Cynapse Blog

Sourceforge has announced the Finalists for the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards 2009. We are thrilled that Cyn.in is a finalist for the Awards in three categories.

Cyn.in is among the 85 Finalists chosen from 47,887 nominations for 4,875 distinct projects! We are sincerely honored by this recognition by our community and are thankful to all cyn.in fans for helping us get there.

Cyn.in is a finalist in the following 3 categories:

• Best New Project
• Best Commercial Open Source Project
• Best Visual Design

It is because of your continued support and passion for cyn.in, that we have made it to the finals of the Oscars of Open Source Awards.

We now urge you to vote for cyn.in in the above 3 categories and help us win the Sourceforge Community Choice Award 2009. To vote, simply click on the link below and follow the steps:

1. Visit the Sourceforge Community Voting System: http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/vote/
2. Click on the Best New Project  to expand the category
3. Scroll to cyn.in and click on the “This is the best!” button above the cyn.in logo
4. Repeat steps 3 & 4 for the other two categories - Best Commercial Open source Project & Best Visual Design as well
5. Scroll to the bottom, Add your Email Address and Click on “Send my Vote Now!”
6. Don’t forget to confirm your vote sent to your email address

Please do encourage your friends and colleagues to vote for cyn.in. Tweet about it, use one of the social links below, call/mail/sms them to tell them about the Awards and how they can decide the winners of the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards before the 20th of July. 8000 votes have been cast for the Finalists already! So go ahead and make your voice heard.

I’d like to carve out a little space to say a special THANK YOU to the cyn.in team, cyn.in community and all our fans who have helped us take cyn.in this far. There is no way around the simple basic truth: without YOU cyn.in would not exist.

Your love, support and votes will surely help us win the Sourceforge Community Choice Award 2009!

A big part of being a cyn.in developer is being one with the fine art of building out… your buildout.

Geek / Tech warning! This post is best read if you’re a software developer interested in working with cyn.in (and / or plone) and are interested in improving your development productivity.

Ok, that dire warning out of the way, let’s get down to it, shall we?

I restate my assumptions:

1. You downloaded the cyn.in source snapshot.
2. You actually opened the README file and went through it.
3. Figured out the dependencies and got through the buildout procedure
4. OR you’re starting off from the plone.org community and have got a plone buildout running (yes, this applies to you too!)
5. You’d like to reduce the bandwidth / time it takes to build a buildout

So why does buildout take so long?

Well because cyn.in depends upon a whole lot of python eggs (and even a few old-style zope products) that are downloaded during buildout. The biggest of these is plone itself, because that depends upon more code than you’ll ever end up going through (or at least that’s what it looks like when you’re starting out).

So how do we optimize our Internet usage? Well, several ways. Read on:

download-cache: This is most important to you if you build a lot of new buildouts from scratch. And when I say from scratch I mean on new operating system installs, or if you’re into virtualization and appliance building then this one’s for you! You can set this to a path outside your main buildout directory and instead of downloading directly from the Internet, buildout will first consult your download-cache directory to see if the file’s already there. So while buildout will still spend time looking on the net for the correct version to download, for each egg, once it does figure out which one, it’ll usually find the file already present in your cache. The idea of course is that your downoad-cache directory will be a network share somewhere that’s mounted locally on a path, so you always have a pre-primed cache. You should have this setting in your own personal override config, (user.cfg in cyn.in buildout is a great example of this!). This is the minimal override that is usually required for per-buildout case, where you set up your personal settings, like port and network ip to bind to, the effective user to run under and so on. If you keep your download-cache setting in your main buildout.cfg then all developers will be forced to use or override it, which is not a good thing to do.

download-directory and eggs-directory:

Most developers should already be aware of this one. When developing you often have to recreate new buildouts repeatedly on the same computer with different filestates, typically in a multi-developer team where everyone’s working on different branches in subversion and so on. For this kind of scenario, buildout provides these 2 settings to speeden things up, some. In buildout, packages can be marked to be on particular versions or they default to the latest (more on this in the newest=false setting). The idea with these 2 settings is that you should set them in your user-account-wide defaults file. Where? In linux, usually in your /home/username/.buildout/default.cfg folder.

