You are a fantastic company!
We are a fantastic company....

In 2021, LINAGORA remains one of the companies with the greatest capacity to move the lines, influence and participate visibly in the various transformations accelerated over the last 18 months by the COVID-19 health crisis.

For some, the back-to-school season may already seem a long way off: for my part, I was lucky enough to be back with the other members of the COMEX for a back-to-school seminar that smacked of a physical reunion, full mobilization and a strong desire to meet the challenges ahead. Needless to say, it was the perfect way to give myself a boost after the summer break, so that I could start the end of the year rested, serene and motivated as never before.

Moreover, business is also on the up, as shown by our figures for August and September. This also confirms that the decisions taken since the start of the crisis have been the right ones, such as continuing to invest and not "slapping LINAGORA's muscle". We've never stopped investing in your skills and our processes, and we're continuing to recruit. The complementary nature of LINAGORA's different activities has once again been an asset during this troubled period...

We can be proud of our consistency, our vision and our resilience!

Among the decisions taken, there was telecommuting: we are and remain a company that very much encourages telecommuting, with a hybrid mode proposal that is the one that is becoming the norm just about everywhere among our customers too. As the advert says, "you can argue about anything but numbers": of the company's 165 employees, only 35 are concerned by a return to site until the end of the year!.

In fact, on returning from summer vacation, I (we) felt the need to recreate an operational collective with a view to mobilizing all our forces when it comes to the success of the last four months of 2021. So, with Alexandre, we're back on site full-time, and we've asked the members of the COMEX, the sales team and our support teams to come back on site with us. I'd like to thank each and every one of them for their understanding and exemplarity in carrying out this decision.

In fact, we're already seeing the positive effects, and beyond the day-to-day efficiency, we're once again sharing moments of conviviality that we've clearly missed over the last 18 months...

One of this year's challenges is to retain our talent and recruit new staff to ensure the company's development.

No less than 30 positions are currently available within the company. I've made an initial LinkedIN post (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mmaudet_bonjour-cher-réseau-en-cette-rentrée-on-activity-6844190521854873600-2ayp) to launch our year-end recruitment campaign. Details of the positions will be gradually announced over the coming days.

The "war" for talent is starting up again: I expect you to get more involved to help us grow and recruit the best experts in the field. How? At the very least, you can relay our messages in your own networks, get in touch with your school and organize a meeting (talk to a class, hackathon, job forum, etc.), be active and bold in the communities by inviting your friends and fellow contributors to apply with us...Don't forget that we have a generous co-optation scheme and in the LINAGORA family spirit, it's still fun to imagine working on a daily basis with your buddies or more or less distant acquaintances. We're open to all applications, whether French or international. However, we are looking for expertise: a minimum of 3 years' experience for developers and preferably 5 years' actual experience for Ops (requirements demanded by our customers). And if you don't feel like taking the first step, don't hesitate to send me the contact details of the people you'd like to work with, and we'll make sure they join us as soon as we have the right skills.

On the subject of talent retention, and aware that the recruitment market is very active for everyone, we have decided to speed up the Annual Appraisal Interview (AEA) process.

Indeed, our ambition this year is to further shorten lead times and to ensure that changes in your situation are communicated to you in the second half of January with application of your new conditions on January 1, 2022. Thus, our schedule is as follows:

• framing of the overall exercise and assessment of potential increases by General Management and the CFO by October 15 ;
• communication of framework elements to managers between October 15th and November 1st ;
• your interviews with your managers should take place in November;
• feedback from your interviews to the DG in the 1st half of December;
• final decisions and arbitrations will be communicated to managers at the beginning of January, so that they can pass them on to you before the end of January 2022.

Finally, a few words about internal IT and SaaS services in general. With the arrival of Cyrille and Amaury, my objective is threefold:

• Leaving the world of craftsmanship behind to adopt a more industrial model, which is essential if we are to pass the ISO 27001 and Health Data Hosting (HDS) certifications that our customers are increasingly demanding ;
• constitute a single skills center bringing together all our Ops teams (internal information, SRE, operation of sites such as l'Humanité) in France, Vietnam and Quebec, in order to best structure their activity and, above all, centrally manage the priorities of our operations work or implementation of our platforms ;
• Finally, in the very short term, stabilize our core IS by getting rid of the ZeroShell weak link which is the cause of 99% of our service interruptions.

