Blogs

Hot Branding animals is cruel and Scotland is on good grounds to ban Hot Branding equino - horses and ponies.

However, Hot Branding on the internet is cool! We have introduced some new features to SambaJAM so that Business Customers can preserve their Brand Identity. Here is a list of Branding Features we provide:

Select Your Account URL

• Business Customers can request a bespoke url for using SambaJAM.
• Contact us to request your preferred Account URL.

Upload Your Logo

• Upload your business Logo to SambaJAM.
• The Account Logo will be shown on both the Login and SambaJAM Header.

Select Your Colour

• Business Account Holders now have the ability to change the colour of SambaJAM.
• Enter your colour as a Hex Code or use our simple colour picker.
• The selected colour will appear on the Login Screen and the SambaJAM Header and Side Navigation bars.

Customise Your Email Notifications

• As a Business Customer we can enable you to create custom email templates for SambaJAM notification emails.
• Contact us to request more information on how to create custom email templates.

We hope you like the new features which we will undoubtably continue improve.

Some Useful Links

• Branding in SambaJAM (Video In Production)
• The Importance of Brand Identity
• Identifying your brand colours

We have made a couple of updates to SambaJAM. We have added Powerpoint to the family of office documents we support and introduced some enhancements to make it better to use. Thanks to our community for the feedback. Here is some information on whats in Release 1.1:

View Slideshows and Edit Powerpoint Documents Online

* We now support editing of PowerPoint online in Zoho.

Last night I did a presentation at Drupal for Enterprises on how to add Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to your Drupal site using the recently ratified OASIS standard - Content Management Interoperability Services, otherwise known as CMIS.

This new standard looks set to revolutionise the ECM market by providing a standard API so that your content applications can pull in content easily from multiple repositories regardless of the vendor. Backed by all major ECM vendors in the marketplace its hard to see the standard going away. Its also very well designed and easy to develop on.

Using the new CMIS module with Drupal you can now connect your ECM repository with all your documents into your Drupal site. During the presentation I gave a demo of SambaJAM, uploading and managing the documents in our workspace document library, while using CMIS to pull the documents and upload new ones in a Drupal website. This is great for Drupal as to date Drupal has never been very good at managing lots of files and documents, but is good at other things like community websites and web content publishing that ECM isn't. The two together provide a powerful combination.

We haven't published our API for SambaJAM yet, but we will in the next couple of months, and it will include CMIS. What that means is you will be able to build your own CMIS applications that pull in data from SambaJAM, Alfresco, SharePoint and other repositories using a common API. With SambaJAM, you'll be able to create a new account for free in minutes and get started avoiding the hassle of setting up and learning how to use your own ECM system. We hope that CMIS on SambaJAM will encourage even more people to develop their own custom applications on top of SambaJAM without the risk that their hard work is locked into a proprietary API.

It also means that organisations we work with will be able to plug SambaJAM easily into their existing IT infrastructure without any custom development or plugins necessary - SharePoint 2010 for example, will have a CMIS browser that will allow a SharePoint site to read and manage documents on SambaJAM with just some simple configuration.

All in all, this new standard is going to really change the dynamics of the ECM industry, just as SQL did for Databases, and as usual SambaJAM will be one of the first out there to provide this powerful new standard

Please sign up for SambaJAM here if you'd like to be involved when we open up our API soon.

A customer inspired me to look at how to improve SambaJAM, so that it would fit into their everyday workflow. Many of us use Google Calendar to keep a track of meetings and important dates. Well it is now possible to use Google Calendar while in SambaJAM.

Our Web Dashlet can be used to embed web pages of other sites and in addition allows users to embed their Google Calendars.

We have put together a guide below on how you can add your Google Calendar to your SambaJAM Dashboard using our Web Dashlet.

There are a whole bunch of challenges to be faced if you are thinking of working from home or are already remote working. Though you save on the commute to work you still have to deal with the psychological journey from the bedroom to your home office and if you live in an urban cul-de-sac it is unlikely that Prêt a Manager or a Starbucks have procured next door’s garage for you to pop to for lunch. So, to help the work at home pioneers, we have come up with some online comforts and new gadgets to make your home feel more like the epicenter of your personal corporate universe.

1. No one likes talking to themselves. Fire, hire or hold that “one to one” virtually using Voice Over Internet with www.skype.com together with the machismo new JABRA Dog Tag Bluetooth Headset.




2. As you predicted working at home your personal wealth will soar. While it is growing keep an eye on your Finance and Expenses over the internet with the powerful www.xero.com.



3. Pretend you oversee the sales arm of a large global firm. Email a bunch of people you don’t know with angelic ease using www.mailchimp.com.



