1. Tell the story of Expresso, when development started and what criteria led you to choose E-groupware as the base system for Expresso.

Cláudio Dutra: Before answering your question directly, I believe that is important to describe the scenario of when we took this direction at Celepar. During gubernatorial elections for Paraná State in 2002, the candidate Roberto Requião declared that in his government program, he would give priority to open source in government IT solutions. Roberto Requião won the elections and invited Marcos Mazoni, who was president of Procergs (the state IT company from Rio Grande Do Sul) and who also led a very successful experience using free software in that state. When Mazoni arrived at Celepar, he immediately proposed the adoption of a solution for email, calendaring and contact list developed by Procergs, called Direto. The State, at that moment, was using a solution from IBM Lotus Notes, which served only 10 thousand state employees (various departments had selected various other solutions). Mazoni’s proposal to use Direto ran into problems when the organization which created it, Procergs, decided to use a proprietary license and sell it to other parts of the government. In response to this, the free software community in Brazil discussed the development of a “Direto Livre” (Free Direto). However, the developers working at Celepar disagreed with this proposal. Instead, they proposed that Celepar should adopt a solution from the free software community (instead of Direto) with the clear goal of eliminating the possibility that the government could ever close the software. And this is the story of how the directors decided to go with the proposal created by the actual developers at Celepar and, today, this software is a success.

Pedro Luiz Viesser: The E-groupware choice was made after a comparative analysis with other existing solutions in the free software community. We considered some of the aspects in E-groupware that others didn’t offer and were essential to the state government’s requirements. The solution had to have the following characteristics:

• High Scalability
• Low Cost
• Independence from the supplier
• Use of default/standard protocols
• Independence for the client platform
• Independence for the server; cross-platformability
• Mobility for users

The development of Expresso started, effectively, in April of 2004 and immediate actions had to be taken: finishing the translation to Brazilian Portuguese, corrections of many critical problems (bugs), construction of a customized layout for the system and implementation of required features that didn’t exist (e.g., building of a General Contact List of all users, diverging from the normal concept of a web mail service, where the user only has a Personal Contact List). Subsequently, Celepar developed a new module for the mail service, the Expresso Mail, using AJAX, since the modules offered by E-Groupware were limited and didn’t have features that our users were already accustomed to from other tools.

2. What was the process, the most important issues raised during the discussions inside the Government, to decide to expand the use of Expresso to other institutions inside the government and at the same time opening your changes up to the free software community?

Cláudio Dutra: Like I said in the answer above, the Governor very clearly mandated that we would use free software. We needed a enterprise solution that would work for the majority of our employees. We did have big problems with both development and deployment, but we had these problems before and overcome them. The great argument used by the government was the possibility of us having complete knowledge of the software because we had the source code and problems could be fixed by the engineers from our company. The other argument was cost. To give an idea of the scale, if we implemented the proprietary solution the state had been using, we would spend around 30 million reais (roughly $15 million USD).

3. What were the most significant contributions made by Celepar (which modules)? Were there are other significant contributions that came from the community outside the government? Or other government institutions?

Cláudio Dutra: At the beginning the development was done by the employees of Celepar but nowadays there is a community that we built for Expresso and we identify what each one will develop, the deadlines, etc…

Pedro Luiz Viesser: The project Expresso Livre groups together, in general, modules that were developed completely by Celepar. Those are: Expresso Mail, Expresso Admin, Instant Messenger and General Bookmark of Addresses. And modules like Internal Newsletters, Work-flow, Administrator and Agenda are originally from E-Groupware, but on those it was necessary to edit, customize and adapt some things. In November of 2006, we created the Expresso Livre Community which, today, has more than 700 users subscribed, a great part of those users are using the project inside of big institutions from several regions of the country. Celepar is the coordinator of the community and manages several types of collaboration. We reply to questions from the Discussion Forums, we handle request for documentation/how-to’s and new modules. Recently, we released ExpressoMail-Mobile, which allows access to Expresso through mobile devices (cell phone). Those collaborations come from the various government institutions as well as private companies who are using the solution and support free software.

4. Which government institutions are using the Expresso these days? Are there private companies and / or organized groups from civil society who use Express? Is there any estimate of the number of government users?

Cláudio Dutra: At the Paraná Government we have around 110 thousand mail boxes.

Pedro Luiz Viesser: Some Companies and Institutions we know that are using Expresso:

• Government of Paraná (Celepar)
• Itaipu Binacional
• DataPREV - IT State Company for the Welfare
• SERPRO - IT State Company for Finance
• Agetis - IT Agency for the State of Sergipe
• Propepa – IT State Company from Pará
• Propepi – IT State Company from Piauí
• Prodeb - IT State Company from Bahia
• Prodam – IT State Company from Amazonas
• Codin – IT Agency from the Rio Grande do Norte State
• IT Agency from the Pernambuco State
• Quinto CTA, Pernambuco Army
• Primeiro CTA, Porto Alegre Army
• ICMBIO (Chico Mendes Institute)
• PGFN (Attorney General for National Finance)
• Ministério Integração (Integration Ministry)
• Ministério Fazenda (Treasure Ministry)
• Cindacta 2 Curitiba-PR
• Camara Municipal de Curitiba-PR (Town Hall of Curitiba)
• Sanepar Presidency of the Republic

We also know that is a country from Africa who are using Expresso: Sao Tome and Principe.

5. What was used in the government before Expresso?

Cláudio Dutra: The Lotus/Notes - a proprietary solution and others, like Direto from Procergs.

6. With several countries from Latin America adopting free software, are there plans to expand the use/community of Expresso to those governments who are starting the migrating process? Is there translations of Expresso to Spanish? And/or English?

Cláudio Dutra: There is the will, but no plans yet. The people from PTI (Technological Complex of Itaipu) have already translated it to Spanish.

Pedro Luiz Viesser: As Cláudio has mentioned, Itaipu Binacional use Expresso in two languages: Portuguese and Spanish. The translation to Spanish was done by the people from PTI. For English, we don’t have any case of usage. However, as default, the developers created the phrases keys always internationalized to English. The site expressolivre.org has support multi-language and is available in English as well. The Expresso community are waiting for this collaboration from the volunteers that could make the translation to English. Without doubts, to make it available in English would leverage the project in an international aspect.

8. Are there Expresso packages on GNU/Linux distributions repositories? If so what distributions?

Pedro Luiz Viesser: Unfortunately, we still haven’t had time to implement a package for the distributions’ repositories. What we recommend is that Expresso should be installed in a Debian distribution, although we have knowledge that has already been installed in others also: Red Hat, Suse, Slackware, Ubuntu. It is part of our plans to create a package to be added to the Debian distribution, but still no forecast for completion.

9. Is it possible for people from outside Brazil to collaborate with the Expresso community? Are there any language barriers?

Cláudio Dutra: Of course they can, there are no barriers. Expresso is an enterprise solution and is free and therefore whoever has interest in helping with the development can do it. What we ask is that this contribution is made through the Expresso community, www.expressolivre.org.

Pedro Luiz Viesser: The multi-language support in the site of the community exists with the goal to give more visibility outside of Brazil to the project.