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Congrats on the new release! Since GitLab for Education was announced I've been trying to get our college signed up for it, but it's been difficult so I was ho

by orware 8y ago

Congrats on the new release! Since GitLab for Education was announced I've been trying to get our college signed up for it, but it's been difficult so I was hoping I might be able to share some GitLab for Education Requests: Working in a community college it's been really tricky to get the agreement signed for us to take advantage of this at all (that's more of an issue with the way we work in particular, but I just wanted to throw it out there that it would be nice if we could sign up for the licenses completely online without needing to wait and get an agreement signed because for example our president doesn't want to do an esignature so that means sending it over to their office for signature, waiting a long while, getting it back, and then finding out our deadline passed and haven't to try it all over again so if that process could be changed, or better yet removed, that would be great). Related to the GitLab for Education license limitations...I originally though the Education licensing would cover usage for our IT Department staff as well, but it definitely seems to be limited to just Faculty/Staff type usage which ends up being a bummer for us since now I can't promote it anymore internally with us a free option we can sign up for anymore and other ideas I was potentially thinking of (the Group Issue Boards seemed like it could potentially be a nice way to organize Kanban Boards across the college and make it so that staff from other areas outside of IT could make use of Kanban Boards too...we've been using Kanboard inside of IT for a few years now, but haven't made a strong push to have other departments use it). In terms of affordability, that would limit us to licensing GitLab primarily for IT stuff only + for 10 users that's already going to be a pretty big cost for our small college / IT department. Lastly, I know there's Wiki functionality and GitLab Pages already and that can be used for documentation to a degree, but is there any work towards building/including some sort of Confluence alternative into GitLab as well? Right now we'd like start using some sort of nice, comprehensive documentation option, but I'm not really sold on Confluence at the moment. Admittedly, right now with the info about us needing to license GitLab for our IT department staff as well being fairly new to me that's thrown the whole idea of using GitLab out the window (almost), but the lack of a Confluence option built-in to GitLab would be another potential blocker for us (I do like the idea of having everything all under one system if possible to simplify usage for us). tldr: If you can make edu licensing completely free (for staff too) and simple to use/signup for (without an agreement needing to be signed), plus add a Confluence alternative that would be awesome!

hitekker 8y ago
This comment is high quality customer feedback; it deserves a thoughtful consideration and response from Gitlab.
btasovac 8y ago
Thank you for the detailed feedback! We love to hear that we're doing something well, but also like to discuss if there is something that can be improved. > It would be nice if we could sign up for the licenses completely online without needing to wait and get an agreement signed That sounds reasonable, and it doesn't seem to be an issue only with your institution. We already have an issue for automating the application process for the educational license. [1] The proposed solution would resolve all concerns described here. > I originally though the Education licensing would cover usage for our IT Department staff as well The primary goal of this program is to help students catch up with the latest technology in software development as early as possible, and we think that we managed to do this with the current setup. However, we would love to discuss other options regarding this program's limitations. Please open an issue [2] - we would love to hear your suggestions. > Is there any work towards building/including some sort of Confluence alternative Can you please tell us more about what part of Confluence do you think is missing in GitLab? You can use this page as a reference - there are all stages of development that are covered by GitLab. [3] Thank you again on your feedback, it is greatly appreciated. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/education-program/general/issues/3 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/... [2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/education-program/general/issues/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/... [3] - https://about.gitlab.com/product/ https://about.gitlab.com/product/
- orware 8y ago
  Thanks for the reply, I'll look into putting in an official issue request for it in [2] you shared but just to add on a bit...on our end we're really not developer oriented at all (I've put up a VisualSVN server quite a few years back and then put up a Gogs server about 3 years ago) and I'm pretty much the only person that uses it. Our CS offerings are pretty minimal so even though I would love to see usage expanded there as well (teaching/using Git for instruction) the reality is it would be lucky if 50 students made use of Git during a given schoolyear since the offerings are that limited right now (and we don't generally get a lot of signups for those classes). It'd be awesome to expand our program and also create some sort of tie-in with Silicon Valley companies somehow (we're a community college in Southern California in a rural community so job opportunities for tech locally are really slim...so unless we built some sort of partnership for remote opportunities where people could stay local and have a good remote job people basically have to leave to other communities in different parts of the state to get work). So going back to the staff side...I'm just trying to get our own IT staff onboard with using Git and hopefully start integrating more DevOps type things into our workflow, but it's difficult when you don't have the right tools available (or there's a pretty big cost to them). For example, I love the idea of us starting to create private containers but we need a container registry to do that and that's something GitLab could help us out with. The other main thing is the issue boards which I think we'd be able to make good use out of as well, but can't really test out those ideas at the present moment easily. For Confluence, I don't have a ton of experience with it...the main thing is that at least one of the other community colleges that's a bit of a tech leader in the state is using it for their documentation stuff and the state's CCC Tech Center is using it too so that makes folks think it's the best solution to try out. To be honest right now though we're not doing a great job on documentation currently, even though we have a lot of other "low-hanging fruit" type options to be able to try out and just document things currently if we really wanted to do so (so what I'm saying here is that I don't think getting/implementing Confluence would actually solve our documentation issues here...but it would be nice if GitLab had a piece that you could point at as equivalent to Confluence that way people could be more comfortable with using it as a whole solution, rather than looking at that one capability as "missing" and discarding the entire solution because of it). A response shared by the other college using it mentioned the following use cases that they used Confluence for: - Team Project Sites District-wide (new and ongoing software implementations) - “Bookshelf” Searchable district-wide software documentation library (Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.) - Technology “Knowledge Base” – district-wide searchable problem/resolution, FAQ - District IT Policies and Documentation - Development Team Private Documentation (Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.) - Operations IT Team Private Documentation - And more! In terms of web application development, I'm the only staff member really doing that currently...pretty much all the rest of our "development" work consists of our analysts writing database queries, with the occasional database view/procedure being written, but that's the team that I'd like to have to start using version control a bit. Our Ops side of the house still needs a lot of work to get into the "DevOps" mindset, and I've been limited in the stuff that I can try out and experiment with as well (e.g. I've wanted to experiment more with Docker, but since we're a Hyper-V shop primarily understanding Microsoft's support of Docker has taken some time...plus moving into production is another stage, etc. and I basically have to sort out those new approaches on my own).

