We’re Making 365Mapper Open Source

Posted on 24 November 2019

In 2020, 365Mapper will start a new adventure out in the world of open source development, joining other such projects on GitHub – here’s why.

 

For years, our 365Mapper product has helped customers to get a better lay of the land over their Microsoft 365 document library and windows machines. In that time, it’s empowered IT teams to easily manage various cloud storage drives, saved organisations retraining costs as they harness the power of the cloud with ease, and secured storage against viruses via on-machine antivirus products – and our customers have loved it!

 

Of course, change is inevitable. From 1st January 2020 Identity Experts will gift the product and its source code to the developer community at large by releasing it under GPL v3 licensing. Meanwhile, the 365Mapper service will continue to support legacy versions until 31st December 2019.

Yes, that means GitHub users are now able to utilise the open source code behind 365Mapper in their own development projects. This might sound like an unusual decision, but it’s not one we came to lightly.

 

In fact, there were a number of reasons why we chose this path – and here they are:

 

1. Building Something Better

Although 365Mapper has been of great help to many customers and their organisations, its potential stretches far beyond the role we had it playing. However, with a focus on developing new products, delivering training, and implementing new partner solutions, our internal team’s focus isn’t on exploring that potential.

The GitHub community, however, have already been responsible for a number of collaborative successes using open source code, and we have the feeling that if anybody can use 365Mapper’s source code for some good, it’s the imaginative brains that fill GitHub’s community.

 

2. Less Waste, More Opportunity

The shift towards other areas of support, implementation and training is inevitable at this point, meaning that 365Mapper’s maintenance will eventually become less of a priority for our in-house team.

Obviously, it wouldn’t be fair to simply kill off 365Mapper and waste something we’ve worked hard to create, and which has served our customers so well. Instead, we’re ensuring all our past hard work doesn’t go to waste by allowing 365Mapper to live on in different forms.

 

3. Contributing to the Community

Finally, as an organisation filled with techies, we believe whole-heartedly in paying into the community, supporting other members and doing our bit to stoke imaginations and provide resources where we can. Depositing the open source code on GitHub – to us – feels like the right thing to do. After all, many of our technical team members have used GitHub themselves for side projects, which have helped them to nurture their abilities and understanding, and be an active member of the development community.

 

In short, there’s a fresh start ahead for 365Mapper in 2020, and we’re excited to have GitHub users along for the ride; we’re excited to see what their imagination and 365Mapper’s source code can do together!

 

And don’t worry if you’re still a 365Mapper user, our team are on hand to help ensure a smooth transition. If you haven’t already heard from us, be sure to get in touch.

A few people we've already done it for
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