[Kolab-devel] btw, an intro to why i'm suddenly here =P

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi...

i figure i probably ought to drop an email explaining my interest in kolab, as 
it's more than just a passing one. those of you who read my blog may have 
seen this screenshot:

	http://aseigo.bddf.ca/dms/32/211_kolab_admin.png

you'll probably notice a couple things about it right away: a) it's a bit 
prettier than what exists in CVS and b) there's no mention of kolab.

i'll be submitting a patch for (a) sometime in the next few days as i think it 
really makes a significant difference to things. 

as for (b), the reason for no mention of kolab once you are in the admin area 
is that i'm doing work for a local IT consultancy building up a set of 
software that they are selling into the SMB market as a SMB server stack. 
it's Kubuntu (with KDE installed) + a variety of server solutions (e.g. 
kolab) + a variety of graphical server config tools (some web based, some 
KDE). we're branding pretty much everything we can, and for fairly obvious 
reasons.

however, we DO use the names of the products and reference the projects behind 
them in marketing materials since that lends a huge amount of credence. and i 
haven't taken out kolab from everywhere. in fact, here's a screenshot of the 
log in screen:

	http://bddf.ca/~aseigo/kolab_admin_login.png

the phrase "The Open Source Groupware Solution" is linked to kolab.org. so 
every time they log in via the web they see, front and centre, the name of 
the project and have a link to the project page. i hope that makes up for my 
replacing the kolab logo with the IT consultancy's logo in the upper left.

in fact, i feel that this sort of branding is a plus for kolab since it 
encourages regional IT consultancies with an SMB focus to take advantage of 
thesse tools. and i personally believe very strongly that the SMB market is 
critical for our (free / open source) initiatives right now and that the only 
rational way to reach them is by harnessing the regional IT consultancies en 
mass. that was a big part of the idea behind the Microsoft's, Cisco's, 
Novell's, etc... certification programs, no?

ok, that's plenty of ramble for one email. but i wanted to share what i'm 
doing out here in western Canada so when/if you saw screenshots of the web 
interface and what not that it didn't become a cause for concern or 
unanswered curiosity

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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