Links to info on SharePoint Server 2007

Many in the content management industry are curious to see exactly what is going to be included as part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. CMSWire has a few links to some Microsoft resources in this recent post.

At Navigator we had at least one client that was betting heavily on the new release. They believed Microsoft’s promise that it will include web content management, records management, workflow and better security. As more and more people get experience with Beta 2 we should start to find out how well they’re going to be able to keep that promise.

In the meantime, if you’re ready to do an MCMS 2002-to-Alfresco conversion, just let me know.

Testdisk saved my Ubuntu bacon

Last week I got my Dell D820 running Windows XP set up to be dual-booted to Ubuntu. I used Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) because that’s what I had handy. I was following Mathew J. Miller’s excellent instructions on how to do it.

My only problem came when it was time to install the boot loader. I had forgotten (or chose to ignore) the little partition that Dell puts on their hard drives. That meant that my Linux partition was actually number 2 (the third partition) instead of partition number 1 (the second partition) which is, unfortunately, where I told it to put the boot loader. Partition number 1 is my Windows XP partition–exactly where I did not want the boot loader written to.

And neither did Windows XP. On restart I got the dreaded “Missing operating system” error. “Thanks for the new laptop. Look what I did!”

I had used the Ubuntu Live CD to run QTParted to successfully partition my hard drive so I thought it might be able to get me out of the jam. But after the erroneous boot record write, QTParted didn’t want to have anything to do with that partition. It just threw up its hands.

I booted to the Windows XP Recovery Console and ran fixmbr as well as fixboot but neither of those were effective.

Fortunately, for times like these, there’s testdisk. Testdisk is a wonderful little utility freely-available under the GPL that can recover Windows, Mac, and Linux partitions. I booted into my Ubuntu Live CD, used apt-get to install testdisk (sudo apt-get install testdisk) and fired it up. I then disabled the “bootable” flag on the Linux partition and made my Windows XP partition bootable-primary. When I restarted, Windows XP was alive and well again.

I thought about leaving well enough alone–I was leaving for a client site the next day–but my success bolstered my partition recovery confidence. I formatted the Linux partition and re-did the Ubuntu install paying closer attention to the boot loader step. That time everything went off without a hitch.

I’m still getting used to Ubuntu. It’s a bit different than RHEL but overall I think it’s going to work out.

IBM developerWorks evaluates open source CMS

A team at IBM’s developerWorks has written an article on their evaluation of open source content management software. They were looking to build a closed community web site with freely-available software and ultimately chose Drupal for the task. The article covers the requirements, design, selection process, and gives a highlight of the customizations they made.

(I came across this while taking a look at Krugle, which is a code- and technology-centric search engine).

Big News: I’ve changed companies

This is pretty well-known by now, but I haven’t blogged it yet: I’ve left Navigator Systems (now Hitachi Consulting). On Monday I start my new gig with Optaros and I couldn’t be more excited.

Leaving was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make. I started working for Navigator almost nine years ago as employee number twenty-five. During that time I worked with extremely sharp people on some of the best clients in Dallas (and a couple elsewhere).

Beyond the sharp people and the cool projects, Navigator was just a great place to work. The character of the leadership, the radically open communication, and highly collaborative environment were all critical cultural elements.

In the end, though, it was time to move on. Time to start a new chapter. And I’m pretty pumped about who I’ve chosen to write that chapter with. Optaros first caught my eye a year or so ago. I came across Seth Gottlieb’s blog and added it to my blogroll immediately. Seth heads up the ECM practice at Optaros so at the time I figured he’d have some really relevant insights to leverage as I built out my practice.

As a followed his posts (and upon talking to Seth in-person at a conference) I could tell Optaros was a company that potentially had many of the same cultural characteristics as Navigator. And with its focus on open source it was pretty hard to resist.

So, long story short, I start with Optaros on Monday. I’ll be working with Optaros’ local business development guy to grow Dallas and the surrounding geography, playing architect roles on multiple projects, and working with Seth and others on open source content management research, publications, and presentations.

