Chamilo P@rty

Herramientas de capacitación a distancia - Open Source

"La capacitación no necesita mayor inversión, solo compromiso "

Con gran éxito se llevó a cabo "Chamilo P@rty" dentro del marco de "Expoelearning Lima 2010", realizado el 07 de Julio último. La actividad congregó a foro, 220 asistentes de países como Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, España, Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Bélgica, Brazil y Perú, con perfiles empresariales, técnicos, políticos y académicos.

Esta actividad se llevo a cabo gracias a la empresa española AEFOL y BeezNest, que explicaron las ventajas de las herramientas de chamilo como la red social, control de asistencias, panel de control de calificaciones, etc.

La Asociación de Chamilo agradece la colaboración y participación de todos ustedes.

The Chamilo Association and the BeezNest company are organizing the "Chamilo P@rty" in the context and with the collaboration of Expoelearning Lima 2010  with a common goal to better spread the development of open-source e-learning platforms.

Chamilo P@rty will take place on the 7th of July at 18:00h (GMT+5) in the main conference hall of the prestigious Hotel Meliá, situated in Av. Salaverry 2599, San Isidro - Lima, Peru.

Thanks to our collaboration agreement, this activity will be completely free of charge, conditionned by previous registration or by a personal invitation, given seats are limited.

See our previous conference on the DOKUDA website

See our events and meetings around open-source software in Peru: here

ZFS is a state-of-the-art file system that allows for easy management of very large disk space. It is now offered, between others on Oracle/Sun Network Attached Storage servers, but ZFS training is still difficult to find as experts are only a few.

Mira Consulting, one of our European partners and publisher of a great knowledge management tool for medium and large-size companies, recently bought a pair of 10TB NAS servers from us. This lead them to look around ZFS and start being curious about what it could do for their business.

Having ourselves an expert in the field in-house, we decided to organize a 3-days training which allowed them to understand the whole concept, start building new configurations and handle their data much more efficiently!

February has been a planning and sales month. We’ve been very busy answering an enormous quantity of requests for quotes, one of them being to embed Chamilo into a Joomla site (which we have already done in the past, but not the same way), another one being the building of a multi-sources collaboration system built on Drupal.

Here are a few projects that we would like to present to you:

Advanced PHP Course

We had been very busy preparing an advanced PHP course for Perú, with the idea of uniting the 5 only Zend certified engineers in Peru to teach a 120 hours curriculum. However, even the incredible value, a Flash game and a lot of e-mails sent didn’t help us reach our limit of a minimum of 15 participants. This has taken a very hard toll on us as we expected to be able to play a major role in the improvement of the PHP software engineering quality in this country. Nevermind… we’ll try again later.

National Education Organization

Although we aren’t allowed to give the name here, we built a web application for an education organization that wants to control the progress of the national regions in the implementation of common procedures. The project is not finished yet, but they can already input their values through a pre-mashed Excel spreadsheet that we parse and of which we use the data to print beautiful dynamic graphics of which they can control the access and the additional information. We hope we’ll be able to show that online at some point.

This year has taken a good start for us at BeezNest worldwide, and between writing around 3 times more offers than usually and launching new projects, we have been busy on a series of important missions that I’d like to take the opportunity to mention.

Gallery 2 and slow disk accesses

First of all, we’ve been busy trying to debunk a really well hidden flaw in an install of Gallery 2, whereby the “Comments” feature was so quickly getting spammed that the server could just not handle the number of requests sent by the application and a lot of other applications were slowing down.

Trees management

Second, we’ve been working a lot (in terms of development) on a system to manage… trees! What? Yes, trees (and green areas as well). You know, trees are like medical patients after all. Although they tend to fall less ill, there tends to be a whole lot of trees in our cities. Well, we’ve got one great system to do that, that we are working on with one of our partners. Thanks to the system, you can easily plan lifespans of the trees in a city or a larger entity, pinpoint them on a map, and make sure their illnesses and history is stored on something else than an easily lost/stolen/burnt piece of paper. Of course, you can assign tasks, classify trees by street or park, take photos, specify their height, level of danger, or protection put in place. It’s even compatible with Oracle Locator databases! Contact us if you’re looking for something like that.

For a bunch of philosophical and practical reasons, we have decided to migrate the task management system of Chamilo from Flyspray to Redmine.

This is the result of a short time of analysis and of months of small problems. Our reasons to go to Redmine:

• integrated time management, allowing for the evaluation of time per project
• integrated Gantt charts support, allowing for a better planning of human resources over projects
• more flexible management by project (including sub-projects)
• easy links to (code) version management systems like Git, Subversion, Mercurial, etc
• possibility to execute commands via e-mail (which permits, indirectly, to work offline using a stack of e-mails)
• a more appeasing visual look (we developers are already stressed enough by the urgent tasks to have to bear red glowing urgent notifications)
• more complete and visible dashboards (although this could still be improved a lot)
• a friendlier community (this is a subjective parameter, but has influenced a lot our will to improve Flyspray)

Despite these positive elements, we still miss the per-task visibility feature (current visibility is by project), which we understand is under way but is a omplicated conceptual matter.

We are currently working on the publication of a neutral version of the migration script to GPL, so that others can benefit from the effort.

While the thing is still warm, we will also help two other businesses get their Flyspray migrated to Redmine in a matter of weeks.

 That's it, we are officially OpenERP (previously TinyERP) partners. We are very optimistic about this new course we are taking in our business model.OpenERP is a very powerful, adaptive, complete and easy entreprise management software and it's the most downloaded opensource ERP project. We plan to offer a wide variety of services around this succesful ERP.You will find more information about this product here.As usual, we'll post commercial updates here and technical updates on http://beeznest.wordpress.com/

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some Free Software projects which we significantly contributed [1] to over our company's existence:

• apt-proxy
• Asterisk
• Auto Nice Daemon (AND)
• AWstats
• Bacula
• Cedar Backup
• Claroline
• COnfigurator for GNOME (COG)
• Crystal Space
• DCL
• Debian / Debian Education / Debian-Edu
• Debian-Installer
• Dokkeos
• Dolibarr
• dotProject
• Drupal
• Etherboot
• Evolution
• Evolution mail template plugin
• EXACT (POP- and IMAP-before-SMTP daemon)
• FreeCiv
• FreeNAS
• FreeRADIUS
• Fwanalog
• Galeon
• Glasnost
• GNOME
• Gnoppix
• InitNG
• IPblocker
• JFFNMS
• Knoppix
• LAM
• Librassoc
• LTSP
• MnoGoSearch
• Netatalk
• Netsaint/Nagios
• Ntop
• NVU
• OpenOffice.org
• Open ERP
• OpenC2C
• p910nd
• Pancho Project
• Pessulus
• PhpCompta
• PHPiCalendar
• phpLangEditor (Firefox extension)
• PhpLdapAdmin
• Plume
• PostgreSQL
• qemu
• Replicator
• SER
• Sip Express Router (SER)
• Swocket
• TORCS
• Tulip (Editor written in PHP-GTK)
• Ubuntu
• UmiGumi / DLS
• Webalizer
• Webcalendar
• Widelands
• XAMS
• Zebra / Quagga
• Xapian
• …

See also our BeezNest’s Free Software Specialities

[1] code, documentation or suggestions which have been applied

2008-07-20 update: