OpenGoo Open Source office suite is now maintained by FengOffice. The website describes FengOffice as “a complete online solution focused on improving productivity, collaboration, communication and management of your teams”. This applicaiton was originally developed by Feng Office. It is admittedly maintained by the efforts of ” many people who find motivation in its mission, or perceive a possible business opportunity, or do it as an academic task, or just for the fun of it, or all of the above. The pieces and framework that FengOffice uses are made by hundreds of thousands of developers all around the world.” It follows that FengOffice is glued together from many Open Source projects to make it feel like one single application.  The basic language used is PHP.

FengOffice is a paid online service. FengOffice is easy to install, cross platform, secure, open source and easily extendable. The installation of FengOffice requires the set up of a webserver (Apache 2 is recommended) with PHP5 and a MYSQL database. For those who are not tech savvy a free trial is recommended.

Signing up for the trial version requires you to fill in a small form with some personal details.  On completion of this procedure the user is informed that an onsite account has been created for the user:

FengOffice organizes all information as workspaces in its interface. The workspaces are visible in the left side bar and can represent several structural artefacts suchas a company, department, project, group of clients or any other kind of categorization that you may chose to implement.  The concept is generic and implementation is on the basis of the name.

Users are persons who are authorized to access the software. He has a unique account in the acpplicaiton and must be authenticated to access his data.

The dashboard it the heart of the application. It is the first screen that the user sees on login.

Users can view the most recent and most urgent information about their modulces and the current workspaces in use.  Weekly canlender, tasks and milestones are presented in an easy to grasp interface. Comments, modified documents and other important events are published to this interface automatically.  The user has options to remove some of the widgets on this screen if he has no use for them. The Left panel is a collapsible panel with two important tools-the workspaces panel and the tags panel.

The Notes tab opens a window for exchange of information between users of a Feng Office installation. It can be treated as a kind of user forum, a blog, a blackboard or a mailing list.  Users can comment and discuss; subscribe to a note; get notifications by mail about new comments.  Overall it is a very powerful tool, that is entirely to the advantage of the user.

Contacts can be individual contacts or company contacts. Company contacts can have many individual contacts attached to the contact name.

Calender allows the user log and set the current weeks events.  The daily upcoming or urgent events can be set to appear in the dashboard event viewer.

The Email window looks likethe traditional email model. No emails can be sent or received unless the configuration of email accounts is complete under “My Accunts”.

During the process of configuration, email accounts will have to be added to the account. The incoming mail settings, the smtp settings and other settings will have to be specified.  Users can share email with other Feng Office users if they classify it into the shared workspace.

Two types of documents can be created in the Documents window–text documents and presentations. It is possible to upload other kinds of doucments to this window, but users will have to download them to their desktops for viewing and modifying. They can upload the modified version to the workspace.

The Tasks Window provides access to tasks and milestones. Tasks are “To-do” lists and milestones are intended to alert the user when something is due.  Tasks can be assigned to milestones but this is optional.  Task templates enable the user save the template for a task. This template can be used again and again to create new tasks.

The Web Links Window provides the user with a tool to save and bookmark all the favorite sites.  This option also helps users share weblinks with other users.  It is possible to organize web links using workspaces and tags.

The Time module can be used to log the time taken by the user and his coworkers on a particular task.

The Reporting tab, at the name suggests, allows the creation of different types of reports for different object types in Feng Office.  Custom reports can be created by those who are authorized to do so.

Tags are keywords for grouping sets of objects such as documents, tasks milestones, notes etc on the basis of the tagged words.

The elaborate Admin panel is the highlight of this software. The Admin can create workgroups, assign users, manage users or delet users or workgroups. He can also assign tasks or manage tasks at the apex level.

For those who are looking for a simple word editor and simple presentation software that they can collaborate on, FengOffice is ideal. The spreadsheet module of this application is known as gelsheet and has recently been released in beta version.