Cyrille is rapidly settling in, and we'll be in a position to detail an action plan by mid-October overall. In the meantime, he has launched a number of redesign, version upgrade and migration projects which should rapidly bring us greater serenity.

As for the rest, you'll see from the rest of this article that many of our decisions have paid off, allowing us to look forward to the end of the COVID-19 crisis in the best possible light.

The LINAGORA project

Before going into more detail about the operations, I'd like to come back to Notre Projet.

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From the outset, the LINAGORA project has been structured around a major, visceral ambition: "to have a diversified Digital industry, not dependent on a monopoly or oligopoly", as Alexandre reminded us in his recent speech welcoming the new graduating class of the Mines Télécom Business School (his home school). Our past is there to testify to the many projects and successes that validate our mission and anchor it more than ever for the coming years. Like Alexandre, I sometimes like to point out that LINAGORA, for more than 21 years, has saved the French government a great deal of money (certainly several hundred million) just by considering our participation in historic messaging projects and in various interministerial contracts linked to support or expertise in Open Source technologies.

Our mission is also to act as a liaison between the Open Source innovation community and our customers' end-users. In this respect, I'd like to share two important pieces of information with you:

• LINAGORA ranks 159th in the OSCI Ranking (https://opensourceindex.io), which measures companies' contributions to #opensource software on GitHub. LINAGORA is still ahead of Yahoo (209) and the Financial Times (201). The ranking only takes into account some of our developers: if we consider all developers involved in community development, our actual ranking is more like 90th, ahead of Twitter for example. Another figure on our community investment: over 400 external contributions and more than 60,000 commits in 21 years on software licensed under free software licenses;
• In addition, LINAGORA has changed its contribution agreement on our own software (https://www.linagora.com/fr/actualites/2021/07/08/linagora-passe-de-cla-to-dco/). Historically, we required the signature of a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), a lengthy and often restrictive legal contract that prevented developers from freely contributing to our projects. LINAGORA has now adopted a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), which offers greater flexibility and portability to Open Source communities. The DCO puts the ownership of contributions back in the hands of developers, which is very much welcomed by developers interested in contributing to our software.

The openness of our code and your contributions to Open Source communities are fully part of our seven values, which I would like to remind you of here, and in particular those who have joined us more recently:

• Transparency: because Open Source is all about freeing information, talking, exchanging and trusting each other;
• Family spirit: because LINAGORA enables everyone to grow and flourish professionally and mutual help between each other is a daily reality ;
• Customer satisfaction: because it's proof that we go the extra mile every day ;
• Respect: because we place the quality of human relationships at the heart of our concerns;
• Passion: because LINAGORA is also a great adventure for enthusiasts of Open Source and innovative technologies;
• Sharing: beyond the exchange of knowledge, which goes hand in hand with the spirit of Open Source, we want LINAGORA to be a place of sharing and openness for everyone;
• Free software culture: we believe that free software is the future of computing, and we are committed to promoting it within our company.

Since the beginning of the year, we have reinforced our eco-responsible approach in line with our values by deciding with Alexandre to change the company's status "to make it a Mission Company". With the support of Adriana, Cécile and Fredy, we are in the process of implementing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals in a plan of our own, one of the key measures of which is to become carbon-negative by 2025 and to have offset all our carbon emissions by 2030.

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Finally, I'd like you to know that I've asked the OSSA teams to get in touch with the FOSDEM organization so that LINAGORA can organize a special presence for the 2022 edition, which is usually held at the beginning of February.

Sovereignty and Open Source in the news

The theme of Digital Sovereignty is at the heart of our society's debates, and has also become a strategic issue for both the State and our major private customers.

Building an open and ethical alternative to Teams, supporting our customers in the strategic adoption of Open Source, offering industrial software assurance for Maintenance in Operational Conditions (MCO) and Maintenance in Security Conditions (MCS), working with our customers to share their expertise... all your day-to-day actions are helping to create the long-awaited third digital way, a concept invented by LINAGORA and democratized almost 10 years ago!