Alfresco promises better portal integration

Recently, John Newton sent me an email thanking me for my post on Alfresco’s JBoss Portal integration. He said they are looking at providing additional Alfresco portlets in up-coming releases. Being able to use Alfresco as a replacement JCR repository for JBoss Portal is also in the works. Apparently the Liferay-Alfresco bundle is configured in this way but I haven’t had a chance to take a peek yet.

Great sailing today

My friend Brian, Dad, and I went out on Texoma today on Vampyrita as part of a revitalized “Buddy Sail” program. The Buddy Sail program was started by Jay at Texas Charters. The idea was that Jay would send out a note at the start of the week saying which boat was going to be taken out that coming weekend, and whomever wanted to show up could go sailing for $50 which paid for part of the day’s charter fee.

Jay closed down and moved to Key West to run a charter on a beautiful boat called the Freedom Won. But his old pal Greg is keeping the Buddy Sail tradition alive. Greg bought Jay’s Ranger 23, Vampyrita, and today we took her on the first voyage of the newly-revitalized Buddy Sail program.

The day threatened to be stormy but it was actually picture perfect. Dense cloud cover for most of the day kept the temperature down and the winds averaged about 15 knots but died down substantially around 2:00. We had a light shower every now-and-then but nothing terrible–we all agreed the sprinkles were refreshing and of course had the added benefit of bringing with it that sweet, after-rain smell.

If you are in the North Texas area and you are looking to spend an afternoon sailing but you don’t have a boat, check out Greg’s Buddy Sail Yahoo Group. I’ve been on several now and I’ve found them to be a fun, friendly, and cheap way to enjoy sailing.

JBoss Portal and Alfresco

I recently delved into JBoss Portal to put together a demo for a client. I started with JBoss Portal 2.2.1 without Alfresco just to get my feet wet. I was a bit underwhelmed. The documentation was spotty, which I expected. The admin UI was clunky at best and wholely non-functional in some instances (here’s a tip: stick to the XML descriptors and avoid the UI for now).

The bigger problem for my immediate need was that the out-of-the-box CMSPortlet instance couldn’t be easily customized through either XML or the admin interface to show anything but the default content stored in the embedded jackrabbit (JCR/JSR-170) repository. The problem was that the URL was configured as an initialization parameter instead of a portlet preference. To fix that I snagged the updated CMSPortlet from the 2.4.0 Alpha release and deployed it to my 2.2.1 instance which worked great.

My next source of frustration was the JBoss-Alfresco bundle. I didn’t know exactly what was going to be included in the bundled instance of JBoss Portal and Alfresco–in hindsight my expectations were set too high. What I was hoping for was that Alfresco would be configured as the replacement JCR repository for JBoss Portal and that there would be a set of useful portlets that exposed the Alfresco repository to portal users. At a bare minimum I would have expected an Alfresco search portlet and a trimmed down “spaces” portlet.

Instead, what’s included is a single “Alfresco Client” portlet that essentially wraps the entire Alfresco UI in a single portlet. The embedded jackrabbit repository still exists and can be used with the CMSPortlet, but Alfresco isn’t configured out-of-the-box to be used as the content repository for JBoss portal.

These annoyances can obviously be addressed with code. And because JBoss and Alfresco leverage open standards, that code will be easier to write and maintain. I was just hoping that the bundle would have been more tightly integrated. (In the immediate-term I was hoping for a more powerful demo with less sweat equity).

As a side note it makes me wonder: Does Alfresco already have these portlets (and other similar types of value-added code) in-house but not easily accessible (or accessible at all) by the community or do they not exist?

This really illustrates the need for services firms to help clients take open source components the “last mile” by adding glue-code, implementing useful add-ons (portlets, integrations, etc.), and beefing up documentation, all of which could and should be injected back into the community in some form or fashion.