OpenWGA 5.0 Dragon released
After a long journey we've reached our final destination: We released the first version of OpenWGA as open source.
The Code name of this release ist "OpenWGA 5.0 Dragon".
OpenWGA has a long history. We (the Innovation Gate Team) started developing our first java based CMS in 2001 and released it as "WebGate Anywhere" (short name WGA) in 2002. WGA was successfull in the german speaking countries and we convinced some of the biggest german companies of the quality of our CMS.
Years passed by and WGA reached adulthood. Late 2008 we realized that we want to reach far more customers than we reached until then and decided to create an open source version of WGA.
The Code name of this release ist "OpenWGA 5.0 Dragon".
OpenWGA has a long history. We (the Innovation Gate Team) started developing our first java based CMS in 2001 and released it as "WebGate Anywhere" (short name WGA) in 2002. WGA was successfull in the german speaking countries and we convinced some of the biggest german companies of the quality of our CMS.
Years passed by and WGA reached adulthood. Late 2008 we realized that we want to reach far more customers than we reached until then and decided to create an open source version of WGA.
We started to plan the development of what we relased today under the new name "OpenWGA". A time of busy work started. We divided WGA into a lot of small parts (modules) to assemble them in a complete new way.
Our goal was to release both: an free and open source community edition as well as a subsription based licensed "enterprise edition" designed to run business critical websites and intranets. We discussed a lot of what small business websites realy needs and what is critical for bigger websites of large companies and creates the two editions of OpenWGA.
The free OpenWGA community edition is designed for the managment of smaller websites with only a few authors. It is not restricted in any way those small authoring teams will notice. You are not able to authenticate against LDAP or MS Active Directory but that's not essential for small teams. There is no Single-Sign-One available. You are "restricted" to MySQL as repository backend but that's what most websites of the world use. You can't synchronize content between a staging- and a life CMS-Server and have to work with one CMS-Server.
But you get the same state of the art IDE to develop your CMS projects. You get the same impressive browser based authoring UI. You get the same administration client and you profit from the same secure runtime services as the enterprise customers.
The OpenWGA enterprise edition is based on the same source code as the community edition but is bundled with additional modules important for business critical sites with hundreds of authors. It supports additional authentication sources like LDAP and additional connectors for SQL backend systems like DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL or Lotus Domino.
The most important difference however may be that we offer enterprise customers a free runtime support for all licensed OpenWGA servers with a defined reaction time. We care for our enterprise customers - because that's what they need and that's what they pay for.
In addition to develop OpenWGA we worked hard to establish an infrastructure where you can find everything you need to get started with OpenWGA. First of all we created a complete new website for OpenWGA. Then we had to update and translate hundreds of documentation pages into english language (we are not finished with this task but we think we have enough for you to get warm with OpenWGA). We developed a bug tracking system and a discussion forum to be ready for the feedback of "the community".
We hope you enjoy OpenWGA as much as we do.
Fell free to give us any feedback about how we can improve OpenWGA, the OpenWGA website or our services.
Our goal was to release both: an free and open source community edition as well as a subsription based licensed "enterprise edition" designed to run business critical websites and intranets. We discussed a lot of what small business websites realy needs and what is critical for bigger websites of large companies and creates the two editions of OpenWGA.
The free OpenWGA community edition is designed for the managment of smaller websites with only a few authors. It is not restricted in any way those small authoring teams will notice. You are not able to authenticate against LDAP or MS Active Directory but that's not essential for small teams. There is no Single-Sign-One available. You are "restricted" to MySQL as repository backend but that's what most websites of the world use. You can't synchronize content between a staging- and a life CMS-Server and have to work with one CMS-Server.
But you get the same state of the art IDE to develop your CMS projects. You get the same impressive browser based authoring UI. You get the same administration client and you profit from the same secure runtime services as the enterprise customers.
The OpenWGA enterprise edition is based on the same source code as the community edition but is bundled with additional modules important for business critical sites with hundreds of authors. It supports additional authentication sources like LDAP and additional connectors for SQL backend systems like DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL or Lotus Domino.
The most important difference however may be that we offer enterprise customers a free runtime support for all licensed OpenWGA servers with a defined reaction time. We care for our enterprise customers - because that's what they need and that's what they pay for.
In addition to develop OpenWGA we worked hard to establish an infrastructure where you can find everything you need to get started with OpenWGA. First of all we created a complete new website for OpenWGA. Then we had to update and translate hundreds of documentation pages into english language (we are not finished with this task but we think we have enough for you to get warm with OpenWGA). We developed a bug tracking system and a discussion forum to be ready for the feedback of "the community".
We hope you enjoy OpenWGA as much as we do.
Fell free to give us any feedback about how we can improve OpenWGA, the OpenWGA website or our services.