Synergise IT

Google just released Friend Connect a site that allows site owners to add social elements to their site and drive users to your site with these social elements.

Google wrote this on the FriendConnect page

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Google is not only promoting social networking across the world but they are making it easy for people to use this service. Just copy and paste codes into your site and maybe some simple code modification to make this EXACTLY how you want it to be and you have a personalised, mini facebook or myspace setup. Sounds good to me! Check out the video below:

Google has just invested $500million in a new wireless broadband company and they would be providing search and applications to the network’s users. Coupled with Google’s Android, Google is becoming a big player in the mobiles market.

With the iPhone SDK and Andriod in the market, two big players are investing time and money building their capabilities and also preparing the market to learn, develop and implement applications for the mobile phones. In future, people might receive a brand spanky new phone with capabilities to login to their company’s internal applications and work from their phone.

Now, do I really want that? Currently I spend at least 12 hours a day in front of the computer and sometimes more. I should be exercising, spending time with my family, working on my hobby or any other thing that creates a work-life balance. The last thing I want is to be bothered by ringing emails or a call from the boss to get you to do some stuff. It would be nice if I can access the internet while shopping with my partner and go online to check if the prices of her dress is cheaper online or not. But nothing more!

Many people in companies have “lost” their freedom to emails and with mobile applications coming to your phone, means more time working. It would be a super awesome technology if people can manage it well and I believe many actually do manage it well but for those who can’t, stay clear of this.

I have been exploring many different enterprise 2.0 related open source software and there were two products that came up tops - KnowledgeTree - enterprise grade document manager and Mindtouch - enterprise grade Wiki. Many of the products I have reviewed have highly similar functionality. They do what they are meant to do, store / retrieve documents or collaborate through the Wiki platform - no surprises in this space. However, some of the stuff that I specifically looked at were UI ease of use, scalability, support and APIs. Let’s start with Knowledgetree.

KnowledgeTree is

a open source turn-key document management software designed for business people to install, use and purchase. Collaborate with team members, securely store all your documents and ensure regulatory compliance with absolute ease. With no vendor lock-in and with source code readily available, KnowledgeTree provides a more flexible, cost-effective alternative to proprietary applications.

When I first created a demo account for myself on KnowledgeTree, I browsed around the software and it took me nothing more than 2 mins to figure out the site navigation and general functionalities. It was that simple, things were where there as you expect it to be and no surprises, no dramas. UI was totally simple on the eyes and the site in general was pretty. Excellent features includes drag and drop access to the document repository for Windows, integration into MS office applications, customisable “iGoogle type” dashboard, MetaData support, workflows for managing document generation and integration to your applications via SOAP Web Services. See the full list here.

KnowledgeTree API documentation is good and very comprehensive. Scalability is pretty clear from their list of clients and also from clarification with the sales team at KnowledgeTree. Support from the sales team has also been very very quick and answers were clear. I am very impressed. If you are looking for an open source document manager, look no further, Knowledgetree is the one.

MindTouch Deki Wiki is a enterprise Wiki software. The key to Deki Wiki success and popularity is its ease of use and its SUPER excellent widgets and Web Services support. Its pretty much up to your imagination on what you wanna mashup and display on screen. Check out their service extensions.

For a quick overview of Deki Wiki, please watch video below

When I first tried Deki Wiki, everything was clear and I understood all functionalities very easily. There were no surprises, no dramas. It was super easy to use, WYSIWYG editor is GREAT and there is even imaging support! This is great stuff. I totally love this. I have four words to describe Deki Wiki - Simple, Scalable, Extensible and Flexible.

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However, having said all these, organisations are moving toward enterprise content management (ECM) software and such standalone software is not very helpful in providing a single view of the enterprise. You can argue that organisations can build integration layer between these products but if it came as a package, then a suite of such standalone tools that works nicely together producing an ECM effect, ultimately this would give IBM Filenet, Microsoft SharePoint and similar products a run for their money.

One area of Enterprise 2.0 that I haven’t really explored deeply into is document management. I spent a great deal of time over the last few days checking out various open source document managers and this is my review.

1) KnowledgeTree
This is my favourite. This is a standard document manager that is extremely simple to use. Check out the demo to know what I mean ease of use. There are sample data available for you to play around with.

Knowledgetree has all the standard functionality like check in/out, version control, transaction history and document ID (access the document directly). Special functionality include Microsoft office connector and drag and drop desktop access. One disadvantage is that the content within the documents are NOT searchable. This can be a driving factor why I would not use this product. Natasha from Knowledgetree corrected this error of mine and everyone, I am sorry… KnowledgeTree provides full text indexing on all Office 2003 & 2007 documents, PDF, HTML, Plain Text, Open Office, XML and Postscript Files. Thanks Natasha! =)

You can choose to host it inhouse and the system requirements are:
PHP 5.2.4 upwards
J2SE 5.0 (JRE 5.0)
Apache Web Server
Microsoft Internet Information Server

2) EPIWare
This is also another similar document manager with a just average UI. I feel that this is much harder to use as compared to KnowledgeTree and the UI is not as interactive. However, one big advantage is that the content within the documents are searchable. Disadvantage is that there is no document ID which will make communicating slightly harder.

