For the last few weeks we've been dogfooding the first product built using KnowledgeTree's next generation of client technology, the KnowledgeTree Add-in for Microsoft Office. Tohir and Donald have already written about some of the building blocks behind the new technology and so I thought I'd put together a quick video tour of the KnowledgeTree Office Add-in from a user perspective.
We already have great extensions for Microsoft Office, but this new version is by far the cleanest integration we have yet built. As Tohir mentioned, we'll be leveraging this new user interface technology (codenamed "Smurf") throughout our product line, including on the server's web user interface and in a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) Adobe AIR "Explorer" client application.
The Office Add-in as demonstrated currently does a great job of the basics of accessing KnowledgeTree from within Microsoft Office applications: retrieve and store versions of documents from the KnowledgeTree document management repository while not having to change how you work when using Microsoft Office. Our aim is however to provide significantly more richness than just this:
Our goal is to provide richer document management capabilities than the native Microsoft SharePoint interfaces built into Microsoft Office applications, all sitting in front of a light-weight, open source, cross-platform server.
Of particular interest to our open source community is the new set of SOAP and REST APIs that make this all possible, and the maturing of the existing KTAPI layer to version 1.0. More on this from the engineering team once we near release.
Expect a beta of this new product over the next few weeks.