The dynamics of today's Open Source market, in terms of both customer activity and community innovation, have never been more important than they are today. I refer you, for example, to the European Commission's report (https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/fr_ec_open_source_strategy_2020-2023.pdf), which concludes that "Open Source has a major role to play in Europe's growth and strategic autonomy".

After a disappointing first half, this summer's figures show a very encouraging take-off, which should enable us, thanks to the investment of each and every one of you, to "produce an acceptable copy" by the end of the year. We're looking forward to working with you.

A new window of time, a momentum, has opened up in recent weeks, and now it's up to us to seize every opportunity to emerge even stronger from this bloody health crisis. What's more, France's political agenda is in our favor. Here are a few examples:

• Amélie de Montchalin: announced last week in a tweet (https://twitter.com/AdeMontchalin/status/1435550450032517121) a plan to strengthen Open Source in Administrations and that the FranceConnect source code will be published very soon. Let's not forget the positive impact of the last Hayrault directive in 2012 on the use of Open Source in Administrations;
• France will hold the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union (FPEU) in the first half of 2022 (January 1 - June 30). This will be a high point in France's European policy (https://www.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/cid156581/www.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/cid156581/presidence-francaise-du-conseil-de-l-union-europeenne-pfue-2022.html), whose role will be to steer negotiations, reach compromises and agreements on current legislative dossiers, and drive forward the ambitious agenda for the future of the Union. There is no doubt that open innovation will be at the heart of the debates, following on from the work already initiated by Commissioner Thierry BRETON in 2019;
• the presidential election in France April 2022 in which digital independence and sovereignty will be themes inevitably debated by the various candidates: for the outgoing President, whom we know well the convictions with Alexandre, has already launched new initiatives in favor of our ecosystem and we will inevitably be at the heart of the new schemes that will be put in place.

In fact, the President began to speak out in favor of more Open Source during the closing speech of his presidential trip to French Polynesia (certainly helped by Alexandre's presence there).

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Influence is not a bad thing: it's often misperceived, but without it, major projects and ambitions cannot succeed. In this respect, I'd like to share with you the pleasure of noting the great influence we have with CIOs in the public and private sectors. As the current period makes it easier for us to meet them again for appointments or executive lunches, it's always a pleasure to see the strategic alignment we have with these CIOs on the major issues linked to independence and Open Source. I can also vouch for their keen interest in our positions and recommendations on the major choices they face.

Because that's also one of LINAGORA's key characteristics: to be the Actor (with a capital "A") of choice for major Open Source users!

News about our operations

LINAGORA Global Software (LGS)

More generally, I wanted to give you an update on our various activities, starting with a focus on our software offering (LINAGORA Global Software - LGS):

