KnowledgeTree

: KnowledgeTree on the Mac

2008-02-19T08:31:10+00:00

We don’t yet officially support running the KnowledgeTree server on Macs due to complications around getting all of KnowledgeTree’s dependancies working on OS X. In particular, OpenOffice.org’s dependancy on X11 (and not native Aqua) makes putting together an easy to install, commercially supported stack quite complicated. (A native Aqua port of OpenOffice.org is ostensibly on the way but there hasn’t been a development release since July 2007 )-: )

There are however two routes to getting the KnowledgeTree server working on the Mac:

installing from source code: installing and enabling Apache, PHP5, MySQL, Java, X11 and OpenOffice for your Mac and then following the KnowledgeTree “Source Only” install instructions (this is the harder install route);
using BitRock’s very cool BitNami stack for KnowledgeTree, an easy to use “one-click” install of KnowledgeTree (and most of its dependencies) for a variety of platform’s, including the Mac (this is the easy way to install KnowledgeTree).

The BitNami KnowledgeTree stack is currently based on KnowledgeTree 3.5.2 Beta 1 but should be updated to a newer version sometime in the near future. Whilst this is a really slick and easy way to install most of KnowledgeTree’s dependancies BitNami still doesn’t ship with Java (J2SE), the Lucene Indexer enabled and OpenOffice installed. As a result, you will still need to follow the Source Only instructions mentioned above (and tailor appropriately for Mac OS X) to get document full-text indexing and KnowledgeTree’s powerful search capabilities working properly across document contents (metadata should still be indexed as it is database-bound).

BitRock, the guys who provide KnowledgeTree’s certified stack technology, have also added a number of other stacks to their BitNami portal, covering popular CMS’s, blog applications, bug trackers and the like. Well worth a look.

BitNami’s KnowledgeTree installer running on OS X 10.5.2 Leopard:

And the welcome page (note that BitNami’s Apache runs on port 8080 to avoid conflict with OS X’s own Apache instance):

As mentioned above, the BitNami installer doesn’t install all dependancies and KnowledgeTree notifies you of this on the Administrator’s dashboard:

And the BitNami stack’s PHP Info:

: Amazon Simple Storage Service Outage - Some Learnings

2008-02-16T05:42:54+00:00

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced an outage earlier today, which affected KnowledgeTreeLive and its users. The outage was quite widely reported.

KnowledgeTreeLive is in beta and so this was a great way to learn about our contingency planning, both from a technology perspective but also process and communication.

The pundits appear to be pointing to major holes in the cloud computing model which I think is somewhat exaggerating the impact and significance of today. All systems have issues, and this is not entirely unexpected. To provide some context here, we recently experienced outages with our (expensive) hosting provider, RackSpace, who are supposed to be best in the business (and we were by no means the only parties affected). Amazon has had a really great track-record of keeping S3 up and running for the last few years (over 99.993% of the time) and one or two small, isolated outages are acceptable and indeed, expected.

There are however some learnings suggested by others that I do hope Amazon will take to heart.

This is all well and good but it is up to us companies who leverage cloud computing technologies to provide our customers with a innovative (and reasonably priced) services, to ensure that we engineer our systems appropriately to gracefully deal with these situations.

What this outage meant for KnowledgeTreeLive users

During the period of the outage, all documents stored in Amazon S3 were safe and unaffected.
We experienced problems with the creation of new KnowledgeTreeLive accounts, particularly if you asked for demo data to be placed into your repository. Our support guys picked up on these pretty quickly and contacted the users affected by this.
Users weren’t able to upload new documents, not a great state but what we think is an appropriate behavior - we want users to be certain that their documents are stored safely in persistent storage.
Users weren’t able to download documents they had previously stored. This is certainly not an ideal situation and we’ll be investigating how we can implement a cache of documents within our cluster, probably utilizing the distributed filesystem between the various front-end web server appliances.
We couldn’t start up new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud AMI’s and if we needed to due to a significant increase in load we would have had to take the entire system into maintenance mode. Maintenance Mode and other fail-safes are managed from outside of the Amazon cloud.

Some learnings for KnowledgeTreeLive

We need to investigate a “Hot Cache” for documents uploaded to KnowledgeTreeLive, most likely leveraging a distributed filesystem running between our web server appliances. This will allow our customers to continue to have access to their documents during an S3 outage.
We need to be better at keeping users informed about what’s going on. We have a KnowledgeTreeLive Beta blog and send an RSS feed of the blog to the KnowledgeTreeLive dashboard, but didn’t do it fast enough this time around.

We’re meeting early this coming week to discuss how we can plug these technology and process holes and I’m likely to blog about the outcomes.

: Intermittent Back-end Amazon S3 Errors

2008-02-15T19:49:58+00:00

Earlier today we experienced intermittent failures reading from, and writing to, the Amazon Simple Storage Service. This would have affected some account creations and the reading of writing of documents to KnowledgeTreeLive. KnowledgeTreeLive does attempt to retry writes to the S3 repository and, if it fails, will notify the user of the failed upload of a document.

It is understood that Amazon has resolved the issue and service has stabilized.

: System Status 21:12 UTC 15 January 2008

2008-01-16T09:14:44+00:00

We appear to have sorted out our JIRA issue tracker for now. We are encountering issues with it periodically and hope to have a more permanent fix in place soon.

: System Status: 09:11 UTC 15 January 2008

2008-01-15T09:12:43+00:00

We’re having intermittent issues communicating with our ticketing system from within KnowledgeTreeLive. This will only affect access to the ticketing system for bug reporting.

We’re working on the problem and hope to resolve it shortly.

: Refresh Completed - 07:00 UTC

2007-12-20T07:04:22+00:00

We have successfully completed a refresh today! This refresh sees the base system migrated from KnowledgeTree 3.4.3 to KnowledgeTree 3.4.5. Various stability fixes, improvements and bug fixes that are specific to the Live offering were also included. Enjoy!

