There is good news for commercial open source software vendors this week with the announcement of Red Hat’s recession-defying fiscal Q1 performance. Red Hat, seen by many as a bellwether for the Linux and commercial open source business community, reported revenue up 11% on Q1 2008 and earnings per share up 25%.

Of particular interest to many was the health of Red Hat’s subscription revenue model for Linux operating systems and middleware. Red Hat, like many other commercial open source vendors, sells open source software bundled with support and non-open source components. Here, Red Hat reported strong growth of 14% year-on-year.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst attributes this growth to his company assisting customers to “save money in a challenging IT spending environment.” Not only are Red Hat’s open source solutions driving cost savings, they’re also driving “new capabilities, efficiencies and functionality” for customers.

In contrast, Red Hat competitor in the middleware space, Oracle, saw a 7% decline in quarterly earnings. While Oracle itself has a variant of the Linux operating system, the company, until its recent purchase of Sun, was primarily a proprietary software vendor with a traditional high upfront price-tag license-based business model charged for its business applications and middleware. Oracle Unbreakable Linux has never managed to garner the momentum of Red Hat Linux or Canonical’s Ubuntu.    [Read more]

Thanks to the dedication and support of our community, KnowledgeTree has been chosen as a finalist in the Best Commercial Open Source Project category at this year's SourceForge Community Choice Awards.

To vote for KnowledgeTree, visit the SourceForge Community Choice Awards page, vote for us in the "Best Commercial Open Source Project" category, and confirm your vote by clicking on the confirmation link sent to your email address.

Don't delay - vote now!

Want to meet the team that make things happen? We compiled a short video for the awards - let us know what you think...

We all know how useful a document management system is for everyday productivity, but some industries rely on their DMS to help them comply with complex regulations around document changes and retention.

I recently had the opportunity to contribute as a guest columnist on the blog of John Mancini, President of the AIIM. In my article, I discussed “8 Things You Need To Know About Using Enterprise Content Management Software for Regulatory Compliance”. Have a look, especially if you’re in a regulated industry.

The AIIM is the global ECM community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize information. The post is part of a broader guest columnist series John is running that covers a broad range of ECM topics. I certainly appreciate being featured on his blog.

We are pleased to announce the release of KnowledgeTree 3.6.1 and the Microsoft^® Office Add-in 1.0.

This release, for both community and commercial editions, includes a number of new features and enhancements, including:

• Standalone Microsoft^® Office Add-in with new features and seamless integration of Office with KnowledgeTree. Commercial only
• Document Type Alerts functionality for managing time-based events. Commercial only
• Configurable electronic signatures for enhanced accountability and compliance. Commercial only
• Improvements to search and indexing engines for higher quality search results.
• Core API and REST interfaces for integration with other applications and services.
• Text extraction engine for improved cross-platform stability.
• Installers and upgrade installers for Windows and Linux in the KnowledgeTree stack.

You can also find more information in the release notes and on Scribd.

Try KnowledgeTree 3.6.1 Commercial Edition | Download KnowledgeTree 3.6.1 Community Edition

I've already introduced the new sales and marketing team members. Now for some insight into the new engineers who help make KnowledgeTree tick:

Mark Holtzhausen, Senior Software Engineer: Mark is primarily a PHP and Javascript OOP developer. His main interest lies in making the most of Web 2.0 type technologies to make use of the interconnectedness of the web. Mark is passionate about standards and microformats. Twitter; LinkedIn

Prince Mbekwa, Senior Software Engineer: Prince was team leader and manager at the Free Software Innovation Unit (University of the Western Cape) for 6 years where he was active in building the African Virtual Open Initiative and Resources project community. He was also an ICT expert for the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission - IOC (UNESCO). Free and Open Source is his passion...

Paul Barrett, Software Engineer: Paul comes from a background in C++ and PHP programming, having worked in both application development and web based services development. He is also a hobbyist composer of eclectic electronica music when time allows.

Jarrett Jordaan, Software Engineer: Jarrett has been a PHP developer since 2005 and has significant experience in the content management space. In his spare time, he does research on time table problems. Ohloh

Serge Meunier, Software Engineer: Serge loves programming, no matter what language involved. His girlfriend and family ensure that he stays well-balanced. He also enjoys fencing, astronomy and ballroom dancing. Twitter   [Read more]

2009 has been an exciting year for KnowledgeTree thus far. In addition to some exciting new product developments and innovations, we have a host of new, experienced and energetic members to welcome to the team. Starting with sales, marketing and admin, new team members include:

