Monday, September 21, 2020

Announcing Group Office Studio

The last seven months have been strange. However, we worked hard and it is with a certain pride that we announce a new module in Group Office 6.4. The Studio module enables administrators to create their own modules, without the need to be able to code.




Two Target Audiences, one Goal

The studio module is aimed at both seasoned Group Office administrators and developers. By the use of custom fields and custom filters, Group Office already had some very powerful tools to adjust functionality. With Studio, we added another level of customization: the ability to create entire modules.

In the field, there are several resellers who need custom functionality for their customers. They either have to program the entire module themselves or have a developer do it. Studio enables an administrator to create a simple module with a list view, a detail view and an editing dialog, all within the space of a few mouse clicks.

On the other hand, developers benefit from the generation of boilerplate code. A lot of boring, repetitive work is skipped and the developer can immediately start with the more interesting bits.

In both use cases, the goal is to reduce development time, thus saving money.

How does Studio work?

Creating a new module from scratch is done is a few steps:

  1. Fill in the module data, like package name, module name and the entity name;
  2. Add custom fields;
  3. Add group permissions;
  4. Enter frontend options;
  5. Confirm your choices and click 'Finish'.
The new module is automatically generated, Group Office will reload itself and your new module will be visible in the start screen.

Here's an example of a module with cars:





How to get started


Studio will run in any recent 6.4 installation with the Professional package. In system settings, the module can be found in the Business package. Be sure to read the documentation first. 

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Group-Office 6.4 updated

It's been a while since version 6.4 has been released. Since then this version has been patched with many new features! We're going to show you the highlights of them:

Updated Group-Office Assistant

We've made a new release for the Assistant which enables you to edit any Group-Office file directly on your computer. We relied on WebDAV in the first versions but WebDAV has been proven to be unreliable on some systems. That's why we're now using our own protocol to edit the files which will always work anywhere!

A short video can be viewed here:

https://twitter.com/GroupOffice/status/1206941733050834946?s=20



Dark Mode

For those who'd like to work in the dark there's now a dark mode theme:


Default e-mail client

When you have the Group-Office assistant installed you can now set Group-Office as your default e-mail client on Windows, macOS and Linux:



Collabora Online

Group-Office supports Collabora Online now. It enables you to edit documents directly in your browser!

A short video can be viewed here:

https://twitter.com/GroupOffice/status/1140618702838292480?s=20

Address book filters

We've extended the filter functionality with much more options. Some useful examples:
  • Find all upcoming birthdays
  • Find all contacts with invoices with the “Has links to..” and then select invoice.
  • Find contacts with recent comments

SMIME more secure

Group-Office now supports the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP). This makes e-mail certificate validation more secure.

And many more

Apart from the highlights above there were many more smaller improvements, bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Updating Group-Office to the latest 6.4 is recommended for everybody! Get it at