: KnowledgeTreeLive is out of Maintenance Mode (19:00 UTC)

2007-12-17T19:26:24+00:00

What was initially assumed to be a DDOS attack turned out to be a corrupted NFS mount. All services have been restored to normal operation.

: KnowledgeTreeLive is Currently in Maintenance Mode (16:30 UTC)

2007-12-17T16:33:29+00:00

We’ve taken KnowledgeTreeLive into maintenance mode and are investigating a possible distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) against our cluster. Our systems engineers are currently performing virtualization ju-jitsu within the cloud and we expect to restore service shortly.

: Data in the Cloud

2007-12-17T07:13:39+00:00

Amazon have announced the next piece of the puzzle for enterprise application cloud computing: Amazon SimpleDB, the database in the cloud. SimpleDB is a quasi-relational database accessed via web services. You can grow your datamodel and data on the fly without worrying about indexing, storage capacity etc. All the underlying infrastructure is taken care of by Amazon.

We’ve had the ability to store Binary Large Object (BLOB) data for some time in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. SimpleDB is a significant piece in the enterprise cloud computing puzzle as it provides a persistent, addressable storage medium for non-BLOB data.

While SimpleDB has great potential, the beta has limitations on the number of domains, size of domain datasets and maximum query time. We can’t yet port KnowledgeTree to SimpleDB and our MySQL clustering technology will still be around for a while yet. We will however most certainly continue building out KnowledgeTreeLive’s (our on-demand/SaaS document management software) management, clustering and potentially “self-healing” capabilities using SimpleDB. We’ve been lucky to be invited to the closed beta and will be starting to muck around with SimpleDB over the next few days.

: System Status - 09:05 UTC

2007-12-13T09:05:41+00:00

Maintenance has been completed successfully.

: System Status - 08:05 UTC

2007-12-13T08:03:37+00:00

KnowledgeTreeLive will be put into routine maintenance mode for five minutes between 08:30 UTC and 09:00 UTC.

: System Status - 16:10 UTC

2007-11-20T16:28:30+00:00

We experienced a temporary database connectivity issue. No loss of data occurred. Only one of our database servers was affected by this, and we were able to bring in another server that was on hot-standby.

We are putting additional safeguards in place to ensure that this does not happen again.

: System Status - 12:15 UTC

2007-11-20T12:38:24+00:00

Maintenance was completed withing the maintenance window period, and all services are back to normal operation.

: System Status - 09:00 UTC

2007-11-20T10:41:06+00:00

We experienced a failure of one of our MySQL servers this morning, and as a result there was a brief interruption of service.

KnowledgeTreeLive will need to be put into maintenance mode briefly again. The expected maintenance window is 15 minutes and will start at 11:45 UTC.

: KnowledgeTreeLive Architecture Webinar and Storage, Language Pack Updates

2007-11-16T09:20:20+00:00

I recently participated in a webinar conducted by rPath as part of their Webinar Series. The webinar focussed on how we had built out KnowledgeTreeLive, our on-demand document management software, using Amazon’s EC2 and virtual appliances. rPath have a recording of the webinar available on their website.

On the subject of KnowledgeTreeLive, we’ve increased the amount of storage each user is allowed to 10GB, making the total minimum storage available to an account 50GB! We’ve also added several language packs to KnowledgeTreeLive: French, German, Spanish, Catalan and Simplified Chinese.

rPath’s blurb for the webinar follows:

On this webinar COO Daniel Chalef explains how the company strategically used the combination of scalable, virtual infrastructure from Amazon EC2 and virtual appliances to offer KnowledgeTreeLive as a hosted solution. You’ll learn how the company:

Saved time by using rPath technology to build its virtual appliance format;
Saved money by avoiding the need to build its own hosted datacenter infrastructure and to re-architect its software for multi-tenancy; and
Increased its marketshare potential in the crowded space of document management products with a competitive, on-demand offering.

Guest speaker Phil Wainewright, strategist for emerging software industry trends and author of the ZDNet Software as Services blog, also presents his independent perspective on virtual appliances as a fast and cost-effective route to market for SaaS.

: System Status - 15:55 UTC

2007-11-13T16:00:03+00:00

We are currently experiencing issues with, ironically enough, our issue logging system. Our engineers are attending to the problem, and it should be resolved soon.

: rPath Software as a Service Webinar

2007-11-12T10:13:50+00:00

I’ll be participating in a webinar tomorrow, organized by rPath, on the topic of virtual appliances and software as a service. Phil Wainewright, strategist for emerging software industry trends and author of the ZDNet Software as Services blog, will also present his perspective on virtual appliances as a route to market for SaaS.

: System Status - 16:35 UTC

2007-11-09T16:41:03+00:00

We have completed a refresh of KnowledgeTreeLive today. Included in the refresh where the addition of language packs to KnowledgeTreeLive, enabling users to select their interface language. We have also increased the storage space per user to 10GB for new accounts. We will be rolling this out to existing accounts in the coming weeks.

Other minor improvements and bug fixes were also included.

: KnowledgeTree Running In IIS

2007-10-31T16:04:58+00:00

Having found an old Windows XP laptop on our systems manager’s desk I decided to try installing KnowledgeTree 3.5.1 within IIS 5.1 and lo and behold, it was quite simple. By 11pm last night I had got KnowledgeTree 3.5.1 Open Source running under Apache, IIS FastCGI and IIS ISAPI, with IIS ISAPI being the clear winner in terms of performance.

Our recent move to “modern” PHP (i.e. PHP5) has certainly made these sorts of things far easier. I’ve written a very high-level HOWTO on the KnowledgeTree wiki.

: System Status - 08:58 UTC

2007-10-25T09:00:04+00:00

We have just completed some maintenance that resolved the following issue:

Access to the JIRA issue tracker is failing intermittently. This will affect dashboard access and logging trouble tickets

The “My Issues” dashlet is fully functional again. No interruption of service occurred as a result of the maintenance.

