OutSystems Express Edition
Well, I’ve been planning on doing this for quite a while, but it’s better late than never.
Finally OutSystems has released a free version of its’ flagship product, and the response for it has been nothing short of amazing! This is what I’ve been involved in for the past months. It is called the OutSystems Express Edition, and it is still in beta stage.
The official announcement was made in a public event that OutSystems hosted last week, and from then on we have been receiving a steady income of considerable registration requests for the beta program per day!
While some people who might be unfamiliar with the technology might not understand what the fuss is all about, let me shed a little light on the subject.
At OutSystems we have always been a bit closed about our technology and resources. To download our development environment – the OutSystems Service Studio – you used to have to register in our site. Granted, the registration was free, but we required it so we could better keep track of our user base.
To download the platform where the applications would run on – the now called OutSystems Service Center – you had to be either a partner, a customer, or someone developing a project for one of those two.
Access to our “public” forums – as well as to our knowledge base – also required user login.
As of past week all of this became simpler.
The public forums and our knowledge base have become readable to anyone who wishes. You’ll only need to log in to post something in our forums.
The OutSystems Express Edition is a package that will set up the OutSystems Service Center and the OutSystems Service Studio in a user’s PC, along with the OutSystems Integration Studio and a full-blown open web application called OutSystems IT Asset Manager, which keeps an inventory of all assets in a network. For now, only those who have been eligible to participate in the beta program will be able to download it and start tinkering with it, but the bottom line is that you no longer have to be a customer to have access to our technology. As far as we know, you might be someone who was just looking for a free application that did what our OutSystems IT Asset Manager did, a freelancer doing projects in our technology for a living, or just someone who was just curious and decided to try out our product. Honestly: whatever gets you through the day will also get us through it as well!
I am really proud of being part of this great team. For long we have tried to find a way to bring our technology to a broader audience, so more people can benefit from it, and finally all our efforts have paid. I have already installed it in this laptop and it is a startling difference to actually play the role of the user of our product. For all of us who have been developing it and rarely using it for serious stuff, it just doesn’t get any more compelling than this!
As of this day, the first lucky beta users have been notified that the download is available, and in the following days more people will have access to the download link. If you are interested in enrolling in the beta program, register in http://express.outsystems.net and we’ll get in touch with you!
Cheers!