EPIWare has a wiki included as well but seems pretty hard to use - I haven’t checked it out the wiki fully yet but these are my initial thoughts.

System requirements is really simple the standard Apache, PHP, MySQL

Try it here

3) Alfresco
This is not just a document manager but a pretty full on Enterprise Content Management software (not to be mixed up with CMS - they are two different things). It seems pretty powerful and relatively flexible.

These are the things that Alfresco does.
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- Document Management
- Collaboration
- Records Management
- Knowledge Management
- Web Content Management
- Imaging

This is a pretty complicated and enterprise grade software. Clients includes American Stock Exchange, Electronic Arts, Harvard Business School Publishing and Activision.

System specification can be found here

Kapow is a business mashup server software that allows you to collect and mashup all the data you want and display it. I attended a walk through with Andrew Lasko from Kapow and was really impressed with the capability of Kapow.

Some of the really cool features of Kapow includes Content Migration, Synchronization and Integration, Transform functionality to mobile compatible and Rapid portlet development. The demo that was present to me was absolutely amazing. It not just some simple screen scraping tool or data collection tool. It has the ability to collect almost anything you can think of structure or un-structured and you can then manipulate the information add some functionality to it and display the stuff you want. In a very skewed way of looking at this, a company could (if they wanted to) do a business transformation project using Kapow.

I am now having a play with the Kapow’s mashup server and would update more when I have finished playing. In the mean time, take a look at the Kapow Demo. Very interesting.

ClearSpace has been upgraded and this is an extremely exciting time for Enterprise 2.0. Jive has upgraded ClearSpace in some major ways like more drag and drop, enabling more social networking within the organisation and a XMPP cloud which allows outsiders to gain access to some stuff within ClearSpace. Check it out!

Jive also bought Jotlet which Jive plans to use their expertise to enhance their calendar functionality within Jive’s suite of software.

BuddyPress is the answer to social networks on WordPress. Soon enough, you can have your own little facebook running within your blog and a simple blog can be transformed your personal social network with photos, private messenging and groups. How cool is that!

Buddypress has not been officially launched, so stay tuned for the great work the open source community is doing…

Google Docs newest functionality - offline access, is a great step towards integrating their “Office” suite into the day to day life of users. Google Docs is a great idea, online collaboration, sharing, communication and if used properly, you might even be able to achieve some levels of collective intelligence (read - web 2.0)

However, to make this application main stream and widely used, Google needs to bring this into the office. I would say that a large percentage of “Office” type software is being used at the workplace and thats where the money is.

Having said this, I do not think many organisations are keen to take up Google Apps due to privacy, security and psychological issues of having the data stored in someone else’s backyard. Google needs to release a GSA (Google Search Appliance) type box and allow companies to be able to host it within their own firewalls and network. I believe this will increase the adoption rate of not only Google Docs but the whole Google Apps suite.

Lets face it, scope and requirements of a system changes all the time. Between requirements gathering and development or during development and testing or even after go live, the situation changes. Just an example, a couple of colleagues and myself are building a new enterprise tool for the organisation we are working with and even before the proof of concept is completed, there were request for us to increase/change the scope slightly. With so many changes in place, how can the software adapt itself to the ever changing business environment?

With SaaS, SOA, simplified programming languages like Ruby on Rails, Agile development and so on, software has been increasing adaptive to the organisation. It seems that as long as the organisation is willing to spend, developers can almost do anything. I believe the biggest challenge in IT nowadays is not delivering the the software anymore but to manage the change within the organisation and educate people on the new functionality / system.

Its not about what systems you can build now but how fast you can adapt to what you have designed.

Many would know something about feed aggregators but we have so many of them around at the moment. Say if you are a iGoogle, live.com, De.li.cious, etc member, you have some serious work to get down to just to view stuff that you are interested in. Unless you are capable web-savvy netizen, its hard for you to be able to aggregate all these information to one place and read it from one screen.

Yahoo Pipes have solved this problem. In a nutshell, described by Tim O’Reilly, “it’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.” If you have noticed, its a drag and drop editor - no programming required.

I have created a simple pipe by watching the demo. There is a whole lot of operators and functions you can use and not just filtering the information but also do mathematical calculations, union some sites, filter information, location builder and have your own user inputs. After you have done this, save it as RSS, ATOM, JSON, XML and you can use it for yourself or publish it to the WWW or popular search engines.

This is a good example of mashups with ability to improve the quality of the mashed data and it brings mashups to a whole new level.