fruux blog

Baïkal joins our open source projects

2016-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

For a long time Baïkal has been one of the most popular implementations of sabre/dav, one of our many open source projects and a core component of fruux. Baïkal fills one of the biggest gaps that out-of-the-box sabre/dav has: an easy to use installer and admin interface. It's the best choice if you're looking to host a light-weight CardDAV/CalDAV server yourself.

However, since a little while the Baïkal project has stagnated a bit and thus many users were on older versions of sabre/dav. To change this, we had a talk with the lead maintainer for Baïkal (Jérôme Schneider from Netgusto), and proposed to bring Baïkal under the 'sabre.io' umbrella of projects.

What this means in practice is that:

We're moving the existing website and documentation over from baikal-server.com to sabre.io.
We're now helping with support, and already closed over a hundred tickets.
We're taking over maintenance of Baikal 0.x, and already did the first few new releases.
Eventually we will release a 1.0 version of Baikal, unless Baikal 2 is ready first.

This blog post is based on Baïkal joins sabre.io over in our sabre.io blog, which you should read for all the details.

Don't forget to wish a Happy Birthday!

2015-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

A little while ago we've added a handy feature that sends you a daily email with your schedule every night, so you are already prepared for your day when you check your email in the morning.

Starting today, we'll also remind you of any birthdays of your contacts in your primary address book.

Below is the email that was waiting in my inbox this morning. Oh, that reminds me: Happy birthday, Willi! :-)

If you aren't using the daily schedule email yet, turn it on, configure your timezone and you'll get your first one tomorrow.

We hope you'll like it. :)

Daily email with your schedule

2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Always having your most important contacts, calendars and tasks with you and seamlessly syncing them with all of your devices is straight forward with fruux.

As our calendar webapp is getting better and better some of you don't even sync devices and work entirely with the webapp. This works great, but without syncing a device you're missing out on a great feature: constantly getting reminded of your schedule for the day. We're happy to report, that we've solved this problem.

Our new feature sends you a daily email with your schedule, so when you get up in the morning it's already waiting in your inbox (if you turn it on and configure your timezone).

Here's what's new:

Daily email with your schedule.
Delivered to your inbox every morning.
Automatically takes your timezone into account.

Go ahead and turn it on. We hope you'll like it. :)

We just released sabre/dav 3.0

2015-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

The fruux syncing system is fully based on open standards, and our core is also "open sourced". In a nutshell, this means we give it out for free to other developers, so they can take advantage of our innovations and in some cases contribute back to the community.

The name of this project is sabre/dav. This project is now primarily funded and developed here at fruux. The project has been active for nearly 8 years, and today got it's third major release.

For more information, head to the announcement on the sabre.io blog. If you'd like to know more about how your business can benefit from deploying sabre/dav, drop us a line!

We encrypt everything to keep your data safe

2015-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Making sure that your contacts, calendars and tasks are secure is our top priority, so we wanted to give you a brief overview of what we do to keep your data safe.

We are a german company and based in Münster. Germany is renowned for having one of the strictest data protection laws in the world. We believe in these laws and stick to them.

Our infrastructure -and so your data- is exclusively on servers in data centers within Germany and always encrypted, both in transit and at rest.

Privacy and Transparency

Our Privacy Policy is quickly summarized. In a nutshell: You own your data and we will never give a third-party access to your data without your prior consent.

We have never received any request for user data and we'd expect to challenge such an order (in Germany such an order would have to be an official court order) if it were served on us in the future.

Encryption of data in transit

All communications between you, your devices and our systems are transferred using the HTTPS protocol and encrypted at all times.

We exclusively use modern TLS protocols and constantly update our configuration to ensure strong ciphers. Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) prevents attackers from mass-decrypting logged connections. Even if a single message is compromised it cannot lead to the compromise of others. With HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) we also protect you from downgrade attacks.

These measures help us maintaining the best possible grade of A+ at the time of writing for the Qualys SSL Labs test for fruux.

Encryption at rest

Your data is not only encrypted when it is in transit, but also at rest. Whenever we store data for you, it's protected by our AES-256 encrypted storage.

Latest security practices

Besides just using modern encryption, we also implement the latest security practices into fruux, such as Content Security Policy (CSP). With CSP we're preventing so called cross-site scripting (XSS) and related attacks.

Keeping your data safe is a job that's never done

Hopefully this gave you a good overview of how we're keeping you safe. It goes without saying that this is a job that's never done. Security is not something we simply "add" to our product, it's a constant process we're working on all the time. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions. We're looking forward to hearing from you.

ec2dns 2.0 - DNS for EC2 instances

2015-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Back in 2012 we released the first version of ec2dns, a set of command line tools that makes it easy to display public hostnames of EC2 instances and ssh into them via their tag name.

EC2 instances have random hostname like ec9-99-99-99-99.compute-1.amazonaws.com. These hostnames are quite hard to remember - that's where our tool comes into play. All you have to do is to assign Name tags to your servers, e.g. appserver-1.

