 |
Celebrating 10 Years of OLEFA: 2000-2010
Ten years ago, in late 2000, I started a software project called OLEFA - today the software has become one of the most popular software projects ever from Luxembourg, used in 36 cities with more than 10.000 users, 60.000 published pages and over 160.000 books managed in about 100 school and public libraries. So I think it's worth celebrating the project's 10th birthday by at least publishing a dedicated page about it here ;-)
-- Jos Kirps - October 2010
A (very) short history of OLEFA
10 years ago, in late 2000, I started working on a content management system (CMS) as I needed a tool to manage some of the websites I worked on. I called it OLEFA and soon after I started using it on various sites. The very first release already included the CMS, the user logic and a basic implementation of the OLEFAscript language.
Shortly after, I began adding features to make it usable in educational environments. I added the wiki, the library management system and several other features, and in 2001 I redesigned the website of the elementary schools of Roeser (roeserschool.lu) using the new technology. Roeserschool was the first educational website in Luxembourg offering wiki (collaborative writing) and online library management features.
OLEFA became a quite successful tool in our school and shortly after Pino Fiermonte asked me to join him and Frank Trierweiler to form a new company called EducDesign. The company officially opened it's doors in September 2002 and I continued to develop the software.
During my time at EducDesign (2002-2008) I designed a large number of great tools for the education market - including the webbook, the storyboard, a fully automated fileserver, the OLEFAdesk web desktop, the AFELO image compression tool, the online sound recorder and many more. Today these tools are being used in about 80 schools in Luxembourg.
In 2008 I left the company as I was heading into a completely different direction and wanted to focus on Open source software, web 2.0, community platforms and social networks.
Today I'm no longer involved in the development of OLEFA and I'm no longer affiliated with the EducDesign company. Since 2008 I'm working as a teacher at the elementary schools in Ehlerange and during my free time I'm working on various Open Source projects.
EducDesign continues to maintain and distribute the software - the number of schools using OLEFA is still growing, but the market is now quite saturated and the company never managed to make OLEFA popular internationally or in other markets.
Personally I think the future of the education market belongs to Open Source software projects and open architectures, and closed source products by small companies (like OLEFA/EducDesign) will always remain niche products, even if they become very popular in a closed local market.
So what's the final word here? Well, let's say that I'm quite happy that OLEFA is still around after all these years, I never expected this to become so successful when I started coding it 10 years ago. OLEFA has definately changed the way computers are used in schools in our country, and I'm really happy that I had the luck to be part of this small revolution. I suppose that OLEFA will be around for at least a few years more, and maybe we'll even celebrate a 20th birthday in 2020 ;-)
What's next?
If you'd like to learn more about OLEFA than check out this site and come back from time to time, as I'll add more information from time to time (although I don't intend to spend too much time on this).
I'm no longer using OLEFA - if you'd like to see one of the projects I'm currently working on then you may want to take a look at CorneliOS, which is a web OS and application framework:
http://www.cornelios.org
|  OLEFA fact sheet (2005)
 OLEFA 1.4 login screen (2004)
 OLEFA BETA database manager (2001) |
(c)2009-2012 Jos Kirps | This website is not related to EducDesign s.a. | Powered by CorneliOS |