• Twake: interest in a free, secure and sovereign alternative is as strong as ever. With the support of Benoît and Romaric, we recently put down on paper a Manifesto that should enable us to validate the next major milestones in terms of roadmap in order to achieve our goal of providing the market with this industrial alternative to Teams. The latest work on the mobile application has been decisive: we're finalizing tests on a small group of people, but the aim is to abandon Signal before the end of the year. I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Babour, who and his team rose to the challenge of redesigning the application in Flutter in less than 6 months!
• LinShare: is and remains a sure bet. It's one of the pillars of our software offering. The roadmap for LinShare will bring in the next few weeks a complete Drive functionality and also the integration of LinShare as a secure file sharing service inside Twake. Frédéric, congratulations on your investment over the years;
• LinTO : has become the only GafamFree alternative in terms of voice-to-text transcription technology. Our technology is very promising and increasingly successful. Every week, we discover that it's being integrated by third parties (without our support): that's what Open Source is all about. For our part, we have been involved via a partner in the integration of LinTO technology for Castorama, as part of the implementation of the "Hello Casto! Our LinTO technology will also be in the spotlight at the GoodTech4Good summit at the Elysée Palace in November, for which we'll be making a demonstrator to vocalize the Elysee.fr website. This involves creating interactions on the site aimed at facilitating accessibility for the visually impaired, for example by using voice to control the browser to use the website. Finally, we have resumed high-level exchanges with Société Générale to develop the use of LinTO to reinforce the work they have already carried out without our support to date. Big ups to Jean-Pierre, Damien and the research teams, who are and remain at the cutting edge of innovation!
• LinID: we successfully delivered the IAM/SSO project for the Centre Interdépartemental de Gestion de la Grande Couronne de la Région d'Ile-de-France, which has also just been validated from a security point of view via an independent audit carried out by Orange Cyber Sécurité. Bravo to the team for the quality of their work! Our news is intense for the Identities division: among the various projects, I wanted to highlight our work in progress for ANAH as part of the government initiative Ma Prime Renov (https://www.maprimerenov.gouv.fr/) for which our team is implementing the SaaS authentication component based on the FranceConnect infrastructure. I'd like to take this opportunity to wish Mame a happy end to her pregnancy, and of course we look forward to welcoming a new Linagorian to the LINAGORA family;
• TMail : the latest addition to LINAGORA's software portfolio, which aims to develop the 1st web/mobile client based on the JMap protocol, on which Benoît Tellier and Raphaël have had the opportunity to contribute to RFCs via the W3C and the IETF. Raphaël presented his work in this area to us before the summer. We're expecting a lot from this Tmail "Team Mail" initiative. This work follows on from our investments over the past 8 years in the Apache James community, aimed at developing the next generation of mail servers. James is also in an accelerated ramp-up phase: via Docaposte, we are involved in implementing Apache James for GIE Sesame Vitale. We're also receiving increasing interest from all over the world in integrating and supporting James technology. Bravo to Benoît and his teams for their current investment, and I look forward to the official presentation of TMail mobile in the coming weeks;
• and finally some news from OpenPaaS: as you know, we're in the process of merging OpenPaaS's historic services into Twake. Renaud's team, with Andy's support, are working miracles, as we know it's never easy to maintain an existing while building the next generation of a product. We'll be coming back to you specifically with a roadmap to accelerate product roadmap convergence. The OpenPaaS promise remains valid: we're currently working on several deployments, and we're also engaged in an RFP (request for proposals) for a very large private account to deploy OpenPaaS in Special Regime Countries (SRC) without US embargoes (Cuba, Iran, etc.). We'll tell you more about it soon, but for the moment it's too early as we're under NDA...

We are keeping in mind our Teleskop ambition to create an open industrial alternative to Zoom. With our current workload, we want to concentrate for the time being on ensuring the success of Twake. Teleskop will be a hot topic again in early 2022.

To conclude with the LGS entity, we are finalizing a global reorganization of the governance and organization of our teams, which will come under the overall responsibility of Diana. This organization will be communicated and deployed by the end of the month, and should enable us to meet the challenges of the take-off of Twake's SaaS offering, with in particular the release in early October of the pay-as-you-go offering. We have also identified the teams we need to strengthen in terms of skills: recruitment announcements will be published shortly. In short, "we are on the launching pad!"

I would like to take this opportunity to officially announce the departure of Raphaël OUAZANA at the end of the month. I would like to salute your commitment Raphaël for nearly 18 years at our side. Thank you again for your dedication and hard work. We sincerely wish you all the best for the future.

Research activities

A word about our Research activities: our investments are increasingly visible and we are gathering more and more people around our initiatives. Jean-Pierre and his teams are very active, which means we can obtain new funding to help develop our innovation. The latest of these are Work@Home and VoiceLab (which has led to the creation of a professional association of which I am treasurer) bringing together the main players in French VoiceTech. You should know that we're currently hard at work with Jean-Pierre on a wonderful initiative we've called Uverturo (Ouverture in Esperanto), which aims to further strengthen our investments in Twake and LinTO. We're still in the appraisal phase with the BPI in particular: we'll be able to say more in a few weeks' time...

