Schlomo Schapiro

(Joint publishing with my work blog at tkt.dev ) Do you use SaaS Tools? I'd be surprised if not. How many of your SaaS tools provide you an automated full backup of your own data? Probably few to none. Do you want to have a backup or export of your own data? Yes, probably you do (and I want to have that for sure!). In the past, the conversation was over at this point. The SaaS vendor in question doesn't provide an automated backup or export for our data, and that is it. The reason for our capitulation in face of the sad facts is that creating a backup tool for every single SaaS vendor we use was simply way too expensive and not feasible. Today, with the friendly help of LLMs and vibe coding, the conversation is not over and we can simply help ourselves. Many SaaS offerings do have APIs and grant low-level access to our data, they just didn't bother to implement a backup and restore function. For LLMs, create a tool to download all data via ...

What is the most simple way for letting people sign themselves up to a Google Calendar event? Just a few clicks with my new Google Forms Event Sign-Up add-on : 📆 Create an event in Google Calendar 🗒️ Create a new Google Form that collects email addresses 🔗 Connect the Google Form to the event in the calendar via the Event Sign-Up add-on 📢 Publish 🤵 Every respondent of the Google Form will be added as a participant and receive a calendar invite to the event ✅ Self-service event sign-up The add-on adds a configuration dialogue to Google Forms that let's you select a calendar and event to connect to this form: A quick demo of how to use it: Why Yet Another Tool? First of all, I like creating tools! Also, while there are other options available, they all lack 2 main requirements for me: Minimal permissions on my data to limit the risk of exploitation For free and preferably Open Source  After carefully ...

Last week, I attended the Univention Summit 2025 in Bremen , and it was a very pleasant surprise. I didn’t expect much, and it turned out to be an event with about 750 participants and a lot of interesting talks and vendors to meet. In the shadow of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace , there is a vibrant and active community of companies, government agencies and schools who use OX App Suite , Nextcloud , Opentalk , Samba and even Linux Desktops, to name just a few. Univention’s own UCS ( Univention Corporate Serve r) also serves as the core of the internet IT setup for many organizations who don’t want to run a Microsoft Active Directory , or it complements it with additional functionality. One of the big news items that everybody talked about was of course the foundation of Opencloud , a spin-off based on Owncloud , by Peer Heinlein . I can only hope that this will ensure the continued success of Open Source file sharing and collaboration solutions. Let me share some personal hig...

Triggered by a provocative announcement for their The Cuckoo in the Tendering Process: When the vendor loses to itself panel discussion by Peer Heinlein  ( Heinlein Support ) and Johannes Loxen  ( Sernet ) on LinkedIn, I attended the 10th Bitkom Open Source Forum  in Erfurt . This free one-day conference on open source in a business context has become a highly informative event - that is well worth attending. This year's motto of  The future of open source - fair, regulated, intelligent was exactly what I needed at the moment, and I spent the whole day in the Open Source - regulated  track. Cockoo or What Is My Business Model? The panel discussion was about the challenges Peer faces in marketing OpenTalk , the open source videoconferencing software that Heinlein Support has developed over the last few years. Competitors seem to be offering OpenTalk hosting packages in public tenders, even though they don't contribute to the code or fix bugs. In the end, Peer c...

Software rules the world, and everybody is its subject. But you can be a ruler, too - if you like  I keep telling my family. Here is a little example where I try to rule my secondary printer by automating the tedious task of rotating and scaling content to print. My Little Zebra Printer My secondary printer (shown here on the shelf in my home office) is a little miracle device: It is a thermal transfer receipt printer , that prints on a roll of continuous paper that is 10cm (4in) wide. Specifically a Zebra GX420d . You can get such a used printers relatively cheap. This is exactly a printer like you know from your local supermarket. And it is a super useful tool to have at home, as many print jobs don't require a full A4 page and don't need to be printed on fancy bright white paper with ever-lasting toner. Most common print jobs are shipping labels (no need to cut them to size), small shopping lists (fits in a pocket), little notes to stick into a book (e.g. reading order for ...

Attending the 2024 Foss Backstage was again a real pleasure, my last one was in 2022 . I enjoyed participating in a conference in Berlin, in person and about Open Source. The only thing I don't understand is, why not more people come to it, there where only about 200 attendees on-site and another 60 online. Corporate Open Source Open Source in the business and as a serious business practice is clearly growing up. Most larger companies who sent representatives to this conference already have some sort of Open Source governance framework in place. It was also a nice meeting of many old acquaintances from the German corporate Open Source community. Has Open Source outgrown the OSPO   (video) , since SUN defined the role 25 years ago? - asks  Per Ploug Krogslund  who established Open Source Program Office (OSPO) teams at Zalando and Spotify. By my own observation it clearly has not outgrown it: Outside this Open Source conference, most companies I...

Attending the FOSS Backstage 2022 conference on "Community, Management & Compliance In Open Source Development" was a real highlight for me: A conference About Open Source In Berlin In person! I fondly remember the first edition in 2018 ( YouTube Archive , Flickr Photo Archive ) which actually helped with my Open Source work at DB Systel . Given the ongoing COVID pandemic, the conference was very small, with only about 60 people attending in person and 200 additional remote participants. That, and the conference location in a co-working space, gave the event a very intimate and personal feeling. More like a true community meet-up than a polished commercial event. The 2022 edition put the major focus on major Open Source related initiatives and community topics, but it didn't talk much about the practical sides of Open Source compliance, e.g. the OpenChain Project . I spoke with the organisers about that, and they indicated that future F...