In the pursuit of collaborative intelligence... : cms stuff

Lee's logo-fest of Web 2.0

Ed Daniel — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 03:47:00 GMT

Lee Wilkins of Podcast.com has kindly put together this Web 2.0 logo montage - couldn't resist borrowing it!

Do you know what each of them does? You ought to!

My favourite is Podzinger who license some smart voice technology to deliver their offering.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Jason Moon for his recommendation of this link: web2logo. At the site they've got a nice tag cloud to help you contextually navigate the logos according to the theme of the business behind the logo, simple yet smart :-).

AfterMail acquired by Quest Software

Ed Daniel — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 08:51:00 GMT

"Quest Software has acquired AfterMail Limited. The quality of the AfterMail team as well as the depth and completeness of the AfterMail product were key factors in our decision to proceed with this acquisition. Quest is a mature, rapidly growing, worldwide company, with a broad range of products that can help you improve the performance and productivity of your enterprise IT.

The AfterMail development and support team remains intact and will be complemented by Quest’s global support organization.

David Waugh Vice President of Product Management
Infrastructure Management Solutions"

http://www.quest.com/news/show.aspx?ContentId=2726

Well done Rod, Mike, Geoff, Tim and the rest of the AfterMail team - it's amazing to think we sat in front of Rod only two years ago discussing strategy for creating a footprint in mainland UK and the rest of Europe - we're delighted to have supported and made possible along with several other AfterMail commercial partners a viable and exciting proposition that has now lead to the acquisition of the AfterMail business by Quest Software.

If you've been reading this blog for sometime you'll remember one of the criticisms voiced was the viability of AfterMail considering the size and time in business of the organisation, now with the backing of Quest those reservations are no longer valid :-)

AfterMail API!

Ed Daniel — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 14:49:00 GMT

I've been waiting for this announcement for quite a while and now I can finally rave about it!

“We have designed the Kit to be as flexible as possible, and to leverage the power of the AfterMail platform. Customers can use multiple ways of accessing their AfterMail data, depending on their level of expertise and technical ability,” said Mike Upshon, Chief Technology Officer. “For instance, basic URL passing can be used to return lists of appropriate email messages, while our XML Web Services application programming interface (API) can be used for more in depth integration. We’re really excited about how this is already being used amongst our customer base.” read more...

"I think we're delivering the benefits of Kodiak today." - Rod Drury, CEO, AfterMail

This is the beginning of AfterMail's 3rd wave - EEI (Enterprise Email Intelligence) - for those of you in the knowledge management industry, working with business intelligence, this is what you've been waiting for - a way to work in a structured fashion with the most popular unstructured data in computing today: EMAIL!

I'm glad to say that at SalePlane we've already engaged our Solutions team to experiment with a variety of value-added utilities that will enable users of AfterMail to harness the power of corporate dialogue in a way never before possible on the Microsoft platform (NB. AfterMail is also available for Novell's GroupWise).

We've also been working closely with some very interesting software solutions businesses who have approached us to help them integrate AfterMail with their Microsoft .NET applications such as SalesCentric, the only CRM vendor that allows creation of adaptive frameworks for every customer interaction which seamlessly integrate with AfterMail's email archiving solution.

It's surprising none of the competition has provided this facility but I can only figure that with their offerings being built on a legacy architecture and approach to email archiving this has hindered the possibility of providing what customers want - a robust solution with flexible APIs - unlucky for them I guess as it will cost them dearly to re-architect their offerings to provide this level of functionality out of the box.

Fruits of working openly: transLucid (MySQL/PHP)

Ed Daniel — Fri, 20 May 2005 10:17:00 GMT

Message: 1

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 18:04:44 -0000

From: "Ton Haarmans" <tonhaarmans@yahoo.com>

Subject: FlashBrain News: introducing transLucid

Hi!

As you might know already we have stopped our work on FlashBrain. It was not possible to develop FB any further because of security reasons built right into Flash.

But then we discovered Lucid Fried Eggs! LFE is basically a number of php scripts that reads and writes a MySQL database and is developed by Stephen Danic as Open Source. It works but not as we envisioned that it should. We hired Andrius Kulikauskas who introduced us to Emad El Deen and together we re-programmed LFE. The outcome of our work is called transLucid. It can be seen, tested and downloaded for install on your own webserver from our website pantha.net.

What can you do with transLucid?

* transLucid can put a PersonalBrain on the web (you still need BrainUtil for making an importable xml file). This can be done during install, but also afterwards. It cannot import Notes yet.

* You can edit your 'lucified' website online: text, images and menu (adding, renaming and deleting of 'thoughts', (un)linking to url, making 'pins', attach files) . In this way transLucid works as an online CMS tool.

