Month: November 2005

Ray’s back

Ray Ozzie hadn’t updated his blog in quite some time but I didn’t have the heart to take him out of my aggregator. This morning, I was shocked to see his blog showing as unread in my Sage window. In his new post he gives us a prelude to something new he’s been playing with.

As a matter of fact, there’s a fun little project that several of us (inside and out) have been playing with for a few months that we’ve wanted to talk about more broadly, but didn’t have a lightweight way to get it out there. Now we finally have a reasonable way to kick off the conversation. Next week, perhaps.

I’m looking forward to finding out more about this and anything else Ray wants to talk about.

Stop by at KMWorld

I’ll be at the KMWorld & Intranets conference this week in San Jose. I’m speaking on Thursday on the Southwest Airlines Intranet migration to an Enterprise Portal (Session D302, 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.).

My colleague, Patrick Dawson, will be speaking on Wednesday. His talk is on making usability a priority in document management applications (Session E201, 10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.).

Drop by and say hello if you are in the neighborhood.

Google Goes after Verity Customers

Note the interesting tidbit, “…on Tuesday Google began giving away its least expensive Google corporate search product, its Mini, to new Google Enterprise customers…” I’m looking into the details. The price on the Mini has fallen to $2995 but free doesn’t seem likely.

Google Goes after Verity Customers

Of course, Google could smell blood in the water and what better way to give a boost to its customer base than to give away its cheapest appliance?

Standalone version of Documentum Eclipse plug-in

I’ve been using an older version of Documentum’s
Repository Interrogation Utility, which is an Eclipse plug-in that talks to the Documentum repository. It is real handy to be able to run DQL queries and dump objects without leaving Eclipse. But what I didn’t know is that with their latest release, they’ve included a standalone version. That means if you are working for a client where you cannot use Eclipse you can still get the benefit of the tool.

Why does OpenOffice.org produce better PDF than Acrobat?

I recently tweaked the format on my Load Testing WDK Apps with Apache JMeter white paper. When I printed to PDF from Word I got a couple of undeseriable effects. The Navigator logo was jaggy. And my “asides” were in simple, not shadowed, text boxes.

I tried a couple of different quality settings in the PDF options but I didn’t see a difference. Just for fun I decided to import the Word doc into OpenOffice 2.0. Without changing a thing I then immediately did an Export to PDF.

The resulting PDF had none of the problems of the PDF produced from Word using Acrobat. The logo was sharp and the text boxes were shadowed. Plus, I reaped a couple of bonus benefits. In Word, some of my wide screenshots were being cropped and likewise in the resulting PDF. In the OO-generated PDF my screenshots were automatically scaled to fit the page. Another nice bonus was that the PDF was about 1/3rd the size of the PDF produced by Acrobat.

My eternal optimism tells me there are probably config settings in both Word and Acrobat I could tweak that would give me the same results–I just didn’t have time to dig. It was definitely a pleasant surprise.