasks" page (as always - you can use emforge-portal tasks as example). It is very basic - but already allow to track the tasks in the project. We will improve it in nearest time

User Home page improvements

User's home page also have many improvements:

User Activities on home-page to display latest actions of user in different projects (and not only ptoject related);
SocialNet functionality - you can now have a "Friends";
Tasks - user can see all related tasks in all projects on "Tasks" page - as well as create/manage personal tasks (not related to any project);

New Project Member

I'm happy to announce Marek Kwiecien joined the project! I hope togeth we will drive project much faster and produce much more new useful functionality for our users.

Our Plans for nearest time

For nearest 1-2 weeks we are planning:

Improve Navigation on site - to make it simpler for users to navigate to project pages/home pages;
Improve Task Management to make it more usable;
Add functionality to invite users into project;

Any comments and suggestions are always welcomed into EmForge forum: http://www.emforge.net/web/emforge-portal/forums

SVN Browser Portlet fixed

2009-10-13T23:16:53Z

Just fixed some bugs in SVN Browser portlet - now SVN browser fully working -you can try it in action!

EmForge Very Early Access Version

2009-10-11T21:05:44Z

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!