/home/username/.buildout/default.cfg

That’s:

• /home is where your user homes are
• /username is your’s (just used cd ~ to land there, and then the pwd command will show you where it’s at)
• .buildout is a folder you create in it
• default.cfg is a file that contians your defaults for buildout

In this default.cfg file you should put in these 2 lines:

download-directory = /location/to/where/you/want/all/downloads

eggs-directory = /location/to/where/you/want/all/eggs

If you put these settings in the correct home folder location (and then go and actually create the target folder paths - buildout will error if they’re not already present!) then buildout saves downloaded files in these locations as a default. The advantage to doing that account-wide for your user is that by default all buildouts will go there and re-use the files already present first. This is best used in combination with the below setting, newest=false. Note that the files here are used directly by every buildout made by your account. That’s different from the download-cache where they’re downloaded from. Why is this important? Well in the very, very, rare case that something in your normal download or egg directory is causing a problem, you can override it in your user.cfg override and fix the problem.

newest = false

This should be present by default in your main buildout.cfg itself. That way when any developer builds the buildout, it will by default only download the dependencies that are missing, if it finds matching dependencies already met, it will not go looking for a better one. This setting when combined with the above user-account default one is like magic, you can re-buildout any number of times after the first one, and do it without any Internet consumption at all!

When you actually want buildout to look for better alternatives, then you simply add -n (that’s small n, not capital. Capital N does the exact opposite, same as the setting above!) to your buildout command line and it will go hunting for the latest and the best.

So what’s your buildout command line looking like now?

First time or force-check for newer dependencies is like this:

./bin/buildout -c user.cfg -n -vvvvv

And “normal” re-buildout is like this:

./bin/buildout -c user.cfg

The -c user.cfg part means that buildout should use user.cfg as configuration. user.cfg extends buildout.cfg, overriding just the personal settings that you want to change from default.

-n tells buildout to go hunting for fresher eggs

-vvvvv is a way of getting as much verbose log output as possible. More the v character’s here the more the verbose the output. You want verbosity when you’re doing it the first time - to diagnose error messages correctly, if they happen.

In normal re-buildout you don’t need these settings because you want the default, newest=false and verbosity is just pointless scroll.

Hopefully that should speed up things some, especially if you’re struggling. There are some more advanced techniques, of course, like ingeniweb’s eggproxy product, which is the perfect way to create a fast, pass-through cached mirror of the PyPI on your LAN - that too only the eggs you need and re-use. But that’s out of the scope of this post, perhaps some other time.

More?

If you want to read more about these sort of things then do let me know by adding your comments. If you have other tips to improve buildout efficiency then do put in the reference links or whatever else you can tell us about them, thanks!

SourceForge has announced their 4th Annual Community Choice Awards and we need your help to nominate cyn.in.

Community Choice Awards is the largest global award celebrating great open source projects that are built with the highest quality, creativity and ingenuity. And YOU, the community, gets to choose which software gets nominated for the final awards - Power to the people!

If you have been using / evaluating cyn.in or have just landed on this page and really like what you see, please take a few moments and vote for us.
You can nominate cyn.in in any or all of the categories below:

1. Best Commercial Open Source Project
2. Best Project for the Enterprise
3. Best New Project
4. Best Project
5. Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything
6. Best Visual Design {also known as the “Swimsuit Competition” for the open source project with the best user interface}

Voting is simple, just click on the Nominate cyn.in link above and select the categories you would like to nominate cyn.in for and make your voice heard!

And don’t forget to ask your friends to nominate cyn.in as well. Get the word out using your social networks, twitter, email, sms, phone, anything that is your favorite way to communicate with them and encourage them to cast their vote.

Nominations close on May 29th and finalists will be announced on the June 22nd.

It is often tricky to justify tangible, monetary benefits of Enterprise 2.0 software to customers. Starting from the age of NNTP, IRC, Email, Enterprise forums and Bulletin boards - these technologies, all concentrate on Increasing collaboration and benefiting from the collective intelligence. How is E2.0 different?

