Bootcamp, an open-source enterprise social network | Hacker News Reader

Bootcamp, an open-source enterprise social network

github.com

34 pointsvitorfs27 comments

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a startup that builds/maintains a competing project.

That said: Awesome, always enjoy seeing more projects in this space. I'd enjoy looking at what interop support this project has, and maybe look at doing an interop "bake off" with some other open source social networking projects one day.

actually the link trybootcamp.vitorfs.com is just to try out the application, so people can see it running

it is meant to be used on the company network, setting ALLOWED_SIGNUP_DOMAIN = ['@example.com']

the idea is to make our developer team to interact more

Go, go, go! And then make it 100% distributed via torrent like app (okay, last step may appear bit involved but I'm sure someone can bend torrent/bitcoin/namecoin/whatever enough to make it happen!)

It already exists: meet Vole (made in Go) http://vole.cc/

Mmm, any reason you're not using Django's class-based views (or http://django-vanilla-views.org/) for DRYer code?

actually im new on django hehe i will take a look on this project as it seem to be a interesting approach

There's a debate over whether or not class-based views are a good idea to use. Discussion here: http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/djangos-cbvs-were-a-mistak...

I'd add images of what it looks like. So far, I don't know what it looks like since I don't see anything on the README, and the landing page is just a plain sign up form.

yup! i will do that! for now, the link you found on the github repository is just for test purpose, so feel free to create an random account with a fake email account just to try it out :)

Try these:

  Username: a5035309
  Password: drdrb

Kind of a tangent... but I'm actually having a lot of fun using it as a pseudonymous social network/feed.

I would add OAuth authentication to it, but by far it fits my needs.

What does it mean: "Enterprise social network"?

Probably something like Yammer, but for your own intranet.

yup!

So, none of the features that mindcrime mentioned upthread?

To be fair, our definition isn't necessarily the definition either. And there are degrees of "enterpriseyness*. We, at Fogbeam, try to distinguish products by really emphasizing the integration aspect. But a tool without all those features could absolutely still be a useful tool, depending on the situation.

We're angling towards really large organizations with our offering - the kinds of companies that are using BPM / Workflow engines, a SOA architecture, LDAP/AD, etc. But many firms, especially smaller ones, might not want or need those integrations.

#1 and #3 came to mind for me immediately, even before I read your comment. Although SSO integration is displacing LDAP/AD.

And smaller firms generally view 'Enterprise' solutions as bloated consulting-ware, so if that's their market, they need to work on their messaging.

it means that the network is meant to be used inside a company, to our developer team/systems analysts/testers interact about things that have to do with our work

like sharing an interesting link, a new library, sharing nice solutions, writing an article about how to use some new stuff on primefaces for example and so on

"Enterprise" can mean a lot of things, but I would expect: support for LDAP authentication and paid on-call technical support at a minimum. This project doesn't look "Enterprise" to me (yet).

I can tell you what it means to us at Fogbeam: It's just a Social Network that is tailored to included features that make it specifically useful inside an enterprise, as a way of sharing information / links / knowledge / whatever.

In our opinion, what distinguishes an "enterprise" social network from a "non enterprise" social network are things like:

1. LDAP/Active Directory support

2. Programmatic provisioning with an API

3. Support for integration with other enterprise applications via standard protocols. iCal / CalDAV for integration with calendaring servers / groupware, for example.

4. Etc.

do you pipe all the data to /dev/null? I don't see any databases mentioned in the technology stack

oh! i have to update the readme ;)

actually as i used django framework (which is database agnostic), on my development env i use sqlite3 and on production im using postgresql

so you can pretty much use any database that django supports.

in fact, for a large scale usage postgresql would not be enough... but for using inside a company intranet, with a few users i think it is alright for now

> for a large scale usage postgresql would not be enough

What sort of large scale are you talking about? Why would Postgres not be enough? What would be, and which features make it better for use with your project?

hm im not so sure. but if we plan to use a single to instance of bootcamp, and companies can use it as a service, signing up their companies and using a single infra, that would be thousands of networks on the same database maybe a nosql db would be better? i am not really an database expert to make this sort of analysis hehe.. never really worked with huge amount of data, like twitter and facebook for example

i mean, im not so sure if a relational database would be the best option

I would imagine something like Cassandra scaling better (both on the reads & writes), but I'd suspect you'd have to change your data model quite a bit to see those benefits. If you're interested in this line of inquiry, shoot me an email 'jlh' @ 'opencore.io'.

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