After 2015 years punctuated beautiful satisfactions for the project, 2016 starts very well. The Future of Mail2Voice project as we see it today.
The activity of Mail2Voice the year 2015 was rather intense.
We conducted 9 conferences in communication actions, demonstrations or training. On these occasions we meet our users, their families, caregivers, professionals but also developers. We appreciate these moments of exchange because this is our opportunity to collect your thoughts and your needs, and ask questions that advance.
Secondly and most importantly, we released the first stable version of Mail2Voice. That was our major event of the year! We are proud of the result. The way to this publication was long and took a few turns, so far we have exceeded our expectations. The livery version is much richer than what was envisaged at the beginning of this story. The feedback we have are encouraging, the stable version have more than 1000 downloads, we had good articles in the trade press and we also received a few requests to participate in presentations.
Also, the website was redesigned for better readability and simplicity, while being compatible with mobile.
This year has been very interesting from the standpoint of teamwork. We tested our methods, procedures and tools. We liked collaborate and increase our knowledge. It works !
Mixed.
And we did the assessment. We have identified certain weaknesses.
After a little rest, the team to initiate a discussion on the future of this program. We can not stop here, we decided to work on a completely redesigned solution.
2016 began with very concrete projects ...
We will work to redesign the software to extend its functionality and customization to improve reliability and modernity. For that we will start from scratch.
We have not used the option to reuse an existing e-mail software and grafting on to add the Mail2Voice features. None of the solutions that we studied did meet the prerequisites.
So we will go lower in the code. It will be more work, but it allows us to expand our perspectives.
We decided to split the code into two projects. We will work to a software component that will handle e-mail, the future 'engine' of Mail2Voice. Free licensed, this brick can be reused and improved by any developer wishing it. It will be a base for any available solution for managing emails.
Then we will take another software component that will handle the user interface. It will be such that current users of the Mail2Voice know, only better! It also will be under a free license. Everything will be available at least for Windows ™, Mac OS, Linux and meet the standards of accessibility.
The team is already hard at work with a clear plan of action. Collection of user requirements, general specifications, architecture definition, study of the existing, etc. are currently in our program. In short: we are in the definition phase and we should start coding in the spring.
... And a strengthened team!
We just integrated two new people in the team. We now turn to five active members, four are developers and build in code. The color changes!
The new guidelines and the new constitution of the team will ask us to structure ourselves more. For this, we already know that we will have to equip ourselves with new collaboration tools. We look at some of task automation solutions (compilation, unit testing, etc.), it will speak to the more technical of you.
If you want to learn more in this area will see the wiki dedicated to developers. We describe our choices as you: languages, tools, architecture, etc.
By the way, do you know that internally we call this version Mail2Voice-Next?