The focus of Enterprise 2.0 software is on the user experience. Enterprise software is complex to use and that makes it suck. The most basic yet the biggest challenge is to persuade employees to use these tools in their daily work. Enterprise 2.0 software inventors are walking that last mile to make these tools more intuitive, facilitating interactions and conversations among people and their knowledge. How? Spend a few minutes to check out the presentation below - published by Oscar Berg & Henrik Gustaffson.

In a very succinct manner this presentation accurately explains what is Enterprise 2.0, it’s importance in the Enterprise and how increased level of collaborative working among employees can benefit organizations.

A comprehensive user guide has been published in the cyn.in community wiki for users to get started with using the collaboration software.

The User Guide sections include:

1. Getting Started
2. Anatomy of a cyn.in site
3. Application views in cyn.in
4. Adding / Editing applications in cyn.in

The user guide can be accessed here: http://cynin.wiki.sourceforge.net/cyn.in+User+Manual

Apart from the user guide, the community installation video tutorial is also added to the community wiki. Contributions to the cyn.in community documentation for the user and administration guides are welcome.

If you’re using cyn.in in your organization and have a support question, you can email, call or post a ticket on the Cynapse Customer Care portal - whichever is easiest for you. The open source community forums are a great place to get detailed solutions to technical issues you face while using the cyn.in community edition. And If you’re evaluating / using cyn.in and need a super quick solution to a problem, just tweet about it with #cynin or address it to @cynin. A Cynapse team member will surely respond to your query in real time with a solution.

The Cynapse team has been actively using Twitter for a long time where we have conversations with thousands of passionate cyn.in users across the world. We listen to what users are saying about our product cyn.in, our company Cynapse and discuss their views on collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 software. Its a huge marketplace out there in Twitter and we listen to the word on the street, are on the look out for spontaneous unsolicited feedback about cyn.in and sometimes for tips on new business. For the uninitiated users, we use it as a channel to educate them about the all the great technological products that we are inventing and the benefits it brings to their business.

Our goal is to help users wherever possible and to make ourselves available such that our customers talk to the real people who are behind the product and get their problems solved. We at Cynapse use Twitter for some of the following:

1. Customer support
2. Open source community support
3. Offer Tips about using cyn.in
4. Engage in conversations with customers and users
5. Publish company updates
6. Distribute deals and offers
7. Get feedback and feature requests
8. Evangelize Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration technologies
9. Identify prospects

Everyday we find new ways to help our customers through Twitter … the possibilities intrigue us. Cynapse has 4 employees using Twitter actively, including the CEO and the CTO.

CEO - Apurva Roy Choudhury-  @apurvarc
CTO - Dhiraj Gupta - @dhiraj
COO - Viraf Sarkari - @viraf
Business Director - cyn.in - Romasha Roy Choudhury - @romasha

Follow us on twitter, introduce yourself and interact with us. We’d love to listen to your ideas, opinions, feedback or simply converse

Express Computer Magazine, India’s Only leading IT Business Weekly, featured cyn.in in their Spotlight Section in February. Renuka Vembu, has in a succinct manner summarized Cynapse’s history and philosophy of developing products. It can easily be summed up in a very famous quote by Charles Darwin:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to Change”

A really nice article about Cynapse’s founder Apurva Roy Choudhury. Do read the full article here: http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20090223/management04.shtml

This interview was done in December. cyn.in now has over 20K installations of the open source community edition across the world.

Aside from the complex deployment, challenging back up-restore and an unusable interface for end users, Sharepoint is EXPENSIVE! A recently released market study conducted by Information Architected found that half of the organizations using Sharepoint experienced more effort and budget than expected.

While some of you might argue that you already own Sharepoint licenses, it actually requires an army of MOSS components to run along with it for a successful implementation. These components include (but are not limited to) Windows licenses, SQL Server licenses, base and enterprise CALs, Search servers and the list goes on. Add to this support, upgrade and integration costs, the total cost of ownership (TCO), overtime, simply goes through the roof.