: Edit Documents in the KnowledgeTree Respository Online

2007-10-19T06:00:14+00:00

Rene Kanzler has released a new version of his View All Online plugin for KnowledgeTree which now allows for the editing of .doc, .sxw, .odt, .xls, .sxc, .odp, .sxi, .ppt and .pps documents that are stored in the KnowledgeTree repository using Zoho Office. There are a number of other cool KnowledgeTree extensions available within the plugin. Its great to see community contributions like this!

: We’ve come so far already…

2007-10-17T13:11:32+00:00

KnowledgeTree has kept me insanely busy since we started commercializing such that this is the first bit of time I’ve had to fill everyone in on our conquests in the sales channel.

We now have so many commercial customers from a multitude of industries across the globe. The learning curve has been very steep but I’m pleased the way our sales team has grown, how the systems have evolved, and about the sales teams’ level of commitment to servicing offshore customers from our Cape Town office (they often work late into the night to get it right).

As is often the case, those closest to a system don’t appreciate the way others outside the system perceive it. A short conversation with 2 prospective customers recently led me to download KnowledgeTree 3.0 in order to gauge the progression since our first foray into the world of commercial open source. I was amazed at how far we’ve come in the past 12 months… and with the team growing monthly, we expect more and faster going forward.

To the administrators & management, to the engineers, to the support team, to the technical writers, to our community, to the coffee manufacturers & suppliers, and to anyone else who has contributed even in the tiniest way… thank you!

: KnowledgeTree Open Source Goes GPL v3

2007-10-17T10:31:25+00:00

I mentioned in a previous post our intention to release forthcoming versions of KnowledgeTree Open Source Edition under an OSI-approved license. With the release of the GPL v3 and its recent OSI-approval, and the OSI-approval of the Common Public Attribution License we felt that the time was right for a change. My previous post also looked at what we wanted from a new open source license, covering both the community and commercial drivers that are important to us.

We have settled on version 3 of the GNU General Public License and will be releasing all future releases of KnowledgeTree Open Source Edition under this license, starting with 3.5.0 next week. This wasn’t an easy decision to make: the CPAL and several other licenses are compelling. CPAL in particular, would be a relatively easy switch for us: the KnowledgeTree Public License is an MPL+ license. The “+” denotes that we have added extra terms to the license, usually requiring attribution through the use of a logo and copyright notice. The CPAL is also based on the Mozilla Public License and the switch would therefore have been far easier to manage, whether it be educating our sales and support team, or our community.

Switching licenses isn’t something you want to undertake too often and is certainly not an easy task. To this end we wanted to be absolutely certain that the license we utilized was appropriate for our needs. As previously mentioned, we workshopped what we wanted from the license terms and I’ll cover off our thinking around three of these below.

Firstly, we wanted to a license that would be widely accepted by our community and the open source community at large. We did not want to risk the license we were using to be, over time, relegated to the peripheries of the open source world. We wanted to use a license that would have wide acceptance and momentum behind it. What this would mean is that our community would fully understand their rights and obligations around utilizing the software and would not be dissuaded from doing so because they felt they would need to undertake a lengthy and costly legal exercise to determine if they could use our code. Acceptance would also mean that a legal precedent would develop around the license and that bodies would spring up to defend the rights of licensors and licensees (the GPL Violations project is a good example of this).

In terms of acceptance, the CPAL had a difficult birth and is certainly not yet widely accepted. The Affero GPL v3 (more below) has not yet been published and is also not that likely to be as immediately recognizable and understood as the GPL v3.

There are however problems with the GPL v3. Despite being the latest in the line of the most widely-used open source licenses it is still untested: we have no idea how different courts will interpret its terms. In fact, in an effort to become somewhat “jurisdiction independent”, the GPL v3 steers away from using commonly utilized legal terms such as “derivative work” and attempts to define analogues that are likely to be interpreted more uniformly (”modified version”). In my opinion this has been somewhat at the cost of readability and density.

Two major issues that attracted much debate within our team were: user interface attribution provisions (as provided for in the CPAL, and in MPL+ licenses such as the KnowledgeTree Public License and the SocialText and SugarCRM Public License) and network use provisions (to require redistribution of sourcecode in Software-as-a-Service scenarios and found in the Affero GPL, Open Software License and CPAL). There were strong arguments on our team for and against these requirements, coming from both business and idealogical perspectives (open source is, for many of us, far more than just business).

Strong user interface attribution (which is enforced in most MPL+ licenses) has recently come in for some serious criticism by leading members of the open source community. These licenses require elements of the majority copyright holder’s branding to remain visible on the application’s user interface. Many in the open source community have never been comfortable with what they perceive as “badgeware”. Over a year or so ago we felt that we needed this sort of protection against the forking of our source code or (more likely and more threatening to a commercial open source company) the utilization of the KnowledgeTree source code by an OEM-type entity without them giving “something” back (money, code, publicity). Section 5 of the GPL v3 anticipates the need for some level of attribution and requires that “conveying modified source versions” include the retention of “Appropriate Legal Notices” (which may include a copyright statement on the user interface). [UPDATE: As pointed out by Richard Fontana from the SFLC, section 7(b) permits copyright holders to optionally require preservation of “reasonable author attributions” in the Appropriate Legal Notices (in addition to copyright notices). This is something we are in fact doing.]
We’ve also matured our thinking, built out our community, learnt a lot more about our business and now believe that a strong copyleft license is more appropriate for us: it is far more friendly to an open source community and far more likely to dissuade commercial use of the code in circumstances where profit is involved (if you, a commercial user of the KnowledgeTree source code, want to ensure that your derivative work does not need to be redistributed, you’re going to have to license the code from us under new terms).

