Daniel Chalef

New KnowledgeTreeLive Functionality: Drag and Drop, Office Tools, Online Editing and Hot Folders

We’ve upgraded KnowledgeTreeLive and released a whole bunch of cool new features for our software as a service document management application: Drag and Drop tools for Windows, Microsoft Office 2007 integration, integration with Zoho Office for online editing of documents and a cool Hot Folders application. More on all of these on the KnowledgeTreeLive Applications page. We’ve also exposed KnowledgeTreeLive’s web services API to users, allowing you to build mashups with KnowledgeTreeLive as the back-end document management store.

Some videos of the new functionality below:

KnowledgeTree’s easy to use Drag and Drop app for Windows

A cool mash-up between KnowledgeTreeLive Document Management On-demand and Zoho Office

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ProcessMaker, Easy to Use Open Source Workflow & Business Process Management

Brian Reale and his team at Colosa launched their very cool ProcessMaker product this week. ProcessMaker is a commercial open source Workflow / Business Process Management (BPM) software tool designed for medium-sized organizations and is designed to allow a business or process expert with no programming experience to model and then automate an organization’s business processs. ProcessMaker includes a nifty AJAX web interface for form design and process mapping, and includes powerful document creation, security and 3rd party application integration capabilities (with a KnowledgeTree interface coming Real Soon Now(tm)).

ProcessMaker has been released under the Affero GPLv3 and is available for download from SourceForge.net. The tool is written in PHP and one-click installers are currently available for Linux and Windows.

As mentioned above, the team at Colosa are integrating ProcessMaker with KnowledgeTree, providing ProcessMaker with a secure, version controlled repository for documents created during processes. The interface is also likely to provide the ability to attach documents stored in the KnowledgeTree repository to activities in a process.

We wish the team all the best as they develop the product, build community and build their business!

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The Tyranny of Social Networking

So many apps, so little time… Is it possible to keep them all happy?

twitter
me blog
doppler
LinkedIn
facebook

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KnowledgeTree on the Mac

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:

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Amazon Simple Storage Service Outage - Some Learnings

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.

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Data in the Cloud

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.

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KnowledgeTreeLive Architecture Webinar and Storage, Language Pack Updates

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.

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rPath Software as a Service Webinar

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.

Register to watch the webinar on the rPath website.

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KnowledgeTree Running In IIS

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.

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Edit Documents in the KnowledgeTree Respository Online

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!

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