The KnowledgeTree Office Add-in has been available for Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) since early 2009. It uses Office 2007’s Custom Task Panes to display a view into the KnowledgeTree Document Management System (DMS), allowing amongst other functionality quick-and-dirty downloads (both for view and editing) and uploads of documents straight from Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007. This means that users don’t have to log into the web interface to interact with their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents!

Office 2003 does not natively support Custom Task Panes. However, a great number of users (including KnowledgeTree customers) still use this version of Office, and it became vital that we deliver the functionality offered by the Office 2007 Add-in to these users. But how to emulate the Office 2007 Custom Task Panes in Office 2003?

Add-in Express, the third-party library that IMHO is indispensable when creating Office Add-ins, have developed their own implementation of Task Panes that can be used in Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, versions 2000 – 2007. Using this technology, we were able to port the Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 functionality to Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2003. And to make the solution even more elegant, a single installer can be used for either Office 2003 or Office 2007, meaning we don’t have to maintain two different versions!

KnowledgeTree Office 2003 Add-in:

The same view from Office 2007:

UPDATE 09/03/2010: Please note that the KnowledgeTree Office Add-in 2003 has not been released yet; please watch this space for the release date!

When we sat down to architect our next generation KnowledgeTree Explorer, we agreed on several design and business principles that we regarded as must-have, fundamental cornerstones of our new product: cross-platform availability, component re-use, maintainability, Rich Internet Application (RIA), thin client architecture.

A sneak preview of our new KnowledgeTree Explorer (running on a Mac no less):

Platform independency
We realized very early that “desktop” is no longer synonymous with “Windows”, and saw from our diverse customer base that users require client (desktop) applications that run on Linux and Mac as well as on Windows. The most obvious choice of technology to deliver a truly cross-(OS) platform desktop application was Adobe AIR (http://www.adobe.com/products/air) since AIR applications run on any platform and operating system that support the AIR runtime (which includes Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows).

AIR implements WebKit (http://webkit.org), an open source web browser engine, which allows desktop applications to run in a scaled-down browser on the desktop. And since this browser is platform-independent, KnowledgeTree Explorer can run on any OS that supports the browser.

Rich Internet Application (RIA)   [Read more]

VCS Root Settings
Having recently migrated our Version Control System from SVN to Git, we needed to update our continuous integration (CI) environment to use Git. CruiseControl.NET works excellently with SVN, but does not support Git. A quick search revealed that a community plugin for Git (available from github, of course ;) ) has been created for JetBrains' TeamCity. I jumped at the opportunity to test this setup.

What you will need:
1 - TeamCity (v4.0.2 was the latest when going to press)
2 - Git TeamCity plugin (make sure to get this commit; apparently it has been merged into the master branch)
3 - maven - needed to compile the plugin (latest version is 2.0.10)

Steps:
1 - Install TeamCity: pretty straight-forward, see this post for guidance. (Tip: make sure that both the TeamCity Web Server and TeamCity Build Agent Service services have been started - it may be necessary to run the TeamCity Build Agent Service under a local user account and not the local System account - this can be configured during install of TeamCity or after).
2 - Build the Git plugin using maven. (Tip: make sure that your environment variables are set up correctly!).
3 - Install the Git plugin:    [Read more]