finnlabs presents success story "before" - Beta-Test-Center for Deutsche Telekom at meet & greet mit open source berlin: Problem gelöst! Dank Freier Software. - Problem solved! Thanks to open source software.

Early feedback from customers to new product ideas is essential for the future success of the product. finnlabs has developed a Beta-Test-Center for Deutsche Telekom, based on the Open Source software ChiliProject.

The platform https://before.telekom.de was launched in December 2011.
It includes features, such as

• test management via projects
• bug reporting via tickets
• roles: admin, test manager, tester
• user maintenance and selection
• news, forums
• user profiles
• community
• surveys
• incentives
• wireframes

Development teams can regularly present new features or products to their test group. The customer gets access to new interesting projects and can actively steer the development of the product by reporting bugs and discuss new features.

We have released two new plugins which where developed during a client project. We think they will also be useful for the public, so we are sending them out into the wild.

ChiliProject Activity Module

Activity Module is a simple plugin, that solves one problem. We were using ChiliProject for more than just project management and issue tracking. One particular project e.g. is used as a knowledge-base with FAQs and training material available for all users. Since its main purpose is to provide the content buried in the wiki and forums, we wanted to deactivate the Activity tab within the project menu. It was of no use for the given project and simply occupied space, that could be used for other things.

So ChiliProject Activity Module simply allows you to deactivate that tab in the project menu. Or in other words: Activity becomes a project module, just like Issue Tracking and Wiki.

You may find the sources and detailed installation instructions at the plugin’s GitHub page.

ChiliProject Wiki Tabs

Wiki Tabs was developed for the very same project. We wanted to have multiple wiki sections, so to say. With ChiliProject Wiki Tabs you are able to add tabs to the project menu, which point to certain wiki pages. These settings can be configured per project and you can have as many tabs as you like. To support the feeling of separate wiki sections, Wiki Tabs also manages the currently highlighted tab. So whenever you are on a wiki page, that is configured to be a tab in the project menu or on a child page, the right tab will be highlighted in the menu.

Again, you may find the sources and detailed installation instructions at the plugin’s GitHub page.

See also, www.finn.de/chiliproject/features/wiki for further description.

During the last few weeks finnlabs has worked on a new design for ChiliProject. We didn’t start from scratch. Eric Davis had already spent a lot of effort in this area. It was already a major improvement and a great starting point for our initiative.

You can see the latest results on ux.finn.de. Everyone is invited to create an account in this installation and play around. We will continuously deploy new versions in the next couple of weeks. I am quite happy with the first results, however there still is a long way to go.

The focus of our first sprint were the following design components:

• ChiliProject logo (first shot)
• Header, including a new project menu with search and autocompletion
• The project menu (previously the project tabs) on the left

The code is published in the finnlabs repository on GitHub.

Our goals for the next sprint are:

• Integration of your contributions and comments
• Project home page redesign
• Wiki redesign

Thanks to Holger Just and Felix Schäfer for their helpful advice and guidance.

If anyone in the ChiliProject community is interested in helping out, please send us your contributions and comments, for example on the associated forum thread on chiliproject.org.

On Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 www.TEDxBodensee.de offers outstanding people a platform:
Innovation. Inspiration. Ideas and talents on the lake! - new approaches for green technologies, ecological agriculture, innovative and social projects.

Dr. Klaus Reichert, Innovation Consultancy & Business Coaching , highly appreciated member of our advisory board, is initiator of the TEDx Bodensee. finnlabs will be a sponsor of the independently organised non-profit event which is based on the Californian concept www.TED.com. Many "big ones" and "enthusiastics" in this world have already presented their ideas and projects here. Participants are mostly students, entrepreneurs, but also everyone else experiences stunning talks and an exchange of new ideas and experiences.

Guest speakers will be

• the founder of DeinBus.de from Friedrichshafen
• Rolf Kunisch, "Mr. Nivea", from Überlingen
• the Poetry Slammer Matze B from Kreuzlingen
• Christoph Gräf from the foundation Liebenau
• Andreas Huber from DESERTEC, Tuttlingen
• Max Pohl, ZU Graduate and Co-Founder of Sahay Solar from Winterthur
• Karsten Uitz, Entrepreneur for energy from Argenbühl

> more on http://www.tedxbodensee.de/

Come and participate!
Tickets on www.TEDxBodensee.de/teilnehmen

“Berlins Zukunft ist offen!” / “Berlin’s future is open!” is the title of the Open Source/Open Standards Award for ideas and best practices from the TSB Innovationsagentur Berlin and the Berlin senate initative Projekt Zukunft. finnlabs was awarded first prize in the “best practice” category for “OpenProject – Project collaboration and agile development with ChiliProject”.