Another important discussion for us was whether we wanted and needed the license to view redistribution very broadly and thus interpret the serving of an application over a network as distribution of the code. Unfortunately the Affero GPL v3 (which would provide for this) has not yet been published. We discussed this at length and came to the conclusion that even if it were available, it would still be somewhat exotic (along with several other licenses that attempt to address “network use” and redistribution). We evaluated both the community and commercial aspects of not having this sort of control over the code. The primary concern was in fact commercial: competition with our own SaaS offering, KnowledgeTreeLive. We were however comfortable that the GPL v3’s “Appropriate Legal Notices” provisions mitigated some of this risk.

To summarize a relatively long “brain dump”:

the GPL v3 is very like to gain significant momentum and acceptance and we think it makes good business and community sense to be part of this momentum;
the GPL, being strongly copyleft, is a very community friendly license as it strongly supports the redistribution of source code, more so than the MPL. This also makes it a very friendly license for commercial open source vendors who would like to dual-license their software.
the GPL v3 provides for a level of attribution that makes us comfortable;
the GPL v3’s lack of “network use provision” could be mitigated by the license’s copyright attribution requirements.

: System Status - Saturday 12:38 UTC

2007-10-13T12:40:11+00:00

Hello all,

Persisting very large documents to the document store is failing at times if the stream took a long time and part of the transaction switches over to another web server within the cluster.

This issue, reported in a previous post, has been resolved.

Access to the issue tracker is a bit wonky and so we’re going to disable it until and test further.

Daniel

: System Status - Saturday 12:22 UTC

2007-10-13T12:26:30+00:00

Hello all,

We’re currently experiencing the following issues within the KnowledgeTreeLive Beta cluster and apologize for any inconvenience they may cause. We’re working to fix them and will keep you posted on these.

Access to the JIRA issue tracker is failing intermittently. This will affect dashboard access and logging trouble tickets.
Persisting very large documents to the document store is failing at times if the stream took a long time and part of the transaction switches over to another web server within the cluster.

We hope to have these issues fixed within the next few hours.

Daniel

: It’s (a)Live!

2007-10-12T06:16:48+00:00

On Tuesday we announced the launch of KnowledgeTreeLive, the hosted on-demand offering of the KnowledgeTree. We got some really great press coverage and have had a good number of sign-ups (far surpassing my expectations).

The launch was certainly not free of hick-ups: we had been sending sign-up emails directly from our EC2 cluster for a few days when we realized that a large number of the emails weren’t actually being delivered. It turns out that many of the EC2 dynamic IP addresses are already blacklisted by numerous email block-lists for spam violations and it just so happened that our servers had been assigned those IPs. We’re now smart-hosting email through one of our servers that isn’t in the cloud and hopefully registration emails are now getting through!

We live and learn!

: Integrate with the KnowledgeTree Webservice using Borland Delphi

2007-10-10T12:02:37+00:00

Bjarte Kalstveit Vebjørnsen has contributed a port of the KTWSAPI library to Borland Delphi. The KTWSAPI is an object model based on the functions exposed via the KnowledgeTree SOAP Webservice. Bjarte has created a port of the PHP KTWSAPI object model to Delphi 2006 using components from the Indy Project. His contribution can be found in [...]

: Optaros Open Source Document Management Magic Quadrant and Gartner ECM Quadrant Thoughts

2007-10-07T07:56:09+00:00

Bruno von Rotz and colleagues at Optaros recently put together an interesting webinar exploring the open source document management space. They produced a nifty magic quadrant and KnowledgeTree isn’t doing too badly, considering that the KnowledgeTree application’s primary goal isn’t to solve large enterprise document management challenges. We’re still committed to helping the very large number of smaller organizations and work-teams manage collaboration, control and compliance challenges.

SMB and departmental applications need:

to be easy to install: KnowledgeTree has a single-click installer for both Windows and Linux (see a previous post with some 3rd-party commentary on how easy it is compared to another well known open source DM player);
easy to purchase: clear indication of pricing on promotional material, particularly on your website and clearly defined product offering with no surprises (your customer needn’t have a BS to work out what it is going to cost them);
easy to use: clear, well constructed user interface, significant amount of documentation written at an appropriate level (quick start guides, full user manuals, wikis, API documentation) and available within the application, in a downloadable form, and online.
meet SMB and departmental functional requirements and at the right price: you’re never going to be able to have every single piece of functionality that all of your customers desire, but you can find a middle ground between functionality and price-point that satisfies a very significant number of your customers who are your primary market segment.

Along somewhat similar lines to the Optaros quadrant, Alan Pelze-Sharpe, an analyst at CMSWatch, comments on the 2007 Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant and the absence of KnowledgeTree and its open source contemporaries in his recent De-mystifying the Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant article. Is open source content management still the elephant in the parlour?

: Open Source in Action at the KnowledgeTree Forge

2007-08-28T15:01:06+00:00

In a 2006 Optaros white paper (Seth Gotlieb and Sebastian Wohlrapp, ‘Unleashing the Power of Open Source in Document Management‘. Optaros, March 17, 2006), the authors refer to “… the state of information chaos in many organizations”. Citing the opportunities for Open Source, the authors state that “… document management is a ‘horizontal’ solution, basically the same business requirements apply regardless of industry or size of companies.”

Why are we telling you this? Well, every day, the KnowledgeTree team works hard to deliver build after build of leading edge document management solutions that serve the two, equally important pillars of our Open Source development and business model - our vibrant Open Source community, and a growing list of satisfied Commercial customers.

While we’re passionate about the free and dynamic spirit of Open Source, the power and continuity of KnowledgeTree’s Open Source Document Management System resides with You, the Open Source community.

Getting You involved is a huge part of our mission, so this month, we’re turning the spotlight on the KnowledgeTree Forge - a community resource and collaborative space where we you can help us build the best Open Source document management system in the world. Ambitious? Why not? Most companies need a special breed of document management, and your contributions can make it happen. Everyone Benefits.