Tim Spink, Vice President of Sales: Tim brings more than 18 years of software sales experience to KnowledgeTree, having built and managed several direct and indirect sales teams in the Americas and abroad. Prior to KnowledgeTree Tim was a Sr. Director with rPath Inc. and Vice President of Sales at Solarwinds Inc. (NYSE: SWI). Tim has a deep understanding of Open Source technology gained at Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise. During his 6 years with Red Hat he held various sales management and director positions globally. Prior to Red Hat Inc., Tim held sales management positions at MicroAge Inc. and Merisel Inc. LinkedIn

Rebecca Hirschfield, Product Marketing: Rebecca is a 15+ year veteran of the technology industry with significant experience in product marketing. She joins the Raleigh team after recent employment with rPath and Peopleclick. In her spare time she runs a volunteer group that brings certified therapy dogs and children together for reading activities. www.rebeccah.com; www.seespotread.com

Sharon Taylor, Sales Executive: Sharon, from Surrey in the UK, has significant experience working in startups. Originally a Chartered Surveyor, she worked in a sales position for 6 years at one of the UK's top 10 dealerships. She also enjoys thinking really hard about going to gym...   [Read more]

We've always been strong believers in open standards and are proud to announce that we have recently become sponsor members of OASIS, a consortium focused on driving the definition and uptake of open standards on the web. OASIS is an incubator for a number of draft standards significant in the content management space, in particular, the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) and the recently initiated Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM) specifications.

There has been quite a bit of excitement about the CMIS specification of late. I think this is particularly because of the amount of momentum it is gaining, as a result of significant buy-in from a number of ECM vendors. Certainly, a well-adopted standard services interface could only make for a richer content management ecosystem, which would be nothing but great news for end-users. We believe that the benefits of the specification are clear, and that as its adoption reaches critical mass customers will inevitably begin to demand compliance from vendors.

The far younger ICOM specification has yet to receive the same amount of attention but certainly has similar potential for disruption in the collaboration space. ICOM aims to bridge the gap between the broad range of collaboration services around shared workspaces, communication, content, coordination and social networking.    [Read more]

Just ten years ago, no one could have predicted that a black man would be elected to the office of President of the United States. Perhaps not coincidentally, no one would have predicted that another minority would also reach the highest office in the land, but it has.

I’m speaking of course, about open source software. Barack Obama’s CIO, Vivek Kundra is raising the profile of open source software throughout the federal government in a move that can only be seen as positive for commercial open source vendors.

Although some doubt remains that federal agencies and their purchasing agents will embrace open source, it’s clear to me that many already have. For example, KnowledgeTree, a commercial open source document management system, is already in use in US federal, state and local governments as well as numerous international government bodies, including the General Services Administration (GSA), Federal Aviation Administration, Georgia Department of Audits, Colorado Department of Corrections, Cuyahoga County Veterans Service Commission, Texas Public Defenders Office, New Zealand Customs Service, TNO Defence (Security and Safety) Netherlands, Government of St. Lucia, Ministry of Legal Affairs (Trinidad and Tobago), New South Wales Treasury (Australia), and the United Nations Environment Programme (Kenya) (to name a few!).

While it is evident that there is still much work to be done to encourage the use of open source software in the public sector, government in the US, Europe and even as far afield as Africa are themselves pioneering the use of open source.   [Read more]

Here at KnowledgeTree, we recognize the importance of community contributions and the role that the community plays in driving product development and innovation.

To reward outstanding community contributions and contributors, we will be showcasing a top KnowledgeTree community project every couple of months. To kick off the showcase, I interviewed Istvan Hubay Cebrian from Sybase Portugal, (KnowledgeTree Premium partner) about his project, the "User Registration Plug-in".

DW: Briefly, describe this project and what it entails?
The "User Registration Plug-in" has been developed with one premise in mind - to allow anonymous users to individually register and access documents stored in KnowledgeTree. The plug-in itself provides smarty templates for the registration form, registration message, and the confirmation message. The plug-in's main features include the registration itself as well as e-mail account activation to facilitate (to a limited extent) identity confirmation.

DW: What inspired you to create this project?
This project has been created to provide a functionality a client of ours requested. Specifically, our client had requested a public Document Management System. They required anonymous users to only be able to browse through the available documents (no downloading, exporting or checking-out) and if one wished to download a particular document then he/she would need to register first. In light of this request, a plug-in was developed so that this same code could be given back to the community.

DW: What business problems were you looking at solving specifically with this project?   [Read more]

Yesterday was our first Appcelerator Titanium vs. Adobe Air demo. We have begun rewriting the KT Tools application and want to create an application that would run on Windows, Linux and Mac.

The first step in this process though is to find the right tool for the job, and Tohir and I were given a week and a half to come up with a prototype for Air, using the existing code base from the KnowledgeTree Office Add-in, and then modifying the code to run in an Air app.   [Read more]