KnowledgeTree Blog

Document Management In A Can: The KnowledgeTree Appliance

It’s a rainy and cold Sunday afternoon in Cape Town and so what better to do than put some good music on and take a good look at the new KnowledgeTree Open Source Appliance. The appliance runs on technology we’ve licensed from rPath, a bunch of ex-Red Hat guys with some remarkably cool ideas.

The appliance idea itself is quite simple and has been around a while, rPath’s execution is however really, really good. Take KnowledgeTree, place it on a cut-down Linux operating system and wrap the whole lot in a number of ways, including virtual machine images, bootable install CDs and hard-drive images. What do you end up with? A really easy to install application: “Document Management In A Can”. Couple the “easy to install” with easy to maintain (we package updates for the appliance and send them down your server via the Internet) and you’ve got a very low total cost of ownership document management application.

So, what about Software As A Service? Well, Software As A Service isn’t ideal for everybody. Many organizations positively do not want to place their documents on to a shared resource. For them, the security of an on-premise appliance coupled with ease of use and low total cost of ownership is very compelling.

The KnowledgeTree Open Source Appliance is available for download right now and we’ll be releasing a commercial appliance (i.e. commercially supported and with all of our Windows and Microsoft Office addons) over the next month or so.

We’ll also be offering the appliance to our OEM partners under our “Powered by KnowledgeTree” licensing programme. We’ve already had quite positive feedback from many of them.

So without further ado, let’s take a look:

The KnowledgeTree Open Source Appliance booted in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook. Note that there are two URLs to the appliance: an appliance management interface and the KnowledgeTree Document Management application.

Once logged in to the management interface you’re presented with a management menu and details of the server platform the appliance is running on. The KnowledgeTree menu allows you to configure elements of the KnowledgeTree application that are normally reached only by editing the config.ini file.

Configuring the user interface has never been easier…

Configuring automated updates from the KnowledgeTree update servers.

Setting up the backup mechanism on the appliance is really simple too.

We decided to ship with a pre-release version of KnowledgeTree Open Source 3.4 (note that the version number is missing and has been replaced with a build number). We’ll be sending out an update to the appliances one we have a new version of 3.4 next week (we’re moving the 3.4 DEVELOPMENT branch to STABLE!).

This is the KnowledgeTree dashboard, as viewed from Safari 3 on my MacBook. The Tag Cloud is showing the tags of some sample documents I uploaded and I’m displaying BBC World News on the RSS Feed widget (it would probably make more sense to display some KnowledgeTree RSS feeds there rather!). The Dashboard looks quite pretty in Safari and the AJAX works nicely!