The KnowledgeTree Forge is the repository for community-contributed Plugins (see the Plugins Index and descriptions on the KnowledgeTree Community Wiki). This is the place to download language packs that translate your system into over 20 languages. Some of these are works in progress, but at least you won’t have to start from scratch. Our top project this month is the German Language pack, which has been downloaded nearly 8000 times! Well done to Christian, Hannes, Marcus, Mark, Stefan, and Stephan for your good work.

If the language packs aren’t your thing, you may want to check out the archive of code snippets that others have added back to the project. Contributing back to the project - through Plugins or code - may get your cool features added to the core, so that your future maintenance and upgrade overhead is reduced. Everyone Benefits.

To encourage your involvement, we have a growing set of Developer Documentation, including advice on creating language packs and contributing to KnowledgeTree. We’re hoping to get more of these Tutorials, which reduce the learning curve and help maintain best practice coding standards, and the User Forums are always a good place to openly observe the development process.

The openness of the code means anyone can analyze it to understand how it works, and you can change the system to suit your requirements, and build other applications based on it.
Hopefully, you’ll share your brilliance by adding your projects and tutorials to the Forge.

Carolyn

: Hot Docs! Latest Admin Manual and Install Guide now available

2007-08-03T15:11:19+00:00

The latest versions of the KnowledgeTree Administrator Manual and the KnowledgeTree Install Guides are now available.
If you’re the sort who prefers to download our documentation direct from SourceForge (without the useful links from our funky new website or the KnowledgeTree Documentation site), then you’ll see that, because KnowledgeTree is a Commercial Open Source system, we don’t remove or hide older documentation sets at SourceForge - you can always identify the latest documentation from the last date stamp. In this case:

KnowledgeTree Administrator Manual 2007-08-03
KnowledgeTree Install Guide 2007-07-23

KnowledgeTree Documentation is available for download in PDF format, or you can view the browser-based Online Help, which should be available in a few days.

A Manual is a Manual is a Guide - so what’s up with KnowledgeTree Docs

I realize that you’re probably not rushing to download KnowledgeTree Documentation to read over the weekend or on any lazy sunday at the pool or fireside (depending on where in the world you are) - and if you are, pleeeze drop me a line; I must meet you
So, in an ongoing and continued effort to make things simpler through this Docs review process, I’ve wrestled with structure and content, and with a few of you, dear User Audience, with whom I, normally stuck in a dank writing corner, sometimes have the glorious opportunity to engage with on the topic of what’s hot and what’s very definitely not in the KnowledgeTree docs. Your comment, criticism, and suggestions are always in the back of my mind as I drive my way around the system and journal my findings.

Having said this, we have to satisfy a global, diverse audience. KnowledgeTree has wide application - since it’s commercial open source and simply open source, many different types of organizations and users are able to download the system and implement it in the way that suits them best. We love this groovy energy about you and KnowledgeTree; but for now it means our Documentation has to be a detailed Reference more than definitive ‘How To’ guides. As the product evolves and grows, we’ll build resources on how substantial groups of users and organizations are using the system and be able to develop those ‘How to do this exactly’ type of documents. So tell us who you are, and how you use KnowledgeTree; engage with us to tell us what you want to see in the documentation, and what you like and dislike. Also, if a procedure or description doesn’t work for you, please tell us by logging a documentation issue.
More to the point, this is some of what we did …

merged several procedures to reduce the number of topics
restructured content to make navigating the help and the system more intuitive
verified content, added new features and changes
documented workarounds
added indexes
reduced text where possible to make it more direct, taking care to stick to recognizable technical writing style and avoiding jargon where possible
reduced the number of screenshots - procedures are fully descriptive and the step-by-step style should not leave you lost
we also added a few of those best practice type high level task lists you’ve asked for

Take a look, enjoy, and we look forward to hearing from you as we get the next release of the User Manual ready.

Carolyn

: KnowledgeTree Webservice included in 3.4 STABLE

2007-06-22T15:11:04+00:00

3.4 STABLE is about to be released and includes the KnowledgeTree webservice. The webservice exposes key functions that exist within KnowledgeTree via SOAP so that third parties can easily integrate their applications and KnowledgeTree. The webservice is based on the ktapi object model, which wraps the internal functionality into a layer that simplifies development. Key functionality currently [...]

: Order in ‘Chaos’

2007-06-15T12:04:26+00:00

I’m Carolyn … the technical writer for KnowledgeTree - have been for a while now, so it’s ironic that this is my first blog. I guess that’s because I’ve been busy… busy… busy, documenting and documenting.
Till now, I was a single repository type of gal - a traditional, conservative type, ever loyal to the ‘find it in the Manual’ maxim, but I’m alright now. I’ve finally conceded, and starting putting some of [my] stuff up on the KnowledgeTree Wiki and elsewhere - big step for someone paranoid about having to update content in several places. Do you realize you no longer have just one number and one address (and I’m not talking about the folk with beach houses and apartments in 3 cities all at once). Every day someone gives you the opportunity to own a new number, and a new address. “Remember this link and that number, and these passwords..”, and let’s not get in to your several login names.

Sounds like chaos! Well it is - except that ‘chaos’ is good. Chaos is normal. Our planet and (probably) beyond teams with life, which is dynamic and cyclical and creates newness as revolution becomes evolution. The chaotic world is a continuously changing and dynamically updated state that is informed and formed out of the interaction of a myriad nodes of input, each self-aware and self-centered, and yet intimately intertwined in a bigger creative process. Open Source embodies this non-linear, non static world. Open Source software is the incredible newness that happens on the edge of chaos.

Okay, I finally justified why I can now leave the idea of a non-chaotic documentation set for KnowledgeTree - change is not only as good as a holiday, it is a holiday.

So what’s new on the Wiki?

