dgildeh's blog

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.

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.

Yesterday the big news was the UK economy grew a WHOLE 0.1% last quarter! This means the official end of the worst recession in peace time history, although there are many warnings that we're not completely out of the woods yet.

So does that mean we'll be returning to business as usual? Of course not! Recessions bring change, and while businesses will hopefully start to grow again, some long term trends have been accelerated by the recession and will start to become very obvious from 2010 onwards:

• Remote working - Offices have become increasingly mobile over the past decade, but with businesses looking to save operating costs on office space during the recession, even more businesses are starting to encourage home working for their staff. Forrester predicts that in the next 5 years, 43% of staff will be telecommuting regularly.

With the cold weather thawing now, the first few weeks of this month saw the UK snowed under for several days with up to 20% of the work force staying at home during the "snow days". The Centre for Economics and Business Research (cebr) predicted that this cost the British Economy approximately £900 million for each snow day we suffered.

The lost productivity from snow days leads to problems for both you and your staff:

• Drop in revenue - If you can't work or deliver services to your customers on snow days, you could stand to see your revenue drop significantly on those days

Sorry to everyone waiting for this the past week since I presented it a Minibar, with the exhibition this has been the first chance I've had to catch up and upload this!

For those of you who weren't there, November's Minibar focused on using Open Source for web applications, and here at SambaStream, we LOVE Open Source. For the techies among you, you can see what our Open Source stack looks like, and how we've used it to build SambaJAM in months as opposed to the years it would have taken us had we not used Open Source. There's also some tips on our experiance working with commercial Open Source vendors like Alfresco.

SambaStream Minibar Presentation - Using Open Source in SaaS

View more documents from Samba Team.

Hi everyone, just wanted to give a quick update on the exhibition we've been attending the last couple of days, IMS 2009. We've had an excellent 2 days meeting loads of interesting people and companies, and fortunately getting a lot of positive feedback and interest in SambaJAM! Here's a blurry picture from my iPhone of our stand below - credit on graphics goes to Clarence, who did an excellent job with our banners!

Also, today I was interviewed for China's largest TV news network, talking about SambaJAM and our experience at IMS. I'll post a link to the story when its available, but apparently my face and our product will be going out across China to millions of people in the next few hours! Fortunately Zhijun had already prepared a logo for SambaJAM in Mandarin, so we had that in the background too! Check it out below...looks like we'll have to go sell in China next!

So if you're free tomorrow, make sure you get your ticket and visit us at Stand 283 before its over!

London - Working in the cloud has never been more exciting. SambaStream, the newest company to ascend into the cloud, will be revealing SambaJAM, the first extensible collaborative content management platform in the cloud, at the IMS 2009 Exhibition. The exhibition takes place at the London Olympia from 1st to 3rd December and this will be the first chance for visitors to see the future of cloud content management.

With businesses increasingly working with distributed teams and external partners, the demand for secured information sharing services has never been greater. SambaJAM provides secure workspaces that allow teams to collaboratively create and share content such as documents, rich media, wikis and calendars. Built on a powerful Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform, SambaJAM brings together rich Web2.0 collaboration tools and social networking on top of a powerful, extendable ECM platform.

The three founders of the venture worked in Accenture Information Management Solutions as experts in collaboration software before pursuing SambaStream. “We were delivering complex and expensive collaboration solutions for clients that weren’t getting the adoption rates and ROIs promised,” states co-founder David Gildeh, “we took the lessons learned and produced SambaJAM. No more complex roll-outs and an AJAX user interface that ensures users easily pick up the application and actually save time using it”.

So what makes SambaJAM so different from all the other cloud start-ups fighting for a stake in the collaboration market? “You can build bespoke custom solutions on top of SambaJAM exactly the same way as an on-premise solution” says co-founder Alessandro Giannone. “Customers get the rapid deployment and cost savings of using a cloud solution, without losing the extensibility and customization of an on-premise solution”.

This would allow customers to quickly roll out SambaJAM for immediate business benefits, but easily extend the platform as their business requires to provide a powerful alternative to more expensive and complex solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint.

After a year of passion, ingenuity and commitment, the three entrepreneurs are ready to create a storm in the clouds. As co-founder Clarence Sittampalam says “We hope to become the SalesForce.com of ECM in the cloud. The market is rapidly maturing and we are poised to capitalize on this with SambaJAM.”

SambaStream will be located at stand 283 at the IMS 2009 exhibition in London Olympia. To learn more about SambaJAM, please visit www.sambajam.com or contact us.

We've just reserved our place (very last minute) to exhibit SambaJAM at the Online Information Exhibition 2009 in London this December in 19 days!!!

We'll be there for the 3 days demoing SambaJAM and letting the 9500 people expected to attend understand just why SambaJAM is the future of online collaboration (if it wasn't obvious already?!). You'll find us in the Content Management area on Stand 283 near the Seminar Theatres so make sure you make your way over to come see us and give us some support!

If you're interested in coming you can register for free here in about 2 minutes. It should be a great exhibition only enhanced by our Samba Girls*!

* Subject to us actually finding the girls and Samba costumes we need in time - watch this space (or let us know if you can help!)