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« on: December 12, 2012, 04:30:04 am »
Wow!
Thanks everyone for the great feedback.
We know we have been very quiet lately.
I don't know how to start responding to so many ideas and concerns that you all brought up.
Well... lets start somewhere:
What is going on at Feng Office
We are working on version 2.3. The beta will be released soon.
Making the decision to do version 2 of the system was a bold move. We expected it to be a 6 months project, and an easy upgrade path. But it took over a year to develop, and there are many users -like some of you- that still can't make the upgrade.
We do offer the service to upgrade. I totally agree this should be more clear on our Website... as a matter of fact, the whole website is going to be improved soon. We are already working on several improvement projects we know you will love.
About upgrading to Feng 2.2.1
Feng Office is a big system. And Feng 2 is the transition from a more simple Project Management system with some office features - to a full Collaboration Platform.
The intention was to greatly improve the foundation so that Feng Office could be a platform (supporting easy integration of plug-ins through an API, and supporting extensive information classification through multiple dimensions), while at the same time providing an upgrade path.
The challenge was not easy. And we focused more on what we wanted it to be, than in the backward compatibility.
A complex upgrade path was not planned. It was a consequence. In fact, up to this day we keep improving the upgrade system.
We strongly recommend that you keep an eye on Feng 2 release notes to look for improvements on the upgrade system. The perfect time to upgrade may vary for each one.
If you are using Feng Office for business operations and need to upgrade soon, please contact us through our contact form. Again, we do offer a service to upgrade to Feng 2 without the need to also move to the Professional Edition or our Feng Sky service. You can keep using the Community Edition on your own servers. Expect to pay between $400-$900 for the upgrade, depending on the time that the developers have to dedicate in figuring out the details of what is preventing a successful upgrade. We do, of course, include any learnings from each upgrade into the future releases. So this is also a great way to contribute on the development side.
Something like 92% of our client-base is already migrated (I don't have the exact figure with me). After we are 100% migrated, we will discontinue any improvement work on Feng 1.X series.
Growing the collaboration with and by the community
Believe me: I want this to happen more than anybody. We needed both the platform and the company to be ready. Both things took longer than we wished for. But I feel we are ready.
We have plans to build a market-place for developers to offer their plug-ins.
And yes, of course we need a more extended and better documented API.
And yes, we need to spend more time hanging on the forum and talking with you here (More on that below).
On why some things don't happen faster
We experienced great growth in 2009 and 2010. That encouraged -and allowed us- to embark on the great project of 2011: Feng Office 2.
So we hired many developers to work on the development of the system (we always re-invest profits).
With the recruiting, we didn't do a very good job. Yes, that was bad management. And it was my responsibility.
In summary, this slowed us down, and consumed many of our financial resources. It hurt in many ways. But we pulled it off. And we now have the best product that we have ever released.
Luckily, and in spite of all this, the number of users keeps growing every day.
On replying to inquiries by Free Community Edition users
We are really sorry we are not able to keep up to date with e-mail and forum communications.
We love and miss the activity on the forum!
And we would love to see more activity at the Wiki (@Potion, I did notice your contributions... thanks! That is exactly what we need!)
But we have always been very straightforward about this: we prioritize client requests. People subscribed to our support services (be it Feng Sky or Feng Onsite) get all our attention. Until we resolve their issues, we don't log into the forum.
So the upgrades, the bugs, and the missing features from the early 2.X releases... they had us with our hands full. Luckily that is now almost all behind. So we are finally back into improvement projects!
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