A common reader comment about my post on OutSystems’ Agile Platform was concern over the licensing/pricing model. OutSystems has been reading the online feedback, and it has introduced a new, free version of the Agile Platform called the Community Edition. This edition is a feature complete version of the platform with a few usage restrictions: It is limited to 75,000 “feature points” and a total of five concurrent users. While that sounds fairly tight, keep in mind that, if your application is getting enough traffic to have five concurrent users, you’re probably seeing fairly decent traffic numbers.

OutSystems is also putting into place a new subscription pricing model and provides a pricing calculator online to make it easier to understand.

Along with this announcement, OutSystems is providing a set of new tutorial videos to show new developers how to start using the Agile Platform. I applaud this move. From my tests, the biggest block in using the Agile Platform was that it was just a conceptual shift; I could not just fire it up, start playing around, and see results like I could with many IDEs. These new tutorials are going to be linked to directly from the start page of the Community Edition, making it easy for new developers to get up and running as quickly as possible.

J.Ja

Disclosure of Justin’s industry affiliations: Justin James has a working arrangement with Microsoft to write an article for MSDN Magazine. He also has a contract with Spiceworks to write product buying guides.

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