Our Tools Suite Project

openVISION's Tool Suite projects' sole purpose is to develop and offer to the Open Source community a suite of easy to use, informative and accurate tools or utilities enhancing the end-user experience and promoting confidence in the use of selected Open Source applications within the personal and professional internet space.

The openVISION name is a reflection of our enduring commitment to providing world-class and community accepted robust, functional and versatile software tools that assist in furthering the Open Source cause, whilst building confidence in the deployment of our supported applications within both the commercial and community internet services arena's.

Projects, names and some images are either Trade Marks and/or Copyright their respective owners.

The Projects' History

The "Tools Suite" project was officially opened in January of 2007 with the initial Beta release of the Joomla! Tools Suite application. A need was seen to assist new and inexperienced end-users of the Joomla! Open Source Content Management System with the tasks of configuring and securing their installations in a more user friendly manner. The Tools Suite aimed to provide a very rudamentary audit function that could then test for known and common misconfigurations or potential security issues, whilst offering simple to follow advice and instructions to it users that may need additional assistance.

Tools Suite was conceived by "RussW" one of the security and Installation forum volunteers after seeing many of the same questions and queries being raised by new users or those existing users who were the unfortunate recipients of the unwanted attention of site exploits and defacements.The Joomla! communty rose to the challenge offering tremendous support, and a huge array of further development asistance, testing, translations and feature requests.  The Joomla! Project themsleves then also offered space on the JoomlaCode SVN and Project Management server as the new development home for the Tools Suite, an ever growing and improving project was born.

Ongoing Project Growth

During the following year, Tools Suite grew in capability, with improved testing and advice, enhancing the platform and environment coverage of the installation base. The Joomla! Open Source Content Management System, being the initial development platform, became the core and predominant supported application, however at the request of several other project community members, sub-projects became active to include other Open Source applications such as the Mambo Content Management System, Drupal Content Management System and Wordpress Web Log applications.

To ensure the useability and effectiveness of the Tools Suites, several versions were developed including standalone (application independant) and embedded (application modules/extensions) releases, this architecture allowed for Pre~Installation assurance testing, Post~Installation confidence testing and ongoing montioring methods of using the Tools Suites. The Tools Suites have now extended their reach with a variety of other equivalent and related tools and utilities, including embedded modules or extensions that install within the supported application to provide ongoing information and advice through to the "Forum Post Assistant" enabling end-users to gather relevant and useful system and application diagnostic information, preformatted for use within a support forum post.

The Projects' Future

The Tools Suite project had traditionally been funded purely by it creator, Russell Winter. In March 2008, Russ secured the ongoing sponsorship and support of the Sedona Group. The Sedona Group is an IT consulting group based in Melbourne Australia, specialising in new and emerging information storage and security technologies such as Stoage Area Networking, Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Infiniband.

Russ is the Principal Consultant within the Emerging Technologies division tasked with the development and proving of conceptual and architectural offerings on behalf of many of the top manufactuers and end-users working with today's leading edge storage and security products.

The partnership with the Sedona Group ensures the ongoing development and availability of the Open Source Tools Suite applications to the community at large, with the ongoing addition of new options, features and premium services. 

Select the following links for further information regarding Russell Winter and the Sedona Group.