The solution already proved itself since the ChiliProject-based project collaboration platform was successfully introduced at major enterprises such as Siemens, congstar and Deutsche Telekom. The software provides project management functionalities as well as agile processes and methods (scrum), e.g. project and milestone planning, issue tracking, document management, product and sprint backlog and much more.

finnlabs is especially proud that Sven Hinderlich, project lead from Deutsche Telekom – Products & Innovation for MyProject (this is how the tool is called at Deutsche Telekom – Products & Innovation), was able to participate in the presentation of awards. He emphasized the decision for this open source solution for Deutsche Telekom: “We were looking for a project collaboration tool and the solution finnlabs offered was the best”.

The prize money will be donated to the ChiliProject community to help the current rework of the layout and design of the software.

Details to the winning projects will also soon be available on open it berlin – the Berlin website around Open Source and Open Standards.

In May of this year, congstar started using ChiliProject as their requirements management and roadmap planning tool. finnlabs supports congstar with the integration of ChiliProject into their IT infrastructure and provides custom development, maintenance and user support. In addition to these services, finnlabs offers congstar strong synergies with other large ChiliProject installations in the telecommunications industry.

In 2010 the Products and Innovation (P&I) department of Deutsche Telekom AG started using the open source web-based project management and collaboration tool Redmine. Shortly after the initial evaluation and assessment phase, a fast growing number of project teams at Deutsche Telekom P&I began using the software in complex product development projects.

Soon after Redmine was forked (see From Redmine to ChiliProject: why finnlabs supports the fork) and ChiliProject and its community had been founded, Deutsche Telekom decided to switch to ChiliProject.

Deutsche Telekom actively supports and encourages further development of the Open Source software and its community as it benefits from bugfixes, feature developments and plugins arising from the transparent and comprehensive project stewardship. Deutsche Telekom plans to contribute to the community with custom-developed features and plugins, e.g. security plugins or scrum functionalities as well as security patches.

With finnlabs as their dedicated partner for Redmine and now ChiliProject-based services (support, training and maintenance) and plugin development, Deutsche Telekom P&I now trusts ChiliProject as one of their enterprise team collaboration platforms.

Siemens CF R migrated their team collaboration platform from Redmine to ChiliProject. Important reasons for the migration are lower maintenance and development costs compared to Redmine as well as significant synergies to other global enterprises using ChiliProject. finnlabs is Siemens’ dedicated partner for ChiliProject plugin development, maintenance and support.

About four years ago finnlabs chose Redmine as their project management platform of choice. We soon started to develop extensions and plugins for ourselves as well as for our customers and subsequently became the leading Redmine service provider in Germany.

The evolution of Redmine and the handling of the core project however turned out to be not as predictable and responsive as we had hoped and strived for. Together with several community members we worked on resolving these issues through clear suggestions and contributions.

Unfortunately these attempts turned out to be not as effective as we had hoped. As a final consequence we decided to support and encourage a fork of the Redmine project. The newly founded ChiliProject guarantees a sustained development process of our favorite project management suite by ensuring an open and collaborative project environment.

With ChiliProject we see a bright future ahead as we continue on our goal to provide the best project management software on the market. As an important part of the ChiliProject community we are thus working hard on improving the open source project through both code and sponsored resources. We will continue to support our customers to adapt ChiliProject according to their processes and provide complete solutions for their management needs.

For more information, see the Why Fork statement on chiliproject.org.

finnlabs' Thies Lindenthal launched his newest project:the first high quality price index for internet domain names (IDNX).

• Each month, it calculates the latest trends in domain prices.
• It is the appropriate benchmark for estimating changes in the value of your domains.
• IDNX is based on data for more than 200,000 domain sales today, more to come in the future

Internet domain names rapidly gained in value from 2006 through 2007, with prices peaking in November 2007 (+76 percent relative to Jan 2006) before falling by 34 percent in the subsequent 5 quarters. Since then, domain prices regained their strength, climbing to an all-time high in May 2011.

Compare to:
NASDAQ 100 ? Google's share price ? Revenues from online ads (US) ?

Domain prices have an economic foundation. They are not detached from the economy in general. On the contrary, domain price changes are very similar to changes in the NASDAQ 100 index, the stock prices of internet giant Google or total revenues from online marketing (US). The strong correlation shows that domain name buyers and sellers make economically motivated price decisions. Domain markets are not a cloud-cuckoo-land where dreamers trade esoteric goods at imaginary prices.

For the full story, check out the project's website at http://idnx.com.