* Editing can be done in 'public mode', which means than anybody can do editing, or in 'restricted mode' where only you can edit the contents of your website.

* Layouts and style of your transLucid website can be changed by any HTML editor.

Installation requirements of transLucid

You need a webserver which is php-enabled and has full access to a MySQL database.

Future of transLucid

transLucid is now in beta. For version 1.0 we want to add the following features:

* Wysiwyg editing with built-in FCKeditor.

* Sorting 'pinned' thoughts in any possible order.

* Fixing export to TouchGraph applet.

* Exporting to xml which can be read by BrainUtil

* Fixing all reported outstanding bugs.

Feedback

We welcome any feedback you might have. You can do that by directly mailing one of us (see addresses below), by using the feedback form on http://www.pantha.net/index.php?request=displaypage&NodeID=395 or by becoming a member of the transLucid Yahoogroup on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/translucid/

Download now!

You can download transLucid directly:

http://www.pantha.net/transLucid.zip

We hope sincerely that transLucid can be of use for you!

the transLucid team.

Ton Haarmans, Bjoern Schliebitz

info@wideopenwin.com | bjoern@schliebitz.name | info@pantha.net

http://www.pantha.net

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/translucid/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lucid

AfterMail is to email what Google is to web pages

Ed Daniel — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:38:00 GMT

Quick update on AfterMail:

AfterMail v3 is almost out the door for global release and we're itching to bring it to market. That is one of the main reasons why I had to hold back on blogging screenshots and the like as I had promised in an earlier post, sorry readers - NDAs are nasty things to mess with, especially as a blogger.

That said we've got some of the key UBPs now up on the work website that cover things such as an 80% saving in e-mail storage costs, lightning fast Exchange server and Outlook client performance by using stubbing technology developed in house by Mike Upshon, CTO of AfterMail.

Mike has also been re-factoring the codebase further to bring some mega improvements under the hood such as even more powerful indexing through advanced algorithms to reduce the index size - end result to the business: even faster searching and filtering by AfterMail to enable email intelligence integration solutions on top of the existing core proposition: archive, retrieve, analyse.

I can't wait for the likes of KVS, Cryoserver and Zantaz to request a head-to-head - they dare not I tell you because their technology is inferior but I have to wait for that marketing opportunity to emerge otherwise we'll be having to go do it ourselves and right now we're just too busy winning business off them but I should not gloat, the battle is not won yet - and we don't waste our investors' money on hype - we just get the business done.

Rainbow gets a new look!

Ed Daniel — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 08:27:00 GMT

Open source CMS (content management systems) is one of the most interesting spaces to be in right now. Thanks to open source CMS communities across the globe are being enabled and appearing online.

For some years now I've been part of the Rainbow team (no! not the gay movement) who are creators of the .NET open source multi-lingual CMS Rainbow Portal that has evolved extensively since the early days of IBuySpy.

The project is a great place to learn how to use .NET and get a feel for what it is like to work collaboratively with developers from all around the world.

Our latest build has just gone live with a whole new branding using our Zen skinning engine, developed by Jeremy Esland - it's a great testament to the talent working on the project and the commitment by Due Metri of Italy to maintain and support this community on an on-going basis - they have kept to their word and soon you'll have the pleasure of using Rainbow Portal v2 to help you learn about Whidbey - planned for launch later this year at the Rainbow Fest in Italy.

A big thank you goes to our desginers Anne Panne and Jeremy Esland for their excellent work, to all my colleagues who have and continue to participate on this exciting multi-lingual/cultural project and the Due Metri team for their support and commitment to our community.

Software holding back the progression of technology?

Ed Daniel — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 08:49:00 GMT

"What is holding things back right now is software," Mr Gates said, before adding with a smile: "At least I hope so, otherwise we are overspending to the tune of billions."

That's a serious responsibility for our industry to consider...

Also of note, considering Davos, was the re-occuring theme of knowledge management and knowledge economy in some of the keynote speeches.

I also would like to voice my support for the World Social Forum taking place in Brazil simultaneously, I caught some reporting on BBC video news and again the issue of duplicity of effort was mentioned, i.e. many groups with the same cause unaware of each other's common interests, not an uncommon phenomenon but we should remember not everyone is on the net or has access to it yet.

It will be of interest to see what new open standards emerge that cater for these communities as more and more come online and most of all, how will they and essentially us, as software architects, avoid duplicity of effort.

Human ML

Ed Daniel — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 16:36:00 GMT

http://www.humanmarkup.org/

Presentation to Federal Workshop

Body language highlighted for emotion, gesture and dance These three animations are offered as a sample of exressions which HumanML can enhance by providing a standardization of vocabularies for emotion, kinesic gestures and dance which can be specified further for a particular culture. These kinds of uniquely "human" capabilities can be more easily expressed by using these vocabularies. All of these employ aspects of the Human Physical Characteristics Description Markup Language, HPCDML, a key component covered in this Presentation given to the EA Collaboration Workshop #30.