KnowledgeTree Document Workflow Integration (DWI) Service User Guide

KnowledgeTree Document Workflow Integration (DWI) Service XML Schema

KnowledgeTree Features Summary

A Plugins Index - including functional descriptions

And … did you know WebDAV is now Open Source? Here are the Instructions for Configuring WebDAV on KnowledgeTree Open Source

Online Help for KnowledgeTree at http://docs.knowledgetree.com/
In true chaos spirit, the KnowledgeTree documentation now has a beach house. The traditional documentation set is always updated and available in PDF format at SourceForge, but we wanted to provide the option to view information on the fly. So check out docs.knowledgetree.com - the traditional document set (User, Admin, Install, and other Guides) are available for Online Viewing, or you can download the PDF versions. This is a work in progress since I’m currently updating the documentation for KnowledgeTree 3.4, which promises to be bigger and better (especially better) as always!
This site also includes a few useful Tutorials for developers, and two new White Papers that provide a concise presentation of all the KnowledgeTree Interfaces, from an Integration perspective, and from the Document Import perspective.

enjoy!

: KnowledgeTree Developer Documentation

2007-05-25T13:18:41+00:00

The KnowledgeTree developer documentation is slightly lacking, and we are undertaking an exercise to improve this situation. Over the next few weeks, we will be trying to create tutorials to cover key areas that KnowledgeTree developers need to know about. Recently, I have written two tutorials: How to write a dashboard dashlet How to write an authentication [...]

: KnowledgeTree 3.3.7 STABLE Released

2007-05-25T12:54:38+00:00

The latest stable release of KnowledgeTree has been released. This release includes minor bug fixes and a security issue. The security issue is related to installations authenticating with Active Directory. It is advised that users of the Active Directory authentication upgrade as soon as possible.

: Integrating into the KnowledgeTree web service

2007-04-30T09:12:20+00:00

The latest development release of KnowledgeTree, 3.4.5 DEV, now exposes a SOAP web service. This is opens up the platform so that 3rd parties can easily integrate their applications into the document repository. Documentation can be found at http://docs.knowledgetree.com. A quick start guide is provided with a quick overview of the functionality available. As part of the [...]

: Improved Upgrade Utility

2007-03-05T14:44:42+00:00

The upgrade utility has been improved to provide a database backup and restore functionality. Before attempting any upgrade, it is always best to make a backup. The upgrade utility provides a very easy ‘click-through’ backup procedure, and the restore process is just as easy.

: Monitoring Disk Usage

2007-02-24T17:53:26+00:00

I’ve just been working on two little prototype admin plugins for KnowledgeTree Administrators. The first one is something to monitor disk space, and the other is to assist in cleaning up temporary files. Running out of disk space can cause many serious headaches. Although system administrators should be doing regular maintenance and monitoring system resource utilisation - [...]

: Running KnowledgeTree on PHP 5.2.x

2007-02-22T20:55:23+00:00

I found that KnowledgeTree works out of the box on PHP 5.2.0 and 5.2.1 on Windows XP. I tried to use it on 5.1.6 a few weeks back and all I had was continuous headache with require_once() not working properly and classes being redeclared. So what does this mean? Well, we will be migrating to PHP [...]

: Bulk importing files and metadata

2007-02-22T20:46:09+00:00

I’ve added a script to the KnowledgeTree Forge to assist users in importing files and meta data from other systems. It relies on meta data files based on a .ini configuration file format: [invoice] invoice_date=”2006-01-01″ invoice_no=”001002214″ [client] client_name=”joe bloggs” invoice and client are the names of field sets, and invoice_date, invoice_no and client_name are fields linked to the field sets. The script [...]

: Tag Cloud for KnowledgeTree

2007-02-21T14:31:43+00:00

More than fluffy-white plumes

KnowledgeTree gets a bit of silver lining with the new Tag Cloud plugin. A tag cloud basically serves as a visual representation of data or content on a website. The content or data is weighted and depicted in such a way so as to make it obvious what has a larger occurrence and what occurs less frequently. Still not making sense?…Whats that? An example? No problem

Let’s say you have a basket of fruit made up of:

-4 x apples
-2 x bananas
-10 x oranges
-1 x pear

If you put each type of fruit in their own container, it might end up looking a bit like this:

So without being a mathematical genius you would easily be able to tell at first glance which fruit you have more of, just by looking at the size of the containers. If you guessed oranges, give yourself a gold star….if you didn’t please join little Timmy in corner of the room…thanks

This is how a tag cloud work. Its takes data/content, puts them into ‘containers’ based on specific criteria and you get to see which containers are bigger and which are smaller.

How does it work in KnowledgeTree?

Inside of KnowledgeTree you now have a Tag Cloud dashlet.

You will notice how text elements vary in size. Each text element is actually a tag. These tags are attached to each document you add to the repository, and if you remember our example with the basket of fruit, you can think of these tags as our containers. As each document is assigned a descriptive tag, those documents with the same tag are dropped into their own ‘container’.

Here we see how tags are added.

What you see in the dashlet is a visual representation of this as some tags appear to be bigger than others, indicating that that tag was assigned to more documents than others. So bigger tags = more occurrences and smaller ones = less occurrences. Pretty simple eh?
Clicking on these tags will redirect you a results page displaying all of the documents that have been attached the relevant tag.

The results page.

Conclusion

To some it might seem to be useless fluff, but to others it’s a useful tool allowing you to get a birds-eye view of the kinds of documents being added to your repository. You either like it, or you don’t, but being able to view data in this way is both useful and easy on the eyes.

: Maintaining Database Referential Integrity

2007-02-10T16:49:16+00:00

Never underestimate the value of time spent on database design. Unfortunately, sometimes people know the concepts as they are mostly logical, however the concepts are not always applied. Relational databases have some wonderful features that are not always utilised to the maximum. What might these be? The fundamental concepts behind relational databases is the concept [...]