4. The desk drawer and the gopher kid only exist in the movies from the 80’s. Share your documents and the office memo with the rest of the team online and in technicolor with www.sambajam.com.



5. No time to grab lunch? let lunch grab you, order food over the internet with www.tescodirect.com.



6. Missing the timpani from the office lift, let background music lift your spirits when the house is too quiet with www.spotify.com.



7. No office can be complete without a designer executive chassis. This one is the Ferrari of Office Chairs for a low carbon drive, The Charta Chair.



8. The world's sleekest desk you can eat your cereal off it. The Computer Desk by Milk.



9. So reflective you can gaze incessantly at your own corporate reflection. The only feedback you need is yours with the Ultra slim Sony TV with 3D Glasses.



10. So you don’t have forty stories, your home office is in a bungalow or a flat in a two story converted semi. Doesn’t mean you need to feel left out. Get big brother to watch your new pimped out home office with security from Vitamindinc when your away.

At Sambastream, we are trying to build the Future Workplace.

What does that mean?

The Future Workplace, is a term we coined to describe our ideal workplace. If you are a project manager trying to manage your local team, international teams, intergalatic teams whilst managing "a complex set of stakeholders". You know what we are talking about.

(April 13, 2010 - Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images Europe)

Today David Cameron was discussing flexible working at a Celebrating Women's Organisation at Southwark. There is a benefit to both Employees and Business Owners to support flexible working. It enables Employees to balance their work and lives, whether the Employee is a carer for family members, or whether it is for the flexibility to spend time on other commitments. For Business Owners, their is a benefit to support remote working as it enables their companies to retain staff or access a talent pool of professional employess at a lower cost based on part-time hours.

SambaJAM aims to support such opportunities, enabling employees and business owners to work securely and productively whether in the same office or from remote locations, such as working from home.


SambaJAM provides a structured way for businesses to manage their employees and their work, whether it is a financial controller's excel spreadsheet, a solicitor's legal document or an editor's final draft. SambaJAM enables you to create flexible work areas online to share documents and view auditing trails and activity feeds that provide you with the confidence and transparency that your remote workers are deliverying.

If flexible working is important to you, why not try out SambaJAM. Visit our product site at www.sambajam.com or contact us at www.sambajam.com/contact

Anyone who's visited SambaJAM.com recently will have seen a huge difference as we revamped the site to put more information about SambaJAM for people who are interested.

Today we decided we were ready to open up our signups for the general public. This means you no longer have to register for our private Beta and wait for an invite, you can signup and login to SambaJAM right away!

Simply go here to signup for free right now:

Let us know if you have any problems with the registration process (just contact us here) but more importantly make sure you check out SambaJAM and let us know what you think!

We have a pretty impressive roadmap for SambaJAM over the next few months - one of the key new features that has got a lot of our existing users excited is our drag & drop task management feature for your workspaces - more details soon! If you want to participate in the design process signup for SambaJAM now and we'll let you know shortly how you can try out the prototype and give us the feedback needed to build the ultimate project management tool.

A few weeks ago we decided to switch on hourly backups on SambaJAM and I went in search of some good automation scripts to do this...I was very disappointed.

Like a lot of new start-ups, we've been taking advantage of Amazon Web Services to host our servers and data, and if you're building stuff in the cloud it is a great service to use. The problem is they still haven't implemented an easy way to do revolving backups if you're storing data on Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes. By revolving backups I basically mean I keep a certain period of backups (say 2 weeks) and any backups older than that get deleted/overwritten to ensure I stay within AWS's 500 snapshot limit and only keep what I need to recover data in a disaster recovery scenario. Right now AWS provide EC2 command line tools to create snapshots of your volumes but it doesn't have any way of deleting snapshots automatically so I can only keep the last 400 snapshots, and delete any that are older.

Some welcome news today, Google has decided to not support Internet Explorer 6 anymore with two of its core products, Google Docs and Sites (read about it on BBC news).

As Clarence mentioned in his blog, we have also taken the decision not to support IE6. We've found that IE6 (which is almost 10 years old now!) is too outdated to support all the latest advances in web application technology that SambaJAM provides. Instead of downgrading the experience for the end user for the sake of a dying browser, we decided to not support IE6. While on the general web this is an not an issue as many users have upgraded, as the BBC article highlights, there is still a large userbase of enterprise users who are forced to keep using IE6, and as an enterprise company this is something we are constantly aware of.

With Googles support, and increasing numbers of vendors deciding not to support IE6 anymore because of its limitations, we hope to see IE6 phased out sooner than Microsoft's 2014 end-of-support date. The web has moved on, and enterprises will come under increasing pressure to phase out IE6 if they wish to give the latest and greatest web applications like SambaJAM to their users.