Carolyn Duangprom

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

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