Ability to share eSpaces among developers without requiring IPP, uploading to Forge or an Enterprise license

Hi Curt,

In the olden days, we had a community version of the outsystems platform (still got it, for legacy reasons). The main thing people pointed out about this version was that it was very limited in terms of SU's. The personal environment has no SU limitation and you don't spend a dime hosting it. Please note that this version was also a single-developer environment, not allowing you to have more than one developer in your Community.

The tradeoff for giving unlimited SU's in a free offer was that in order to use what you built there you'd need to either:

1) buy an enterprise subscription
2) share it with everyone, via the Forge

In the current encarnation of the personal environment, I don't believe there is anything stopping you from creating a new community account, provisioning a personal environment for it and sharing the login and password with your potencial developers. So, it's not like it's impossible to have multiple people developing on the same application on the personal environment at this time.

Please note that allowing sharing the applications (only) via Forge has a very obvious agenda to foster the sharing of what people are doing in their OutSystems Platform. Anything allowing people to circumvent this, will hinder this objective.

Having said this, I understand when you say you might want to develop something, with more than one user (and know who's doing what). The major reasons for not sharing via Forge that you enumerated are comercial (you want to make money off of that), so my 2 cents for this would be to apply the micro-transactions principle to these kind of operations on the personal environment.

For example, imagine there is a fee of €20 for moving a solution between personal environemnts using IPP, or €5 for a module/extension. Would this be an acceptable solution for the problem you raised?

Micro transactions could then be applied in other ways. For example, charging 10€ / month for an additional developer on your personal, 30€/month for a second environment for production, etc.

I'm not in anyway saying that OutSystems will move in this direction, I'm simply sharing my opinion on a potential solution that would benefit both parties involved.

Best regards,
Ricardo Silva

I'm going to create a new PE account and give the credentials to the other developer.  That solves my immediate need except for recreating the modules I started on in the new environment.  Not a big deal.

I don't think all those little charges are the way I would approach it.  I would try and come up with logical price points with significant features for each level between the free PE version (which I love - a great decision!) and the full enterprise version. 

If I had more time I'd provide some concrete examples of these price points.  If I get some time I'll revisit this thread with some ideas.

Thanks so much for the helpful response!

Hi Ricardo,

Picking up on this thread, I was trying out the limitation of the IPP on the Personal Edition, and come up with a scenario I was not expecting.

I made a simple eSpace in a PE, and tried to IPP to an Enterprise 600.

I've got back an email stating that the IPP could not be granted because "... the destination Activation Code is associated with a Personal Edition Infrastructure."

I would like to know if we can in fact publish "sell" our work to an existing Enterprise Edition client, or if only on the upgrade to a new client licence the code can be upgraded.

Thank you in advance for your comments.

Kind regards,

Nuno Cavalheira Antunes