NECC Vol 7 – First Class user meeting
One of the things I really like about conferences is talk directly to the vendors. We use open text’s First Class and they had a very good presence at the trade show. First class is used by 4 of the top 10 school districts in the US. Some servers are really huge, I know of one licienced to 250,000 users. Talk about scalability.
Anyway, the First Class users meeting was illuminating and very interesting. The changes are exciting and very cool. The web interface that was demonstrated (its a version 10 interface) was easy to use, easy on the eye and very very functional.
Here are the notes on the presentation.
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Key elements:
- indexing
- 64bit processor
- AJAX support including wikis (wikis are now very important)
- New web interface – pretty radical shift, but very cool!
- Active sync and iphone support
- versioning
- External user support
- Nov 08 for 10 release
- May 09 for 11
I must thank Jim, Rahul, Greg, Mark, Tim and all the first class team for their brilliant hospitality and for answering my many questions. I came away feeling very satisfied and reassured.
August 16th, 2008 at 3:17 am
FirstClass is amazing, why doesn’t everybody know about it, and why would anyone in education consider using anything else? I think to be “enterprise” you have to be complicated and capable of keeping lots of IT staff employed. I recently watched a team of knowledgeable IT folk try to install Lotus Notes 8… took the experts three tries to make it work and they were still configuring it and trying to add Chat and browser access two weeks later. They didn’t consider FirstClass because they barely heard of it and it’s not “enterprise” software. Who told them that?
Let me go on record to say I could give any K-12 teacher in the world a FirstClass installer and a single page of instructions (at 12-point font!) and they’ll have a server up and running in 30 minutes. Give me one or two hours face to face and they’ll be assigning users to fully prepared FirstClass conferences and getting on with the job of teaching.
Some people say FirstClass is expensive and with the “enterprise” companies competing with Google and Micro$oft to give their stuff away for nothing I guess they’re right. School boards and universities (in North America anyway, so I hear, what about elsewhere?) are more and more willing to host their students and communities on these because they’re “free.” Are they??!! No thanks. What am I missing, honestly can someone explain it to me? Gimme something I can understand, set and forget and it keeps working 24/7 with no further bother — but if it ever stopped working, or I have more ideas on what to do with it I can **access it myself** with ease — and let me get on with the “collaborating.”
Sales and marketing at Open Text FirstClass may need a wakeup call but the product itself is spot on! FirstClass rules OK!
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