One customer who has now successfully implemented cyn.in, was initially deciding between Sharepoint or cyn.in to be used as their collaboration platform. Listing out feature differences wouldn’t work as Sharepoint has it all. The unmeasurable stuff - like Sharepoint’s complex user interface that an average non-technical employee would find difficult to use, was not something he was willing to buy in. I used a Sharepoint Price Calculator tool developed by the folks at Bamboo Nation that gives a good ballpark estimate of total licensing expenditures. To my surprise (and the customer’s too), Sharepoint pricing turned out to be astoundingly high for a 500 user company!

Here’s a snapshot of the Sharepoint pricing:

The one time cost is approximately 91 times that of cyn.in!

If you are looking out for a collaboration platform and are comparing Sharepoint with other products, go ahead and get a ballpark estimation of the implementation cost here: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-price-calculator/default.aspx

Jonathan Gosier of Appfrica.net, in his search for a simple, customizable self-hosted Project Management Intranet for his company, configured 15 popular applications and found cyn.in to be an invincible winner!

His requirement was pretty straight forward, an open-source self-hosted system that allows for internal messaging, group knowledge sharing, task assignment and works in countries where ‘always connected’ to the internet is still a luxury. In his quest, he first researched the possible options, shortlisted to the 15 and then went ahead and installed/signed-up/demo-ed/tested all the applications meticulously to see how they stand up to their claims.

Here’s what he says about cyn.in:

Cynapse is an interesting initiative. They offer a free self-hosted open-source edition, a hosted SaaS (software as a service) version at $99 and a self-hosted enterprise edition that offers unlimited users and the option for doing things like running it behind company firewalls or cloud storage systems like EC2. The functionality goes a step beyond all the other products on this list by offering things like mind-mapping, instant messaging, and blogs. Beyond, that it’s hands down the best looking of the whole lot…

The applications compared are rated based on functionality, pricing, usability, design, ease of installation and delivery models. Below is the consolidated scoreboard for all applications compared by Appfrica - 1 is the lowest score and 5 is the highest.

What makes cyn.in the winner according to him:

Zimbra, Cyn.in and ActiveCollab are definitely the top scorers and the two best self-hosted project management systems I could find. They all look good and have the features I need. What really sets the latter two apart is pricing, ActiveCollab is $99 per year while Cynapse asks $0.00 for their open source version which isn’t quite as easy to install. But if it saves me $100, I have no problem with that. So the winner, in my book, is Cyn.in (Cynapse)!

Do check out the extensive comparison here: http://appfrica.net/blog/archives/1519

Thanks Jonathan, for the detailed comparison. I am sure this will be useful to a lot of people looking for self-hosted project management / intranet applications.

In the times of the economic downturn, market researcher IDC is projecting a steep growth of the SaaS model - of over 40% in 2009. The right-sized, zero-CAPEX alternatives offered by SaaS vendors is going to lure customers to adopt such technologies. Even as companies seek to reduce thier capital expenditure and postpone new technology investments, Robert Mahowald, director, On-Demand and SaaS research IDC, says:

With a broad slowdown across IT sectors, businesses are increasingly bearish about their short-term ability to invest, whether for stability, growth, or cost savings down the road. But SaaS services have benefited by the perception that they are tactical fixes which allow for relatively easy expansion during hard times, and several key vendors finished the year very strong, reporting stable financial and inroads into new customer-sets.

From our experience of selling cyn.in On-Demand, I find it to be more true than ever. The economic conditions have forced businesses to consider a “change” that was not considered necessary during more affluent times. We’ve been in the SaaS business since 2006 and since the last quarter we have seen a steep increase in sales in our SaaS edition. Some of the most important reasons that we’ve seen are:

1. Businesses are looking at reducing travel costs for team meetings and even client meetings
2. Recession is making companies encourage their employees to work from home - reducing infrastructural spends at the office premises
3. Reduced staff due to layoffs is forcing companies to focus internal IT initiatives only on direct, line of business technology - and outsource infrastructure related management
4. Low, cost-saving technology options - Companies are aiming to reduce their capex by exploring hosted applications, wherein they have to pay-as they consume without making upfront investments

Is your company looking at adopting SaaS technologies? Do share your opinions in the comments. Read more about Benefits of SaaS