[phpgroupware-developers] probusiness introduction

[Christian Böttger]

Hi all,

my name is Christian Böttger and I'm head of the Software Solutions Team at
probusiness AG, Hannover, Germany. I'm writing this not in my name only, but
as well in behalf of our CEO Jens Gogoll. 
See end of mail for more information about myself.

In the name of probusiness AG I would like to introduce our company and our
interest and possible future involvement in this and possibly similar
projects.

The probusiness group (http://www.probusiness.de/) focuses on IT services,
ranging from selling hardware (server, storage, ...) over conceptual work
and remote services and support to a relatively small software development
team. As probusiness' main direction is selling IT services, not products
(apart from hardware), OpenSource  in general fits well into this picture,
although we are not limited to OpenSource services (e.g. we have specialised
teams for Linux, HP-UX/AIX, general storage and Microsoft services alike).
As we are not interested in selling licenses for any software we write (but
selling the service of writing it and offering support contracts), we try to
give our results to the public. 

The first example is the project pb.WebMAUI 
(http://pb-webmaui.sourceforge.net/ (German only, unfortunately)), which
provides an administration interface for the Courier mailsuite and some
patches for Horde/IMP. Currently, there is only a design study available for
download; we are finishing a stable version and will release that hopefully
this month. pb.WebMAUI is already in commercial production use at a
customer.

After having been urged by customers to adapt, extend, modify, bundle etc
not only a mail suite, but some groupware as well (as OpenSource), a
decision has been made to do this on the basis of phpGroupware. Apart from a
customer, the government of Lower Saxony in Germany has stepped in with some
funds from their regional economical support funds (which have to be spend
in the region again and cannot be spend to subcontractors in this case). All
development is carried out under GPL and we explicitely plan to publish it.
Of course, all work will be offered to the phpGroupware project and we would
be glad if parts of our work may flow back into phpGroupware itself. But
anyhow, even parts too specific for this (e.g. for specific customer needs)
will be available to the public under GPL (as far as the customer does not
veto against this).

Currently the work is planned and technical concepts are written. These
concepts will be made available for discussion as well. This will be done
mainly by the responsible developers, in most cases a short summary and an
URL for the full info will be distributed here. If it proves useful, we can
open a Wiki for this as well or take part in the phpGW wiki as well. In case
we create new modules for phpGW, we are of course well prepared to maintain
these modules with the phpGW tree as well, if this is wished by the phpGW
team.

Our team members will introduce themselves shortly.

Our customers normally want an integrated solution, e.g. a mail suite +
groupware + admin GUI, sometimes + hardware (Linux HA clusters etc) and very
often + support/maintainance contract (with defined SLAs). Therefore we have
to restrict ourselves to some products and integrate them in the sense
mentioned above. A possible bundle would be (hardware +) Linux LVS cluster +
Courier mail suite + OpenLDAP + pb.WebMAUI (+ Squid + ...) + phpGroupware +
SLA service agreement. As customers don't like such long names, this will be
known as "pb.Groupuware".


Some more information about probusiness as a company:

probusiness AG is a platform-independent IT service
provider within the probusiness group of
companies. Services include consultancy,
implementation, service and support.

In addition to the basic services the company also
provides support in planning and operating computer
centres, R/3 integration, content management and
information retrieval.

probusiness AG implements systems on the basis of
Linux, Windows, Novell, Solaris, and HP/UX.

And some words about me personally:

Originally, I'm not a software developer, but a physicist. I used to write
scientific software to some extend (mostly in FORTRAN and PASCAL *shiver*; I
used to write, maintain and sell a numerical data analysis software) back in
the 80s and beginning of 90s. Since around 6-7 years, I'm project manager
and team leader in the software area, mostly concerned with user analysis,
conceptual work (database ERP modeling, UML, structured analysis), testing
and quality assurance and of course (more and more) management duties in
this area. 
My main operating system skills are in Linux and a bit HP-UX.

I'm currently actively involved in two open source projects:
pb.WebMAUI (see above) and (without any connection to my job position) in
OpenXP (http://www.openxp.com/ and http://www.openxp.de/ ). For
completeness, I have accounts both on SourceForge and Savannah for these
purposes.

Kind regards

Christian Böttger

-- 
Dr. Christian Böttger                  Teamleiter Softwarelösungen 
pro|business AG, EXPO Plaza 1 (Deutscher Pavillon), 30539 Hannover
E-Mail: address@hidden,  Tel.: 0511/60066-331, Fax: -355  
WWW: http://www.probusiness.de/