It’s been just over 6 months since we launched The Essential Project, and we thought we would take this opportunity to provide you with a brief update.
Firstly, downloads. There have been around 1,500 downloads to date. We believe this shows an exceptionally high interest in open source EA tools such as Essential, and we are delighted that so many of you have taken the time to download and assess the tool. We hope (and have heard via the grapevine) that Essential is providing benefits to both large organisations as well as smaller SME’s, and also proving useful to the many EA consultants out there.
Next, to the forums. We have had some interesting debates on the forums, a few of which have led to a number of extension projects being kicked off via the ECP (Essential Community Process). This has really pleased us because we want the community to grow and to begin to shape the future development of The Essential Project, so the fact that the community has started to dictate the type and priority of changes and updates is fantastic.
And this leads us nicely on to sharing. We have this week received our second contribution by a member of the community. Again, one of our aims is for the community to be actively engaged in the development work, primarily to add additional expertise and experience to the project, so receiving another contribution, with the promise of more on the way, is a great bonus – a big thank you from the Team!
The contribution process also allows the load to be shared – as this is an open source venture The Essential Project Team do this in our spare time, so any help is always appreciated. On this note I would like to take the opportunity to stress that we always reply as quickly as we can to queries via the forum, but if it takes a bit longer on occasion, please bear with us!
Lastly, again in response to demand from the community, we have created a demonstration video which can be accessed via the Home page or the Tutorials page, a sample repository which can be downloaded via the Share page as well as an early alpha release of an Integration Tool that allows existing EA information to be imported from external tools (e.g. spreadsheets), which again can be found on the Share page.
All in all not a bad first 6 months!
We hope the project continues to grow at the current pace and we thank you all for your involvement so far. As always, we are keen for the community to be as involved as possible, so please let us know your thoughts – good and bad!