JumpBox Official Blog

OpenEMM is a mature open source email marketing solution that incorporates many of the features found in popular proprietary systems. Manage the various email distribution lists for your company and track the results of your mailings. Features of OpenEMM include:

• Import/Export capabilities for working with existing lists and moving data between systems.
• Wizard-driven templates for creating multi-part emails with both text and HTML versions.
• Full tracking of statistics for open rates and click-thru rates.
• The ability to do custom list segmentation based on various criteria.
• Customizable opt-in and (un)subscribe forms.

The video below gives a brief introduction to the application and shows how to send your first emailing. Watch the video and then try it out yourself using the orange button below.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

DSpace is a document management system designed to facilitate better preservation and sharing of academic research. Each university runs a copy of the software and registers for a unique “handle.” This allows for a federated repository system in which every piece of content added to any system will have a universally-unique identifier. The notable qualities of DSpace include:

• Built from the ground up intended for Universities with the goal of improving preservation and sharing of academic research.
• Support for all forms of digital content (text docs, pdf’s, images, video, graphics) with full-text indexing and searching of text-based content.
• Extensive academic-specific meta-data and globally-unique identifiers on every piece of content.
• Security contexts with groups, users and permissions to enable or restrict access to content as needed

The video below is a quick primer on how to submit your first article into the system. Watch the video and then try it out yourself using the orange button below.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

Foswiki is a wiki system that is notable for its approachability for non-technical users and its ability to store content in a structured fashion. The following qualities make it unique from the other JumpBox wikis:

• A simple WYSIWYG editor means there’s no need to learn special markup syntax.
• Email addresses can be added to a wiki page and the users will receive notifications as changes are made.
• Easily attach files to any wiki page and either view them in-line or as a separate attachment.
• Add forms to your wiki pages to accept structured content submissions.

Foswiki is great for any project that requires collaborative note-taking. It offers a more shallow learning curve for the less-technical user given its usage of a mature WYSIWYG content editor. Simply cut & paste content from other sites or reference external pages from within your wiki page. This video walks you through the first usage of Foswiki. In it we’ll add a user account, create our first few pages, attach an image to a page and setup email notifications.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

LimeSurvey is a survey engine that allows you to create and deliver surveys online. The main features and benefits are:

• Rapidly create and distribute surveys to extract valuable insight from employees, customers and potential customers.
• Export survey results in various formats for further analysis in a spreadsheet program such as Excel or Numbers.
• Build in conditional logic to create a custom stream of questions that intelligently adapts as the respondent answers.
• Host the surveys as publicly-available for anyone to respond or lock it down for private submission only with invite codes.

If you’ve been meaning to conduct an online survey to tap the knowledge of a group of people check out the video below for a quick overview of how to get started with Lime Survey. In this video we’ll create a survey from scratch, add three different types of questions, deliver it to a respondent and then browse the results. As a side note this JumpBox lends itself particularly well to deployment on EC2. Bring up an instance for a few days to gather responses and then use the backup/restore mechanism to take it offline for processing the results.

And when you’re finished with the video take LimeSurvey for a spin yourself by clicking the orange button below. Happy surveying!

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

The JumpBox for Trac integrates this popular issue tracking and project management system with Subversion for source control. Together these apps work in tandem to provide powerful development infrastructure for software developers giving you:

• Better accountability and transparency for any software project.
• Bulletproof revision control allowing you to track all changes and the ability to roll the state of the project back to a former status.
• Ambient awareness of progress via RSS feeds and automated email notifications.
• Organic & frictionless documentation with integration between the wiki, ticketing system and source control.
• Added functionality and extensibility via subversion hooks and Trac plugins

The video below gives a quick overview of what Trac is and does. For a more in-depth tutorial see this screencast and this talk Sean did for the San Diego Java Users Group. As always leave a comment below if you have questions about anything in the video.

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Jasper Server when used in conjunction with Jasper iReport allows you to extract valuable insights from the systems you use to run your business. In this brief tutorial we’ll examine how to create a simple report using iReport. This exercise presumes that you’ve already completed this prior tutorial on how to expose the MySQL database of a SugarCRM JumpBox. Once you’ve created a report with the client-side tool (iReport) you load the JRXML file generated by iReport into the Repository on the JumpBox for Jasper Server in order to serve it to users. If you have any questions about the video leave a comment below.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

This wiki page gives written instructions. For those that are more visually-oriented here’s a 6min screencast that steps you through the process of exposing the MySQL database of a SugarCRM JumpBox. This process works the same for any JumpBox that uses a MySQL db under the hood. In this video we’ll expose the db, add some sample contacts to Sugar and then browse the contacts table in the db using the free Sequel Pro graphical database client.

Here’s the sample contacts file used in the video.

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The latest version of the JumpBox for Nagios includes a web-based administration tool that makes it much easier to use Nagios to monitor resources on your network. Below is a short screencast that demonstrates the bare essentials of how to get started. In the video we setup Nagios to watch a Wordpress blog, take the blog offline and see how the notifications are handled within Nagios.  As always leave a comment here on the blog if you have questions or search the Nagios Community Wiki.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

This screencast is intended to give you a rapid introduction to SugarCRM. It briefly covers the major sections of the application and runs through the steps involved in getting started with it. If you’re new to JumpBox you may want to watch one of the earlier Ramp Up videos to see the process of booting a JumpBox from scratch.  

This application is in a class of software called “Customer Relationship Management,” whose primary function is to provide an improved customer experience by putting structure to the way you communicate with customers and prospects. It gives you a focal point through which all of your customer interaction (be it phone, email or otherwise) is conducted.  SugarCRM provides an attractive Open Source alternative to solutions like Salesforce.com and has a large selection of commercial and free add-ons to extend its functionality.

Having used this system extensively first-hand at JumpBox to make over 500 followup calls, I can attest that it’s a stellar piece of software.  My few gripes with the system were almost entirely addressed in the last release.  At this point there’s only a miniscule list of features I’d like to see added to the product.  Kudos to the SugarCRM development team for solid work.

Don’t take my word for it though- experience it for yourself using the orange “Rapid Trial” button below. For more resources to learn about SugarCRM, browse their forums, visit the community page of their open source project or peruse the extensions that are available. And leave a comment if you have questions about anything discussed in the video.

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Introducing the JumpBox for Tracks (not to be confused with the JumpBox for Trac). This elegant application gives you the ability to implement the popular “Getting Things Done” methodology in a clean, accessible manner with ubiquitous access to your data. It’s part of our free collection of JumpBoxes and has all the juicy Web 2.0 goodness you could ask for:

In this brief five-minute screencast we’ll run through the Tracks application and get an overview of its capabilities and features. Visit their web site to learn more and take it for a spin with your own private trial instance by clicking the orange button below.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.