For those interested in Zentyal development, it is good to know that making new Zentyal modules is now easier than ever – Among other reasons, this is because autotools is not used anymore for building the packages and instead, the developers can use Zentyal’s own zbuildtools package. Moreover, other helpful development tools have also been documented.

As to other development related news, it is also important to note that Zentyal project has moved from Subversion to GIT. To get Zentyal source, please check these new instructions. If you have any feedback or questions, please let us know through Zentyal Forum or Development Mailing List.

The VM images together with instructions and additional information are available in the trac. It is important to note that the images come with a reduced set of Zentyal modules. In reality Zentyal offers many more features that can be easily enabled in the “Software Management” section once the Virtual Machine is up and running.

Remember to spread the word! And as always, feedback and suggestions through the Forum are much appreciated!

As already mentioned during the Zentyal Summit, the proposed main development lines for Zentyal 3.0 are the upgrade to Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS, better integration with Ubuntu in general, improvements on the Desktop side and better user experience.

For details, please check the trac. As this is not the definitive roadmap, you can give your feedback and participate in the conversation about it through the Forum.

Information on how to use the tool, known issues, etc. is available at the Trac. As migrating a production server is a complex task that may lead to problems, it is recommended to do the migration out of office hours, making sure that it is possible to restore a backup if anything goes wrong during the process.

If you come up with any issues, please report through the Forum. On the other hand, if you have a critical production environment and you want to count on Zentyal Development Team’s help for the migration, you can always opt for commercial support.

Enjoy the new Zentyal 2.2 server!

At the moment the Zentyal Migration Tool includes Active Directory synchronization and exportation of basic DHCP and DNS settings from Windows servers to Zentyal. The tool is made available together with extensive documentation, as well as detailed information on how to migrate from Microsoft Exchange to Linux with Zentyal and Zarafa Groupware.

Please let us know through the Forum if you come up with any issues or have any suggestions for improvements. Our aim is to progressively improve this tool, allowing to extract more data to make the replacement of Windows servers with Zentyal as easy as possible.

Keynote speaker of the Summit is Roberto Galoppini, Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge, who has over 20 years experience in the computer industry, and has spent the last 10 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. His talk “From Projects to Products” will take a look on how open source projects can turn in to commercially viable products and how SourceForge can help in the process.

The Summit program covers a large number of topics related to Zentyal, from commercial aspects to Zentyal server use cases, community talks and technical workshops, aimed at current and potential Zentyal customers, partners, community members and users. There is no registration fee for participating in the event, but seats are limited so early registration is highly recommended. Both the program and registration form can be found at the Summit website.

Zentyal Summit 2011 will be held right after the Libre Software World Conference 2011, that will take place in Zaragoza on the 9th and 10th of November. The Summit is sponsored by the Local Government of Aragón, Zaragoza City Council, Business Consortium for Open Source Software in Aragón (CESLA) and National Reference Center for ICT Based on OSS (CENATIC).

Zentyal 2.2 introduces major performance improvements, reducing the installation time and improving the user interface responsiveness by 30%. Besides, a number of usability improvements have taken place, making the server installation, configuration and management easier and more accessible for SMB users with no earlier experience on Linux.

This version features fully new Captive Portal module, that offers the possibility to limit user access to the Internet through a login page. Captive portals are typically used at WiFi hotspots, but also in wired networks at hotels, schools or airports where users need to authenticate prior gaining Internet access.

In addition, Zentyal 2.2 introduces a bunch of new features, such as IPsec and, PPTP support, Administrator audit logging, Virtual machine management, Zarafa 7 integration, Ad-blocker or the ability to run Zentyal from a USB stick. Moreover, to celebrate the new release, improved free Basic Subscription was recently launched to give users access to basic alerts, reports, remote monitoring and management options directly from the Zentyal Cloud at no cost.

Zentyal users are invited to participate in Zentyal Summit 2011, to be held on November 11-12, to learn more about this version and discuss the roadmap of the next stable Zentyal version.

For additional information, please check out the Detailed Announcement or the full changelog.

In addition, an open discussion on Zentyal community governance has been included to the program, as well as three practical workshops: Zentyal server maintenance with Zentyal Cloud, Best practices deploying a Zentyal Server and How to customize Zentyal configuration files (by using hooks and templates). Partners’, users’ and community’s interests and requirements have been taken into account when defining this preliminary program.

The call for talks will close on the 24th of September. Both submitted and anticipated talk proposals are being taken into account and the definitive program will be announced in October. Potential speakers are encouraged to submit their talk proposals and it is also possible to register to the event at the Zentyal Summit website.

About Zentyal Summit
Zentyal Summit offers a meeting place to share experiences, meet and discuss with other Zentyal users and developers, discuss the roadmap of the next release, attend training sessions or take the ZeCA certification exam. The summit is open to all and it is specially aimed at current and potential Zentyal customers, partners, community members and users.

Zentyal Summit 2011 will be held right after the Libre Software World Conference 2011, that will take place in Zaragoza on the 9th and 10th of November. There is no registration fee for participating in Zentyal Summit, but seats are limited so early registration is highly recommended.

The party will be held in Zaragoza (Spain), city where the project started and everybody is warmly welcome to paint the town red together with Zentyal Team and enjoy a concert by the local band Iron Maños. The exact address of the party is: La Bóveda/Albergue de Zaragoza, C/ Predicadores 70, Zaragoza.

Confirm you participation at event’s Facebook page. If you are too far to attend, hold your Zentyal Release Party in your own town – Simply add the coordinates and the time of the party in the event’s Facebook page comments!

The Zentyal Community Documentation is made available in wiki format and anyone registered in the Zentyal Forum is free to add new wiki pages or to modify them in the Community Documentation Repository. Please note that by contributing you accept the Zentyal Contributor Agreement (ZCA) and your contribution is published under Creative Commons “Attribution-Share Alike” license.

Zentyal Development Teams believes that the community documentation offers a great chance to complete the official documentation with practical use cases, as well as to gather together and structure all the information that until now has been scattered in Forum boards or blogs. In the next weeks we will be going through the documentation we could add and we’re also looking forward to receiving your contributions!