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Durchblick - Office everywhere Rails application that aggregates Google Gdata services and Amazon S3 Storage to a project based complete small-scale business application.

In one sentence

This rails app manages your eMails, Medias, Contacts and Events.

• Browser App: The app contains everything you need to manage your office. That means you don't have to have a special office computer, any with a browser somewhere in the world will be sufficient.

• Google Sync: The special thing about it is it complete syncs with your Google Mail Account. That means it collects your Mails from Google Mail, let's you write and send Mail with the Account, uses your Google Contacts and updates them if you add or remove one and keeps in sync with your events in Google Calendar.

• Project Structure: : As in real life everything is organized in projects. That means you have severeal projects and each has its own eMails, Medias, Contacts and Events. When you create a project, Google Mail has a new folder with the project name, Google Contacts has a new contact group for the project and Google Calendar has a new calendar for it.

• Collaborative Files: Medias are simply files that can be uploaded to any project. Every media item keeps a history with a current active version and a description what state it is in to make collaborative, non-destructive working a breeze.

• Mobile Synchronization: As mobile phones like the iPhone or Android phones have build in Google Mobile support you can sync all items to them and stay updated with Durchblick as well.

• Simple Backup: If you want to backup your whole data from time to time, you can simply a zipped Version

Screen Casts

Installation

To install the app do the following:

1. git clone git://github.com/southdesign/projectbase.git
2. Set yout Timezone in config/environment.rb -> config.time_zone = 'Berlin'
3. rake db:setup
4. Optional: You can run the unit and functional tests now rake test:units and rake test:functionals
5. script/server
6. Open your browser and you should be ready to go!

Deployment

I'm running the app on an Apache2 server with mod_passenger. Currently I am using the Ubuntu Server Edition but any other distribution should work as well.

This is a sample vhost configuration that works out great for me:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName durchblick
    DocumentRoot /home/southdesign/apps/durchblick/public
    RailsEnv production
    SetEnv PATH /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
    RailsBaseURI /
</VirtualHost>

Resources

• southdesign.de

License

• Durchblick is free for non-commercial use only!
• If you want to purchase for commercial use feel free to contact me at tommylefunk [at] googlemail [dot] com.
• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/de/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Author

• Thomas Fankhauser - tommylefunk [at] googlemail [dot] com 2010