: KnowledgeTree does RSS

2007-01-29T13:00:42+00:00

RSS? RSS you say? Yes, you heard right, RSS makes its debut in the new commercial and open source release of KnowledgeTree. We’ve pimped the system inside and out with RSS functionality, but before we get into that, a brief overview of what RSS is and what it can do for you.

For all of you out there who have not been formally introduced to RSS or find it just a bit too intimidating of a buzz word to get your head around (like those magical cell phones thingys and TV remotes), drop your stone clubs, lift your knuckles off the cave floor and gather ’round

RDF Site Summary, the first incarnation of RSS was developed in 1999 by Ramanathan V. Guha. This was RSS version 0.91 and the basic concept behind it (as with every version after) was to allow for web syndication….the ability to make website content, or sections thereof available on other sites. These days the acronym has become a bit more obvious in its definition and is known as Really Simple Syndication. By harnessing the power of XML, websites can now provide web surfers and other sites the ability to view a snapshot of their content.

As users of this technology, we are given the ability to filter the vast information available on the web down to content relevant to our needs and also being able to monitor how, when and by whom this content was updated.

Now, if before that brief ‘blah-blah’ session any of you were scratching your head in the hopes of dislodging from your skull the answer to the question of why RSS would be useful for Knowledgetree, I bet you’re all going “Oh! Now I get it!”. So now that we are all savvy to the concept and of RSS, lets continue.

KnowledgeTree has gained RSS functionality in two ways.
First off the system takes on the role of a RSS provider. You can now subscribe to documents and folder via any RSS client (this is also known a RSS aggregator). Provided you have the required privileges to view the file or document, accessing it is as simple as plugging a link into your favourite RSS aggregator and entering your login details (by this, I am referring to your KnowledgeTree user login details).

The second major RSS feature added to KnowledgeTree is its ability to act as a RSS aggregator. What does this mean? It means that you can now monitor your favourite feeds from the convenience of your own dashboard (I know…it sounds like a late-night infomercial, but its true, promise.)

Ok, now if you are still not really getting it (sigh! What am I going to do with you) let’s take a quick stroll through the interface and see where the new RSS features have been added and how to make use of them.

The Dashboard

Here we have the RSS client dashlet. Pretty, isn’t she.

By default, we see the internal RSS view. This feed is directly linked to your document subscriptions. From this view you can monitor every document or folder you are subscribed to. You will notice also that there is a drop-down menu positioned in the top left-hand corner of the dashlet. This menu is used to select another external RSS feed you are subscribed to. This list of external RSS feeds is managed via the link directly to the left of the drop-down menu.

An external RSS feed.

Managing external RSS Feeds

As previously mentioned, you can manage your own personal list of external feeds via this window. If you missed it, this screen is accessed via the ‘Manage External RSS Feeds’ link found on the client dashlet (stay with me now).

KnowledgeTree RSS

The true potential of RSS is harnessed inside of the document explorer section of KnowledgeTree. When browsing through the repository, you will immediately notice the RSS link and logo inside of the action portlet on the left.

This action allows you to do two things. Firstly, by clicking on the ‘RSS’ text, you are redirected to a page which provides you with a brief explanation of how to use the RSS link.

You will notice that on this page you will find the URL you can use to subscribe the feed for the selected document/folder. This link can be used in any RSS client/aggregator. An explanation of the use of the RSS icon is also provided…which leads us back to the action in left portlet bar. Next to the RSS text link, you will find an RSS icon. Unlike the text link this icon takes you directly to the feed. This URL can also be copied and used in any external RSS aggregator.

KnowledgeTree RSS = Security

To make KnowledgeTree RSS secure, http authentication is utilized. What this means is that to access any feed on a document or folder, you need to have the required permissions to do so (as defined inside the KnowledgeTree DMS). Consequently, when subscribing to a feed you will be prompted to enter your username and password. These login details are identical to you KnowledgeTree login details.

Tips and Tricks

A useful tip is to take note of the link to the rss feeds for documents and folders. For a document, the URL ends with rss.php?docId=… and for a folder, this URL ends with rss.php?folderId=… There is a way to access the listing of documents you are subscribed to inside of KnowledgeTree. This is accomplished by using the URL without any parameters appended onto the end of it (just rss.php).

: KnowledgeTree does RSS

2007-01-29T13:00:42+00:00

An external RSS feed.

KnowledgeTree RSS

: RSS System committed to SVN

2007-01-22T15:09:08+00:00

Hi all,

Jalaloedien has committed the RSS stuff he has been working on to trunk in SVN. It’s pretty cool stuff! Currently, as a test for the system, the last transactions of documents you subscribe to are available via an RSS feed and there is an RSS client dashlet for KnowledgeTree that you can use to view it - or any external RSS feed for that matter . Soon it will be extended so all documents and folders and even saved searches can be “watched” via your favorite RSS client or the new RSS client dashlet in KnowledgeTree. I am trying to get him to blog some of the details for us.

In the meantime here are the obligatory screenshots…

Remember you can always checkout the latest unstable development code from our SVN repository on SourceForge…

Code (on one line):

svn co https://kt-dms.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kt-dms/trunk knowledgeTree

We try really hard to keep the trunk and all branches in SVN working all the time and all code is reviewed before committing it to SVN. So if you want access to the “bleeding edge” of KnowledgeTree, our SVN repository is the place to get it!

For those that can’t use SVN for whatever reason we will be creating a snapshot source file for download from SourceForge every Friday - given sufficient time and code changes to warrant one . I will post a message on the forums when I have more details.

Our new Continuous Integration (CI) environment, that I am currently busy with, will soon (yes soon) provide nightly builds for download and go a long way to helping us integrate all the code contributions and patches we get from you in a timely manner.

So jump in and help make KnowledgeTree all it can be!

