Mon Dieu! I’m still amazed by the vibrancy and ardor of the French open source community, as evidenced by their participation in the recent Open World Forum in Paris. Granted, there was a home field advantage at work, but I was still swept up in their excitement over the growing use of open source for both enterprise and SMB.

One item of particular note is that many French systems integrators are focusing purely on open source applications. Even those that were traditionally proprietary software implementers have established open source departments or practice groups. For example, Accenture was a sponsor of the event – not really a company that we think about as having a stake in open source, but there they were. At least in Europe, Accenture is seeing supporting open source as a very viable business opportunity.

A recent market survey by research firm, Markness, in France shows that 96% of the public sector is using open source. Next to running databases and web sites, open source is mostly used for IT administration. Markness expects that in 2011 some 63 percent of firms and organizations will use open source office applications.

Already, many municipalities are moving away from Microsoft-based environments toward a Linux OS and FOSS, like OpenOffice.org. The French Gendarmerie has saved 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org in lieu of Microsoft Windows and Office.    [Read more]

Earlier today we announced the availability of a KnowledgeTree Release Script for Kofax Capture. As discussed in our announcement, the script outputs processed documents and their properties (metadata) in a format accepted by KnowledgeTree Hot Folders. The result is an end-to-end solution for document capture and management. Scan your paper-based invoices in at one end, let Kofax's OCR, barcode recognition and other imaging technologies extract the properties, and output everything to a secure, and centralized document repository for processing and storage.

KnowledgeTree Hot Folders is a simple, high-volume integration interface for third party applications, such as back-office document imaging workflow applications and fax servers. It is a Windows service designed to monitor and automatically process content copied or moved to a specified Windows file share.

KnowledgeTree already provides a number of easy-to-use interfaces for importing content but there are two distinct advantages to using KnowledgeTree Hot Folders:    [Read more]

Earlier today we released a new version of the KnowledgeTree Drop Box, our quick and easy tool for uploading content from the Windows Desktop to your personal workspace folder. After a successful beta period of over a year, we feel that the Drop Box has reached a stage of maturity justifying the dropping of the "Beta" tag from the release name.

This release includes an overhaul of the session management mechanism, as well as a few patches for issues found in the previous beta editions. For more information please see the relevant release notes.

KnowledgeTree Drop Box 1.1 is available with both KnowledgeTree Commercial and Community Editions.

Over the past couple of months we have been slowly chipping away at a PHP-based implementation of the draft CMIS specification. Today we’re releasing an early snapshot of KnowledgeTree, containing the first parts of our working CMIS interface. Our intention being to give you, our community, a chance to download, test and send us feedback on the implementation.

In addition to the snapshot, we are also publishing the first version of the KnowledgeTree/Drupal module, which Paul Barrett mentioned in his blog a few weeks ago. This early version provides basic document browsing functionality, from within Drupal, and should give you a great idea of the type of integration made easy by CMIS. It also provides a strong base for future integration with Drupal and will hopefully fuel further development in months to come.

For more information on our CMIS implementation and a list tested clients, see the KnowledgeTree CMIS Interface primer on our wiki and the KnowledgeTree-Drupal project page. To download the snapshot, visit our Community Edition download page or just retrieve the latest source from our github repository.

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]

We've just released RC2 of the KnowledgeTree Add-in for Microsoft Office. This version fixes 3 issues found in the previous release candidate. For more details, see the release notes listed below -

• Download
• Installation instructions
• Release notes

Note that the Add-in requires the installation of a server-side patch to function correctly. See the installation instructions for more details.

Please direct any feedback to community |AT| knowledgetree |DOT| com. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Last week Day challenged CMS vendors to rate themselves against the reality-check checklist, suggested by CMSWatch’s Kas Thomas. Now, we don't provide WCM functionality and our focus is on being a point document management solution but, we thought that it would still be a worthwhile exercise to find out how well we measured up to the criteria in the checklist.

These are the rules:

• A CMS vendor is challenged to honestly answer all items on the “Reality checklist for vendors” suggested by CMSWatch’s Kas Thomas (aka the “we-get-it checklist for vendors”).
• If possible the vendor has supply screenshots, links or other means to make it easy to verify the answers.
• The answers also need to be supplied in a short form of one to three stars (denoting “no”, “sort-of”, “yes”).
• Answering all questions on his blog allows the vendor tag some other WCMS vendors.
• A tagged vendor should provide a link back to the blog that tagged him.

Here's our response:

“WE GET IT” CHECKLIST FOR VENDORS

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

We provide Windows and Linux installers as well as a source release intended for use in manual installations.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.    [Read more]

We're proud to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the new KnowledgeTree Add-in for Microsoft Office. This is a feature-complete preview of the final version and is just about 95% of the way to being production-ready. The only things missing are a few small tweaks here and there and the integration of the server component with the KnowledgeTree Stack.

In addition to the functionality available in the first beta, a new email action and user comment dialogs have been added to this version. The email action will save you time, by allowing you to share documents without having to open your email client. Comment dialogs record comments, for auditing purposes, whenever content is edited. There have also been a number of small updates to the general look and feel of the Add-in.

• Download installer
• Installation instructions
• Release notes

Lastly, thanks to everyone who sent us feedback on the first beta release. We encourage you to try RC1 and continue assisting us, by sending your thoughts to community |AT| knowledgetree |DOT| com.

Last Friday, I attended the annual PHP UK Conference, in London. I enjoyed a number of very interesting tech talks and was impressed with the quality of the event. There was a good mixed turn-out of corporate representatives and community members, from the UK and various other parts of the world. Everyone seemed in high spirits and was eager to chat and exchange ideas. I’ve included what I thought were some of the event highlights below:    [Read more]

If you don't fancy the "Smurf-blue" motif used in the new Office Add-in, why not try another theme? ExtJS, the JavaScript framework we used to implement the Add-in interface, is fully themable and there are a number of community developed themes available on the web. I've recently been trying out some of these themes and thought that I should share my notes on how to configure one.

To install a new theme, follow the steps below -

1. Download a theme from the ExtJS Extensions webpage;

(I'd personally recommend the Gray and Olive themes.)

2. Extract it into the Ext resources directory:

/knowledgeTree/ktoffice/thirdpartyjs/ext/resources

3. Point the Add-in at the new theme's stylesheet:
• Open the following file in a text editor:

/knowledgeTree/ktoffice/js/interface/office2007.js

• Add the following code snipet to the end of the file:

(Note that this reference points to the 'gray' theme - 'xtheme-gray.css'. For other themes, point to the relevant stylesheet)

---snip---
document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="'+thirdpartyJsPath+'/ext/resources/css/xtheme-gray.css" />');
---snip---


4. Open Internet Explorer and clear the cache (Delete Browsing History...).

Open Word, Excel or PowerPoint and the KnowledgeTree Office Add-in panel should appear with the new theme applied.