Jaspersoft's developer community goes social

Open source business intelligence software vendor Jaspersoft rolled out a new set of social features this week on JasperForge, its community project development Web site. The newly-added options give developers additional ways to network, exchange ideas, and create projects more quickly. Companies that rely on community involvement should take note because the current trend of using social tools to enhance collaboration won't be going away anytime soon.

The new features at JasperForge include an updated bug tracker, improvements to the wiki and blog, better site-wide RSS support, and the addition of Google Gadgets. The previous iteration of JasperForge was no slouch, either. The site already had a wide variety of collaborative development tools like version control, automated project monitoring, and a repository of open source business intelligence software. These new social tools are just icing on the cake.

Brian Gentile, president and CEO of Jaspersoft, anticipates the new features will help developers get things done more efficiently, but in less time. Despite the fact that the open source community helped write the book on collaboration, Gentile says what worked in development envirionments in the past, won't necessarily work today.

"Open source software communities don’t look like they did five short years ago. Since open source started being widely adopted, new types of community contributors have gotten involved in defining features and requirements," writes Gentile.

Gentile makes a great point. Open source software teams frequently rely on IRC and chat rooms to collaborate on projects and, though the method has a certain charm, it's not an option that appeals to all developers. There's also the challenge of keeping team members from 10 different time zones all on the same page. JasperForge's new features will help address several different issues facing today's open source project teams. It's good to see developer communities keep up with the times.