A couple of questions about Social Office

[Bob Lowski, modificado hace 15 años.]

We downloaded the first beta release of Sociale Office, and are truly impressed with it!

I read about everything I could find about SO, but still have some questions:
(1) If I understand correctly, Social Office is based on Liferay Portal, but distributed under a AGPL license instead of the MIT license. I assume this is to protect SO from forks and re-releases, but does it have any consequences for us as a (commercial) end user of the software?
(2) Will you offer commercial support for Social Office?
(3) I think I read you expect to release Social Office around this March. Is this date still correct? Do you expect to release a second beta or a release candidate first?
(4) We would like to start using SO in a small test setting. Will the current beta be upgradeable to the final version of Social Office when it is available?
(5) Is it correct that the final version of SO will include an announcements module?

You seem to position Social Office as a 'better kind of Sharepoint' and I noticed people asking about SO's functionality in comparison to Sharepoint. But there is a reason we do not use Sharepoint, and I would be very disappointed if Liferay would choose to make SO more like Sharepoint 'because that is what customers want'. IMO your product offers much better usability and, very important, a much lower management overhead. Personally, I'd rather see you borrow some ideas from Jive's Clearspace -- like their messaging/internal mail function :-)

Keep up the good work!

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Bob Lowski:

We downloaded the first beta release of Sociale Office, and are truly impressed with it!

I read about everything I could find about SO, but still have some questions:
(1) If I understand correctly, Social Office is based on Liferay Portal, but distributed under a AGPL license instead of the MIT license. I assume this is to protect SO from forks and re-releases, but does it have any consequences for us as a (commercial) end user of the software?
(2) Will you offer commercial support for Social Office?
(3) I think I read you expect to release Social Office around this March. Is this date still correct? Do you expect to release a second beta or a release candidate first?
(4) We would like to start using SO in a small test setting. Will the current beta be upgradeable to the final version of Social Office when it is available?
(5) Is it correct that the final version of SO will include an announcements module?

You seem to position Social Office as a 'better kind of Sharepoint' and I noticed people asking about SO's functionality in comparison to Sharepoint. But there is a reason we do not use Sharepoint, and I would be very disappointed if Liferay would choose to make SO more like Sharepoint 'because that is what customers want'. IMO your product offers much better usability and, very important, a much lower management overhead. Personally, I'd rather see you borrow some ideas from Jive's Clearspace -- like their messaging/internal mail function :-)

Keep up the good work!

Hi Bob, sorry for the late reply — hope you're still following this thread.

(1) No consequences to you as long as you are not trying to sell / re-sell it. In that case you would need a commercial license from us.
(2) Yes, we just haven't worked out the pricing model yet. Let me know what you would be interested in / what price point would be attractive for you.
(3) We will be releasing a second beta, but timelines are fuzzy at this point.
(4) I wouldn't count on upgradeability to the next version / final version, but there are always ways to keep your data.
(5) Yes, we are working on an announcements module. I'll post a separate thread about this.