Hi Since the release of version 1.0 five years ago, SOGo has gained a lot in maturity and tons of great features. However, we feel like the UI and UX of the Web interface have been neglected and deserve a good amount of love. That's why we have big plans for the next major release of SOGo. We want to leverage the stability and flexibility of the backend to completely rewrite the front-end with modern technologies that will allow the evolution of SOGo for another five years.
The biggest challenge we want to meet is the accessibility of the Web interface from modern mobile devices. SOGo is already accessible to mobile devices through CalDAV, CardDAV and ActiveSync, but some users still want to access their data through a Web browser. That means removing double-clicks and contextual menus. It also means responsive design and simplified UI for small screens, all without penalizing desktop users. We've been analyzing and testing various options for the past few months and we decided to build the new Web interface with the following open source projects: - AngularJS (https://angularjs.org/): a powerful open-source web application framework. The project is already very popular and has a promising future. - Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com/): an advanced front-end framework combining a flexible grid system and a great bare style to build a custom look and feel. - Ionic (http://ionicframework.com/): a new framework to build hybrid mobile apps with HTML5. While our initial goal is to offer a very functional Web interface to mobile devices, Ionic will ultimately help us to package a native app of SOGo for Android and iPhone devices. SOGo is a complex Web application and deserves a serious front-end architecture. That's why we'll adopt a MVW (model-view-whatever) structure on the front-end (AngularJS), use Sass to build the CSS (with Foundation), and use a specific framework for the mobile version of the Web interface (Ionic). If you are a UX expert, a UI designer or a JavaScript developer and you want to contribute to the revamp of the Web front-end of SOGo, please contact us. Share your ideas, sketches and inspirations on what would be the very best open source groupware for you. Thanks, Francis -- [email protected] :: http://www.inverse.ca Inverse :: Leaders behind SOGo (http://sogo.nu) and PacketFence (http://packetfence.org) -- [email protected] https://inverse.ca/sogo/lists