LINAGORA Run Services

The activities of our OSSA (LINAGORA Run Services) teams are also in the spotlight at the moment: in September, we're in the thick of the news in terms of steering committees for our various framework contracts. The news also includes the launch of our latest major contract with Banque Arkea. The stakes for this customer are very high: it's up to us to rise to the occasion and succeed in developing this relationship of proximity and trust, such as we have with some of our major historical customers. I'd also like to welcome back Pierre as part of his end-of-study internship: back (!!) because he was already with us a few months ago. I must say that I'm personally very happy to have you back with us, and I'd also like to thank you for co-opting Claire, who has also joined our OSSA team. I wanted to highlight Raoul's exceptional attitude and commitment in taking over the reins of this OSSA offering, which is essential to the company's development and also constitutes one of the pillars of our resilience. Raoul, in addition to your own personal challenges, you're passing a major milestone in your professional career: that of becoming a manager who is both benevolent towards your teams and always striving for excellence for our customers. Truly Raoul, hats off to you! You are an example today for all those who wish to become a manager within LINAGORA. Given the activity and excellent results achieved in recent weeks, you can count on Alexandre and me to continue to support you and give you the resources you need for your personal success. Your success will also be our collective success on this offering, which continues to set us apart from all the other players on our market.

LINAGORA Professional Services (LPS)

I'm continuing my review of activities with LINAGORA Professional Services (LPS). In addition to the members of COSTAFF (your managers), I must emphasize the investment and daily work of LINAGORA's services teams, who work with our customers every day. Your commitment and the constraints we accept on a daily basis are a credit to you and should earn the respect of all of us. It's worth noting that this service profession suffers from an unfortunate image linked to the practices of ESNs, SSIIs and other "portage" companies... no comment! However, sharing and passing on our expertise to our customers' teams, and taking part in the biggest strategic Open Source implementation projects for the most critical systems used by the French government and other organizations of vital importance (OIV), are essential apprenticeships for any good IT professional. It's a great way to finalize your professional training, to equip yourself with all the right reflexes that will serve you throughout your professional life, and it's also an opportunity to meet mentors you'll remember for the rest of your life...

This autumn, we've decided to revamp the way we organise our services and teams by skills centre. he aim of this organisation is to bring together our teams who are involved with our customers, according to their areas of interest, whatever their geographical location. This makes all the more sense given the widespread use of teleworking. Each centre is co-piloted by an offer manager and a technical lead.

We have selected seven areas of expertise:

• Cloud Infrastructure and Operations (Lead: Valentin / Technical lead: Andy)
• Messaging and collaborative tools (Lead: Pascal / Technical lead: Simon)
• Big Data and Data Science DBMS (Lead: Bertrand / Technical lead: Max)
• User work environment (Lead: Michel-Marie / Technical lead: David Carella)
• Web and Mobile Development (Lead: Bertrand / Technical lead: Albin)
• Portals and Application Server (Lead: Harold / Technical lead: Ismaël)
• Identity and Security (Coordinator: David Carella / Technical lead: Anthony)

The aim is to be able to capitalise more effectively and also to be more efficient in managing the career paths of people working at LPS, for example by offering them appropriate training and certification courses to ensure they are always at the top of their game in terms of expertise. The tenderers will very shortly be announcing and also launching a recruitment campaign for each of them, designed to develop our skills and our ability to respond to market demands. I'll come back to recruitment in a few lines...

LINAGORA Consulting Services (LCS)

Our consultancy business has been going from strength to strength since the beginning of September, with Delphine signing a number of major contracts for Pôle Emploi and the CD54. We work with our customers to build their strategic roadmaps for the use of Open Source: we talk about the Open Source Programme Office (OSPO), business models, licensing, recruiting Open Source talent, etc. These services should be the place where we demonstrate the excellence of our consulting services: in fact, our past assignments are recognised in the market and are a real asset in terms of how LINAGORA is perceived in the market and by our customers. What's more, these assignments systematically generate implementation projects to follow. So see you in 2022 for the continuation of these first orientation missions... Once again Raoul is at the helm on these subjects. You can count on me (and of course Alexandre) to help you convince these new customers to become our future sponsors!

A few concluding words

So that's all the essential information I wanted to share with you after our new collection. It's a bit long for this first attempt... I'll try to write to you more regularly and in a more targeted way about the latest news and innovations at the company.

As you can see, the management team is on deck and pulling out all the stops to keep us on course for renewed growth that is ethical, respectful of individuals and always at the service of the excellence our customers expect.

We will have the opportunity to come back to some of these points at the next employee meeting on 5 October at 6pm, and we will also come back to you all by the end of the year with our ambitions for 2022 and our projected development plan for the next 5 years.

In the meantime, I'd like to wish you all a very good start and a lot of success in everything you do. I know you'll all rise to the occasion.

We are a fantastic company...