general question

Use this forum for questions regarding adoption and functionality of OpenEMM

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chiristina100012
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general question

Post by chiristina100012 »

Hi every one,I am new to this forum. Can any one tell me about OpenEMM.
Anton
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Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2012 9:58 pm

Re: general question

Post by Anton »

Hi,

While it's a great product, community support is not one of OpenEMM's strong points, at least not currently! You will see lots of unanswered questions here - I suspect because the people who really know about it don't have a huge motivation to help.

OpenEMM is definitely geared towards managing a single emailing programme, at least if you want to do it properly. I have hacked some additions on to manage several programmes but I don't think I could have multiple users with restricted access working only on their programmes. For that you need to go SAAS with Agnitas I believe.

Anyway, it's definitely the most advanced open source emailing platform I've come across!
maschoff
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Re: general question

Post by maschoff »

Well, obviously I can only speak for us as initial developers: It is not a matter of motivation but a lack of time. We are not a VC backed startup with deep pockets like Actuate, Sugar or Talend but we have to earn money for our living.

My experience is that open source projects used by developers (like operating systems, developing language tools or middleware) have more active communities because these users are able to contribute meaningful stuff. Opposed to an open source project like OpenEMM used by marketeers who can report bugs and articulate feature requests, but rarely more.

BTW, for multi-tenancy capability we offer a commercial version of OpenEMM called EMM, which offers more features but is based on the OpenEMM code (http://www.agnitas.com/products/e-marke ... nager.html).
OpenEMM Maintainer
Anton
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Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2012 9:58 pm

Re: general question

Post by Anton »

While I definitely don't want to detract from what you guys are providing, I think there are a few impediments to more developers getting involved that could be solved. I totally realise that you have a commercial product and you don't want some functionality implemented but I feel contributing could be made much easier than now. To be honest, it currently doesn't look like you *want* people to contribute, at least not new functionality.

Git support would be a big start. Since I have started using it, I can't see why anyone would use anything else!

A default build system that was more conducive to updates on a working copy would also help (instead of deleting everything and replacing with the tar version...).

I think the best thing you could do to get more developers interested is to make getting to a point where you are coding some new stuff as easy as possible, as quickly as possible (a default eclipse/netbeans setup, decent build file, git, etc.). I suppose that would make it far more difficult to stop people from implementing functionality that you only want available in the non-FOSS version (or having a fork that provides it). An excellent partner to this would, of course, be a statement of "we will not integrate functionalities X, Y and Z because these are available in our paid version". It's not particularly clear how that works now, and that's a bit frustrating. For example, currently it's pretty hard/clumsy to know how to do transactionals properly and you must have a solution for this in the paid version. Clarity on that would be nice - like "if you want to do transactionals properly, get the paid version. We will not add functionality in the free version to do this.", "if you want to do automated imports, get the paid version", etc.

My 2c.
maschoff
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Re: general question

Post by maschoff »

If we were not interested in code contributions, we would not have written a Code Design Guide or an Extension Development Guide.

Everyone is free to put a fork of OpenEMM on Github and if code adheres to the Code Design Guide AND is of general interest to OpenEMM users we will gladly merge (and we have merged) it into the mainline. We will soon start to publish milestones of OpenEMM 2014 so that the public code is quite current.

In general, I can not think of a feature that would not be welcome for OpenEMM, because EMM has tons of additional features and OpenEMM has a long way to go to come close.
OpenEMM Maintainer
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