Previous versions of ec2dns provided wrapper commands like ec2ssh and ec2scp.

Example for the ec2ssh wrapper

$ ec2ssh appserver-1

To make interacting with EC2 instances even easier, we're going one step further with todays release of ec2dns 2.0, which finally justifies the dns part in the name ec2dns.

Version 2.0 has a built-in DNS server

The wrapper commands are still included, but with the built-in DNS server of ec2dns 2.0 working with EC2 instances is now even better - all you need to know is the Name tag of the instance and add .ec2 to it. Amongst various bugfixes and optimizations ec2dns 2.0 has also been migrated to aws/aws-sdk-php v2.

Some usage examples

ssh into an instance via its name tag

$ ssh appserver-1.ec2

copy a file from an ec2 instance onto your machine

$ scp ubuntu@appserver-1.ec2:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf .

Installing ec2dns

There are a few prerequisites, but aside from them setting up ec2dns is done with just one command.

$ composer global require "fruux/ec2dns=~2.0.0"

If you want to use the DNS feature, you'll just have to make sure that the ec2dns server is running on your system (we have instructions for OS X) and used to resolve anything with the .ec2 TLD.

ec2dns is on GitHub. Check the README.md file if you want to learn more or have a closer look at the installation and update instructions.

Open source at fruux

fruux is powered by a ton of open source software, but we also release a lot of open source software ourselves. ec2dns is really just a tiny example. With sabre/dav and our other sabre/* projects all of our core technology is open source, too and heavily used not just in our own product, but also powers sync features in great products from companies such as Atmail, Box and ownCloud.

We hope that ec2dns (or any of our other open source projects) will be useful for you. Perhaps we'll even see you as a contributor on GitHub soon. :-)

2Do 2.0 adds built-in fruux support

2015-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Our friends at 2Do just released, a brand new version of their powerful productivity app for the Mac.

2Do 2.0 is a major update. It now has built-in fruux support and an insane amount of other new features to make you more productive.

The app is a great choice for power users, has a beautiful user interface and is now ready for Yosemite.

You can purchase 2Do in the Mac App Store or read more on their website and check out the free trial version.

Fantastical 2 now with built-in fruux support

2015-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Our friends at Flexibits just released Fantastical 2, an all new version of their popular calendar application for the Mac.

Fantastical 2 has built-in fruux support, so now it's even easier to setup syncing. Just enter your username and password, and you are ready to go. We've also added Fantastical 2 to our setup wizard to guide you through the process.

Fantastical 2 is a great alternative calendar application for the Mac and this new version has an all-new design for OS X Yosemite.

Tasks are supported right in the app and the built-in today widget gives you convenient access to your schedule.

You can purchase Fantastical 2 in the Mac App Store, or read more on their website.

Syncing contacts and calendars with Outlook

2015-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

At fruux we're working hard on tearing down barriers that hinder your ability to use your contacts and calendars easily on all of your devices. Thanks to our commitment to open standards (such as CardDAV for contact and CalDAV for calendar synchronization) and an ever increasing number of companies joining us in supporting these standards it's already quite straight forward these days to keep everything up-to-date with many applications and devices.

But not everyone supports open standards yet

If you are using Microsoft Outlook on a PC and want to sync your contacts and calendars easily with e.g. a BlackBerry, an Android, an Apple device or even another PC running Outlook via CardDAV and CalDAV you are out of luck. Microsoft simply does not support these popular open standards (yet?).

fruux Outlook Connector to the rescue

But we have your back. We've just released our all new and free plugin for Microsoft Outlook. After a quick download and installation you'll just have to enter your username and password and off you go.

Our plugin keeps your Outlook contacts and calendars up-to-date with fruux and all other devices and apps that you are syncing with fruux. Every time you make a change in Outlook, it automatically syncs with your other devices and every time you make a change on any of your other devices, it syncs back to Outlook.

Plugin highlights:

Supports Outlook 2007, 2010 and 2013 on PCs.
Keeps your contacts up-to-date (full two-way sync via CardDAV).
Keeps your calendars up-to-date (full two-way sync via CalDAV).
Updates automatically.
Free for all fruux users.

If you are an Outlook user on a PC, you can download the fruux Outlook Connector right away and give it a try. We hope you'll like it! :)

Three new features in the calendar webapp

2015-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Since we released the first version of our calendar webapp a while ago, we've been busy listening to your feedback and working on your feature requests.

We've revamped our public calendars, made them embeddable, added a way to customize the start day of the week and and set your preferred view and time format.

Today we're making the calendar webapp even better and easier to use.

Here's what's new:

We've added a beautiful date picker.
It's now possible to configure alarms right in the webapp (so called VALARMs).
Creating new events is now as simple as a double click in the calendar.

Go ahead and give the calendar webapp a try. :)