ConcourseConnect 1.0 Open Source
Posted by Tom Manos on May 7, 2009, 11:45 AM EDT
ConcourseConnect 1.0, our directory, community, social networking, and web 2.0 product will officially launch in a couple of days, with press releases and all the fanfare. Code will be available here and on Sourceforge before end of day tomorrow (May 8, 2009).
I want to take a minute and talk about my view of what this beast is, and why it's important.
ConcourseConnect is a web application, built on the same (or at least very similar) underpinnings as our other software: the ConcourseSuite CRM, and Team Elements. It's a Java servlet based application with a fairly large number of Open Source libraries and other code embedded. Our years of experience with this architecture has proven it to be high performing, scalable, secure, and reasonably easy for third parties with Java experience to modify.
If I must say so myself, it is a really exciting product. Since you are looking at the ConcourseConnect product page, I'll assume that you're at least a little familiar with the feature set and maybe the business cases for which we believe it's a good fit. If not, please go look, because I will not be talking about those things in this post. In particular, to get a good idea about what is possible with Connect, please visit our solutions page, where you can see Connect in action in a number of plausible situations.
What I do want to talk about are the ways we're licensing Connect, what other products are available in the same family, and what it all means to you.
There are several versions of Connect:
- ConcourseConnect Open Source, distributed in source code form under the GNU Affero license,The code is available at Sourceforge, and includes all the libraries and other code you'll need to compile and install the application. You are responsible for the database, Java, and Tomcat. We provide good installation instructions with our code.
- A free, but limited Enterprise version. While not yet available, this version is provided only in binary format, and is limited in the number of registered users it accommodates.
- A full enterprise version which contains the same feature set as the Open Source version, but which has the added capacity to attach:
- A Management Console (a special CRM system that can manage both the Connect application and its users).
- A performance package that allows clustering and additional cacheing functionality.
- A multi-tenant CRM system for registered or paying members of the community.
- An integrated BI system for building canned and ad-hoc reports (not yet available).
