phpGroupWare Gets a Commercial Partner

All the pieces are now in place, so I can make the announcement.

phpGroupWare now has a commercial partner - ReSight AS of Norway. Over the next 12 months ReSight will be working with several partners, including Bergen Bolig- og Byfornyelse KF, MIT FabLab Norway and others to enhance phpGroupWare. Most of their work will be centred on the property module, written by Sigurd Nes.

Sigurd has done a great job in pulling this off. When he first told me about this deal in Paris last year I thought that I sounded interesting, but I didn’t see much of a role for me in the deal. Later I learnt that it was happening and Sigurd was pushing for me to have a role. I really appreciate the effort Sigurd has put into arranging this. I think this deal is testament to Sigurd’s skills as a developer and negotiator. I also think it shows that phpGroupWare is a serious business tool.

For my part in the deal, I have been contracted by ReSight for 12 months starting 1 October 2007. I will be working as an engineer and also helping to guide and drive the project. I will be meeting with ReSight in Norway from 5 October until the 18th. Other trips to Norway are likely. I am pretty excited about all of this. Not only does it mean that I am paid to work on phpGroupWare, but it means that the project has a committed commercial partner who is trying to work closely with the existing developers and participate in the community.

I believe things are starting to look pretty good for phpGroupWare. The ReSight deal is just one of several things which has come off in the last few months that really helps the project. Johan has contributed a native php implementation of SyncML as part of the Google Summer of Code program. Don from Blue GNU has been blogging about phpGW and getting it widely syndicated. The user list seems more active too. I hope all this means that we can build up enough steam to finally get 0.9.18 out some time soon.

If anyone is interested in meeting me while I am in Europe, we are planning an informal meet up in Copenhagen, Denmark on Saturday 6 October 2007. If you are interested, please contact me, and we will try to work something out. The rest of my time in Norway is still somewhat unplanned, so I can’t really make any commitments. So far Johan is confirmed and Micke Larsson is a maybe. If there is enough interest and we formalise arrangements I will post the details on the lists and/or on my blog.

Update 2020: Fixing links and cleaning up copy.