We are pleased to announce the release of OrangeHRM 2.6, the latest stable release of our open source version. The key feature being the OrangeHRM performance module, many companies have been eagerly testing previous betas and giving valuable feedback which helped us build a solid module that will help many organizations solve a common problem of performance evaluation.
The release also incorporates many security enhancements and fixes. With this new version we hope to tap the doors of many companies who want to have a complete HR solution in one place and in one piece.
OrangeHRM has been continuously receiving lots of support from its community members around the world. Students from PUCIT & SERC, Age De Gong from Netherlands with the Dutch language pack, Titus Permadi from Indonesia with various training material and our latest contributors are Alexander Blaine from Brazil who has developed a Brazilian – Portuguese language pack while Rashid from Azerbajan with developed the Azeri language pack.
We have decided to reward these contributors for the interest and commitment towards open source products and OrangeHRM. We will reward them with selected OrangeHRM add-ons for their contributions.
Web-Based Software is software you use over the internet with a web browser. You don’t have to install any CDs, download any software, or worry about upgrades. If you use an online bank or web-based email program like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail then you’ve already used web-based software before. Likewise today we find many web-based HR applications.
Web-Based software is attracting many organizations around the world. Some reasons for this are the costs incurred in buying expensive software then investing more money on costly hardware and then on top of that buy upgrades recruit IT Staff for maintenance.
Advantages of Web-based Software
Security
With traditional software, employees save data on their laptops, USB drives, or portable hard drives. It’s not as safe as it sounds. Laptops are stolen, computers are rarely backed up properly, and it’s unlikely everyone’s machines are up to date with the latest security patches and updates. When you use our web-based software, your data is stored on secure, always-updated, backed-up daily enterprise-class servers in a state-of-the-art, highly-secure data center.
Centralized
A key advantage to web-based software is that all your data is centralized and accessible over the web from any computer at any time. You can’t leave something on the wrong computer since everything is stored in one place on the web. You can get to it from anywhere. Safe, secure, and password protected, of course.
Back-Ups
Data is backed up every day. Backups are stored in multiple locations for additional redundancy. You could say our backups have backups.
Updates
Unlike traditional software that requires you to download and install updates yourself, our products are updated automatically. Whenever you use our products you’re always using the latest and greatest version.
No Installation
You do not have to worry about downloading anything or installations. You can simply login through your browser to access your software.
No Compatibility Issues
Software used to only be available for certain platforms. There was Windows software, Mac software, etc. Web-based software works on any platform with a web browser and internet connection. Mac, Windows, Linux are all supported.
Access from Anywhere
When you use web-based software your office is everywhere. At work, at home, a hotel, at a client’s office, even on your mobile phone. You data is accessible anywhere with internet access.
About OrangeHRM Live
The world’s first open-source web-based HR Management application.
OrangeHRM Live gives you the combination of a feature rich cloud based HRMS and Open-Source model which gives you freedom and flexibility.
Our launch of OrangeHRM Live was such a hit that there were over 500+ visitors who stopped by to get more information about the product.
Another attraction was the Rule Based Engine that was developed for leave management, which lets companies easily configure OrangeHRM to implement the specific leave rules they follow.
OrangeHRM had a fruitful day on day 1 at the SHRM Conference and Exposition in San Diego, CA. There was lot of interest with over 200+ visitors stopping by during the day.
A leading Open Source blog ranked OrangeHRM as one of the top 25 projects on Sourceforge.net. Earlier in 2008 OrangeHRM was selected as the Project of the Month for December and was ranked the 5th Best Project for Enterprises in 2009 on Sourceforge.net.
OrangeHRM will continue to deliver high quality solutions for today’s HR Mangers.
OrangeHRM’s next stable released version 2.6 will be released soon.
The soccer world cup is scheduled to take place in South Africa from the 11th of June to the 11th of July. While in contact with James Abrahams a member of our community from Johannesburg South Africa we came to know OrangeHRM being used to recruit and manage the volunteers for the Fan Fests during FIFA 2010.
James was delighted to see a product of this nature, he said “Any spreadsheet or other dbase would have sufficed but OrangeHRM is neatly packaged (segmented like an orange).
It’s also very user-friendly and from an HR point of view, keeps the information safe like cells in the segments, as an orange should.
We are overjoyed to see OrangeHRM being used to assist an event so huge.
Achievements like this will help us drive closer and closer to becoming “The World’s Most Used HR System.”
2010 for OrangeHRM took off with the release of 2.6 and the performance module. Adding icing to the cake MySQL Co-Founder David Axmark and one of MySQL’s former EVP’s Larry Stefonic have shown their confidence in OrangeHRM by empowering OrangeHRM.
We are proud and immensely joyful, we welcome the two pioneers in the open source industry who can show us and guide OrangeHRM in its quest of becoming “The World’s Most Popular HR System”.
We hope to build market focus while continuously developing and enhancing OrangeHRM allowing us and the users to reach greater heights.
Many users have been requesting for this feature, as we always answer to calls of our esteemed community we have done the necessary template changes for add-ons to be plugged in to extract the following data into CSV’s and PDF’s;
Punch in/out
Attendance report
Leave list and summary
Applicant details
With this new version Attendance Reports of all employees can be viewed at once, which was not possible previously.
Yet another group of IT research developers have joined hands with OrangeHRM to assist us with some key development projects. These young talents are part of a project funded by the National ICT R&D known as “Integration of Open Source Software Projects in IT Education”.
Since the 2nd half of 2009 these researchers from the University of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan have been working on few projects that were assigned to them and upon the successful completion of these projects we gained more confidence and realized the potential of the team. This led us to let them work on a new feature being the Meeting Scheduler which is under development.
We are glad to work with these IT research developers and we welcome more developers from around the world to join hands with our community.
Aisha Khan, a Research Officer at the PUCIT said,
“Open source software provide students an opportunity to work with enterprise level software, examine their architecture and extend their functions; which polishes their skills and enhance their knowledge. Working with OrangeHRM has been a great experience. Project community is extremely active and they provided us complete guidance. OrangeHRM is following coding standards and Test Driven Development which is extremely good. Understanding OrangeHRM architecture enhanced our concepts. We got the opportunity to learn new PHP framework Symfony.”
Community feedback on bug fixes also helped us in improvement. Community wants contributors to follow a systematic way, as first we understood architecture and fixed bugs then moved to feature development. This really helped us and made things easier to work with.
