Categorie: LibrePlan

In Libreplan,  State of the Union 2015, I want to talk about what happened this year and what my plans are for the next.

One year as past since I took over as project leader for the open source LibrePlan project from the excellent people of Igalia. Of course that is not my complete involvement with the project. I started as the Dutch language translator some 3 years ago. This year a lot has happened and a lot didn’t happen.

I would like to share with you my adventures with the LibrePlan project. I would like to tell you what happened this year, what didn’t happen and what will happen in the, hopefully near, future.

What did happen?

• I wrote “LibrePlan, the missing manual” in Q1 of 2014. So far over 75 copies were sold and this makes this my most successful self-publishing book to date!
• I answered every email send to info@libreplan.com and helped people using the application and discussed their wishes with them. This amounts to 294 separate questions that I answered. 29 of these were if LibrePlan could be installed on Windows (yes, that is possible but you have to figure it out all by yourself).
• I regularly cleaned the Q and A site where spammers keep trying to sell crap.
• I discussed wishes with over 50 individual companies.
• I traveled to France and did 5 training sessions there for one organisation. Great stuff!
• I contacted several Java programmers to be able to response to customer requests should they occur.

What did not happen?

• A new LibrePlan release.

You might ask yourself why? Now this is were the story becomes a little personal but I will tell you anyway. But if you are used to corporate marketing bla bla only I suggest you skip the next part and go straight to the “What will happen?” section as you are probably only interested in solid results. 🙂

I want to share with you the reasons why there has not been a release yet. One thing is that I lost my day job 1st of January and I have been busy trying to find a new one. Being 50 years of age in a time of economic slum turned out not to bode well for this. Not even the fact that I am a volunteer fire fighter in my community makes any difference :-). I am not in the habit of torching places of work so, combined with the relatively optimistic economic growth forecasts I expect to find a job soon.

Another reason for the absence of a new release is that I have a very lovely stepdaughter. She loves to take a computer apart just for fun! Upon closer inspection of the picture you might see that she sits in a wheelchair. She was born 17 years ago with spina bifida and recently underwent here 43th surgery. Needless to say there is an extremely high level of care taking involved. Did I mention that we have a total of 5 kids to care for, two of which with disabilities? If you can read Dutch we have a website were we inform all members of the family about health issues and progress. Last June it became clear that keeping here living at home was no longer a reasonable option. So from October onwards she started living somewhere else and she visits us regulary. These recent events have had a tremendous impact on all our lives. It will take some time before the deep level of fatigue will subside but both my wife and I are also very optimistic in this regard.

What will happen?

Now this is an excellent question! What will happen? And when? Well, I found out the hard way that communicating solid deadlines is a sure thing to make people unhappy. What I can do is share with you my plans. You may even call it a roadmap. Here it is:

• Make a new release, most likely 1.4.1.
• Set up a stable build environment, most likely on openSuSE Build Service, where I can easily build packages for several distributions at once.
• Make a new release, most likely 1.5.0 where margins are introduced.
• Merge the existing Risk/Issue log code and finish it.
• Add email functionality to the program to inform users of changes.
• Add a pipeline page to show, well, err, the pipeline of projects.
• Add documents functionality to be able to add documents to a project.
• Add a GOTIK report. I know, GOTIK is a Dutch abbreviation meaning Money, Organisation, Time, Information and Quality. So it will probably be a MOTIQ report.

As you can see there are enough plans. Will they all happen? I don’t know, but I am sure as hell gonna try! When will they happen? As soon as I can. That is my promise to you.

Kind regards,

Jeroen Baten

P.S. Normally I do not accept replies to posts because I think there are enough other places on the Internet where people can vent. But this time I am curious about your thoughts. So tell me.

Hi people,

Recently Robin Muilwijk wrote a story on opensource.com titled “Top 5 open source project management tools in 2014“. And guess what, LibrePlan is ranked at second position!

Robin writes: “This is another full featured tool supporting resource allocation, Gantt charts, financials, and more. These features coupled with a web based application make LibrePlan a great collaboration platform.”

Sofar, nothing new 🙂

Then he continues: “LibrePlan ranks in my personal top 3 favorite open source project management tools because of its modern design and balanced user interface, as well as, good and complete documentation, built in reporting, and professional support.”

To us regular users of LibrePlan this is probably no news, but it is always good to have someone write such nice works about our project.

Behind the scenes we are still working very hard on this project and when there is more news we will sure let you all know about it asap.

Greets, Jeroen.

It’s been a while since I wrote a blogpost about LibrePlan, but apart from that things have been very busy. There is some behind-the-scenes stuff going on that I hope I can share with you all somewhere in the future. Now I would like to write about the things that have happened since my last post.

It is a lot. I spoke about LibrePlan at the NLUUG conference, at the SPIder foundation meeting, both located in the Netherlands. I just uploaded my presentation to SlideShare so you can all find it here.

I talked with companies (email or conferencecall) in several countries (US, Spain, France,  Netherlands) who are considering to implement LibrePlan and even gave a couple of demo’s using Skype and GotoMeeting.

I talked to a couple of companies who wanted to have some extra functionality build into LibrePlan and we shared some great ideas.

So, simply put, there is a lot going in behind the scenes.