Thanks
Kevin

: KT SOAP interface specification drafted

2007-01-22T14:14:09+00:00

I’ve just put together a basic specification for a primitive SOAP interface to provide access to KnowledgeTree internals. By exposing KnowledgeTree web services we will allow community members to develop their own GUIs and applications to interface with the KnowledgeTree core. All comments appreciated on the KnowledgeTree SOAP Specification. There is quite a lot to choose from [...]

: Error! Not Found!

2007-01-21T17:20:22+00:00

Last week I took to the task of setting up a few blog spaces for a few people in the company. This should have been a simple procedure as it was documented. However, as a newbie to the setup, I ended up chasing my tail for hours without much reason. I followed the instructions step by step, [...]

: Resistance is futile!

2006-09-18T16:15:43+00:00

Prepare for assimilation into the collective! Sorry, I mean integration into Windows! KnowledgeTree Tools (KTT) is starting to take the next logical step on the Windows platform - Windows Shell integration. I will be blogging about this process here in a series of blogs. I will use figure 1 below as a guide to the topics I intend to cover. However, there are sure to be many detours on the road to Shell Extension bliss so this will be a rough guide subject to change without notice. An agile series of blogs if you will. This series is in *no* way intended to be a comprehensive guide to developing Shell Extensions! The intention *is* to provide an insight into some exciting work that will provide KnowledgeTree users with just one more choice in how they can work with their documents.

PLEASE NOTE: This is prototype work and not yet on the release roadmap. Don’t take anything said here as hard and fast or even remotely true. I am only speaking for myself and the whole team must be involved in any decisions. Some features mentioned here may never make it into production. Some may not even be possible. These could very well be the ravings of a lunatic. With all that said, on to the ravings…

I have spend quite a bit of time getting back to my C++ roots and wrapping unmanaged Interfaces and COM interop objects in a fairly generic managed code Shell Extension library. Then I re-wrote it several times just for good measure and probably will do so again. I do not intend going into any detail on that process. Suffice it to say that that territory is dark and mysterious, sparsely documented and there should be a dedicated Saint to watch over the travelers in that region as Saint Christopher watches over the travels of others. Okay, perhaps a slight exaggeration - but only slight.

The first topic I will look at is Namespaces. You can click on the thumbnail below to see a larger image of where Namespaces fit in.

Namespaces

What is a Namespace? From MSDN: “Microsoft Windows Explorer provides a graphical representation of The Shell Namespace combined with tools that allow users to interact with Shell objects. With a namespace extension, you can take any body of data and have Windows Explorer present it to the user as a virtual folder. When a user browses into this folder, your data is presented as a tree-structured hierarchy of folders and files, much like the rest of the Shell namespace. Users and applications are able to interact with the contents of this virtual folder in much the same way as with any other namespace object.”

“Wow, that sounds great! The body of data thingy as a virtual thingy, that’s just great! I have no idea what that means, but it sounds great!” Okay, let me show you a few “thousand word” pictures then. Click on the thumbnails below for examples of a KnowledgeTree Namespace in action…

As you can see from the above images KnowledgeTree is “integrated” into the Windows Explorer as a virtual folder similar to a network drive, but oh so much more powerful (as we will see in our future Shell Integration adventures). All the Windows Explorer functionality you are used to like drag ‘n drop, right-click context menus, views, etc. become available to KnowledgeTree resources. The KnowledgeTree virtual folder even shows up in a Word Save/Open dialog. This allows you to choose a location on a KnowledgeTree server to store or open a document just as easily as a location on a local hard drive. In fact, any application that has the ability to open or save documents is provided automatically with the ability to do so using a KnowledgeTree resource. Even other shell extensions can work from the existing context menu. Select a KnowledgeTree folder, right-click and “7-Zip -> Add to Archive…”, it’s all possible.

“Fantastic! I can easily open and save *new* KnowledgeTree resources from pretty much any application, but what about the documents I retrieve from the KnowledgeTree resource to my local file system? They are marked as checked out in that virtual folder thingy.” Ah ha! Someone’s been paying attention. Although we are jumping the gun slightly, now is probably a good time to introduce the “DotKT” or “.kt” concept. DotKT does it’s level best to look after your KnowledgeTree documents while they are away from their KnowledgeTree server home, so to speak. DotKT is actually a pretty broad topic but I will only touch on some of the Windows aspects for now. While the Namespace concept relates well to the relative safety of the “server side” of things, on the “client side”, in the wild, things are, well, largely wild. There is currently very little “supervision” of a document once it leaves a KnowledgeTree server (i.e. it’s checked out) and finds itself on a users local file system. Using more shell magic, DotKT under Windows endeavors to keep track of checked out documents on the client side. The Namespace and DotKT interact on the KnowledgeTree CheckIn/CheckOut boundry where they leverage what the other does best. Namespace does server best and DotKT does client best. They both know enough about each other to successfully “handoff” a document to the other at the CheckIn/CheckOut boundry.

Enough! The idea was to introduce Namespaces and I hope that I have at least whet your appetite for more information about the power they can bring to KnowledgeTree Tools.

Until next time then…

: The wind at my Back

2006-08-22T13:19:23+00:00

Hi everyone,
Here I sit… a bloke with no propeller.
I’m currently the newest member of the KnowledgeTree™ team, and really the only person on the team who’s largely unfussed about the difference between 0 and 1 (as it pertains to code). My concern is with the stuff my clients care about, and they care about things like productivity, efficiency, stability, sustainability. Yip, glad you noticed… not a single 0 or 1 anywhere.
I was appointed to manage the sales function here and am literally gob-smacked by the product and the people I represent. It’s a pleasure both to come to work and listen to the sentiments of our market showering ME with lavish praise for the product I’ve developed (single handedly), and to get my hair is blown back by my compadre’s harmonious whirrrrring.

You’re all great people and you make working here is a rush! We’re on our way to the stars!!!