by orware 8y ago

hitekker 8y ago

This comment is high quality customer feedback; it deserves a thoughtful consideration and response from Gitlab.

btasovac 8y ago

Thank you for the detailed feedback! We love to hear that we're doing something well, but also like to discuss if there is something that can be improved. > It would be nice if we could sign up for the licenses completely online without needing to wait and get an agreement signed That sounds reasonable, and it doesn't seem to be an issue only with your institution. We already have an issue for automating the application process for the educational license. [1] The proposed solution would resolve all concerns described here. > I originally though the Education licensing would cover usage for our IT Department staff as well The primary goal of this program is to help students catch up with the latest technology in software development as early as possible, and we think that we managed to do this with the current setup. However, we would love to discuss other options regarding this program's limitations. Please open an issue [2] - we would love to hear your suggestions. > Is there any work towards building/including some sort of Confluence alternative Can you please tell us more about what part of Confluence do you think is missing in GitLab? You can use this page as a reference - there are all stages of development that are covered by GitLab. [3] Thank you again on your feedback, it is greatly appreciated. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/education-program/general/issues/3 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/... [2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/education-program/general/issues/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/... [3] - https://about.gitlab.com/product/ https://about.gitlab.com/product/

orware 8y ago
Thanks for the reply, I'll look into putting in an official issue request for it in [2] you shared but just to add on a bit...on our end we're really not developer oriented at all (I've put up a VisualSVN server quite a few years back and then put up a Gogs server about 3 years ago) and I'm pretty much the only person that uses it. Our CS offerings are pretty minimal so even though I would love to see usage expanded there as well (teaching/using Git for instruction) the reality is it would be lucky if 50 students made use of Git during a given schoolyear since the offerings are that limited right now (and we don't generally get a lot of signups for those classes). It'd be awesome to expand our program and also create some sort of tie-in with Silicon Valley companies somehow (we're a community college in Southern California in a rural community so job opportunities for tech locally are really slim...so unless we built some sort of partnership for remote opportunities where people could stay local and have a good remote job people basically have to leave to other communities in different parts of the state to get work). So going back to the staff side...I'm just trying to get our own IT staff onboard with using Git and hopefully start integrating more DevOps type things into our workflow, but it's difficult when you don't have the right tools available (or there's a pretty big cost to them). For example, I love the idea of us starting to create private containers but we need a container registry to do that and that's something GitLab could help us out with. The other main thing is the issue boards which I think we'd be able to make good use out of as well, but can't really test out those ideas at the present moment easily. For Confluence, I don't have a ton of experience with it...the main thing is that at least one of the other community colleges that's a bit of a tech leader in the state is using it for their documentation stuff and the state's CCC Tech Center is using it too so that makes folks think it's the best solution to try out. To be honest right now though we're not doing a great job on documentation currently, even though we have a lot of other "low-hanging fruit" type options to be able to try out and just document things currently if we really wanted to do so (so what I'm saying here is that I don't think getting/implementing Confluence would actually solve our documentation issues here...but it would be nice if GitLab had a piece that you could point at as equivalent to Confluence that way people could be more comfortable with using it as a whole solution, rather than looking at that one capability as "missing" and discarding the entire solution because of it). A response shared by the other college using it mentioned the following use cases that they used Confluence for: - Team Project Sites District-wide (new and ongoing software implementations) - “Bookshelf” Searchable district-wide software documentation library (Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.) - Technology “Knowledge Base” – district-wide searchable problem/resolution, FAQ - District IT Policies and Documentation - Development Team Private Documentation (Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.) - Operations IT Team Private Documentation - And more! In terms of web application development, I'm the only staff member really doing that currently...pretty much all the rest of our "development" work consists of our analysts writing database queries, with the occasional database view/procedure being written, but that's the team that I'd like to have to start using version control a bit. Our Ops side of the house still needs a lot of work to get into the "DevOps" mindset, and I've been limited in the stuff that I can try out and experiment with as well (e.g. I've wanted to experiment more with Docker, but since we're a Hyper-V shop primarily understanding Microsoft's support of Docker has taken some time...plus moving into production is another stage, etc. and I basically have to sort out those new approaches on my own).