AfterMail v2

Ed Daniel — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:12:00 GMT

I'll have some screenshots for you soon but for now I can't help myself but blog about virtual mailboxes!

It's this awesome new feature in AfterMail v2 which enables you to use the approach not dissimilar to SQL views to select emails to display to an end-user according to criteria and integrated LDAP permissioning - the fact is this, the email is in a relational database and attachments are in a single instance file store as part of an email server as the archiving service (Exchange, Notes, Groupwise and others coming) - the result is an optimised datastore of an enterprise's email communications which can then be consumed by any device capable of having a SQL dialogue.

Very impressive and as far as I can tell the most effective email archiving solution in the marketplace, but heh! you could say I sell this and I would say that. What you don't know is the work behind the scenes we're doing using email intelligence, that is looking really sexy - if you want to know more and get involved in this space feel free to drop me a line with your details and we can see if there is something to discuss.

Alternative tools for searching (Lucene)

Ed Daniel — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 13:40:00 GMT

It's strange how you find out about cool stuff, as I've posted before I never expect to find out about something before anyone else so to the uber .NET dudes please excuse me for mentioning this.

After a tip-off by Paul Thomalla regarding a sweet tool for searching .pst and file data client-side my New Zealand devhead, Mike Upshon, clued me up even further - that LookOut uses Lucene which, like so many lovely things these days, is an open source search engine and a port from the Java community. It seems many cool things in the Java community are making their way across to C# and I'm all for that!

I'm glad to see good evidence of collaborative intelligence flowing very quickly around the world and good ideas seem to rocket ever faster once the concept has been proven.

Here's a mention of Lucene from another blog I found discussing this but for now Lucene is sitting quietly out there waiting to become a must-have component for groupware and collaboration tools.

Source control integration or not?

Ed Daniel — Sat, 29 May 2004 14:43:00 GMT

We had our weekly meeting for Rainbow Portal core and we spent considerable time on the issue of source code control, new feature management and project integration. As we're open source it means that we should continue to leverage Source-Forge's mirrors to provide the downloads of the binaries to the community but with respect to managing the project we've started looking at alternatives.

Some key issues have been troubling us. GDN workspaces is good for smaller projects but it does not currently meet all our needs. It's great to see Microsoft's Team System debut but one thing we seem to find complex is that as we're living at Source-Forge unlike other Java based solutions such as Jira - Team System for all it's glory does not provide CVS integration.

Has anyone else hit this issue and resolved it or do you have any comments on this subject you'd like to share?

Could it ever happen?

Ed Daniel — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 02:14:00 GMT

I've not really been too public on this blog but I really ought to let all my DotNet friends know about something I'm up to and it coincides nicely with a recent request for me to put down in black and white a vision statement.

So, if you want to know how I am using .NET to change the world - please follow this link. Then do comeback and either show your support or give me feedback.

Thanks,

Ha! should have known better...

Ed Daniel — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 23:08:00 GMT

So luckily thanks to being able to search the 608 page document I found my section on SHA-5 in my msft pdf on .net security however I had yet further to travel:

"Cryptography is an important technology for building secure Web applications.

This appendix has covered some of the fundamentals of certificates and cryptography and has introduced some of the classes exposed by the

System.Security.Cryptography
namespace, which enable you to more easily incorporate cryptographic security solutions into your .NET applications. For more information about cryptography in .NET, search MSDN for the page entitled ".NET Framework Cryptography Model."

No s**t ;-) so off to MSDN I go....

Fuzzy...

Ed Daniel — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 22:58:00 GMT

My current passion is the Rainbow open-source project founded by the Duemetri team in Italy. Graziano and Manu are sound blokes as we say in England and they've gathered some enthusiastic .net coders along the way.

I decided to implement this solution as I was impressed with the design, attitude and approach of the team and their community; I've been interested for some time but currently various factors are coming together and the time is right as they say - except for the fact that my head feels fuzzy after getting back up to speed on a few things (currently checking up how to do the SHA5 password encryption thingy, luckily I saved a pdf that tells all).

Today with the help of a sanity check from Manu - thank heavens for IM and friendly people - I installed 6 seperate code base and database implementations of their CMS on my server running from one IP/Domain, all can create their own sub portals - it's really really cool! - in the USA remotely from the virtual office - i.e. my bedroom - been working a lot at home recently but that's another story.

So now it's down to playing with design, customisation and content for a new business I'm working for. I'll keep you posted on how I get on with it all so consider this the intro to my exploration into hosted .net cms solutions in C#, they do have a VB.NET version if you prefer but the C# one is evolving quicker.