Computing

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.

For years, we've been working in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space delivering large document management systems and collaboration portals for banks, global companies and NGOs. All of them used huge and complex systems such as FileNet, Documentum and (less huge but still complex) Microsoft SharePoint. And for years we never understood why it was so hard to manage documents using their clunky web interfaces.

For example, in SharePoint, a great product in manay regards which is why its become Microsoft's fastest growing product ever and used by loads of companies around the world for collaboration and document management, you get something that looks like this to manage your documents:

Its essentially a list of documents on a web page, if you click the arrow next to each document, you get a list of options you can do on that document, clicking one of the options opens a new window with a clunky form to edit or fill in. And SharePoint is one of the easier ones to deal with!

If you look at many of the start-ups in this space you’d think all of them would be taking advantage of the latest in web2.0/AJAX technology to improve on this web-page list concept, but you’d be mistaken. Just take a look, while the lists look nicer, they all still provide the same thing, a list of documents on a web-page which clicking on takes you to another page with all the document properties and forms to edit them, not really much of an improvement.

So when we came to design the document library for SambaJAM we looked for inspiration from what is undeniably the best tool to manage your documents - your desktop! By using the latest in web2.0/AJAX technology we set out to create a very intuitive, familiar experience for our end users to manage documents in their web browser. Some of the key features that were important to us during the design:

• Thumbnailing: Just like your desktop, isn't it much nicer to actually see visually the files your looking at. You may not remember the file name, but you may remember the front page had a bright orange logo. We've ensured all our documents are thumbnailed so you can easily browse through documents. However, if you do just want to go back to a list of documents (detailed view) you can simply switch views and do that too!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Drag and drop Documents: With many users and document controllers spending a lot of their time simply organising the documents everyone else has uploaded into the correct folders so they're properly organised and easy to find, we decided the easiest way to move documents around was simply to select the ones you wanted to move, and drag them to the folder you wanted to move them too. Not only that, but like Windows, you can also drag documents and files into the folder tree on the left hand menu.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Context Menus: Like your desktop, you can get access to all the actions you're allowed to perform on a document simply by clicking your right mouse button. All of the actions will bring up a popup form instead of re-directing you to another page so you can quickly do what you need to do and return back to the folder you're working on.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Tagging: Sometimes, documents don’t also make sense organised into specific folders. That’s where tagging comes in, you can tag different types of documents like ‘proposals’ or ‘reports’ with specific tags and using the tag tree menu on the left hand menu, easily show all the ‘proposals’ or ‘reports’ in the document library regardless of which folder they’re in.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Filters: Sometimes you just want to see the latest modified documents, the documents other people are currently working on or just the ones you're currently working on. By using the filter menu you can quickly filter all the documents to what you want to see.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Online Previews: Sometimes you just want to read a document, or quickly open it to see if its what you're looking for before you download it. Sometimes you can’t download it because the document was written in Microsoft Office 2007 and you only have Office 2003. That’s where online previews come in. By double clicking a document, you can open another tab in your space to view the document (so you can still easily flick back to your folders if needed) and read the document online. If you upload rich media such as audio (and in future Video) you can also listen/watch those online as well!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Versioning: The only way to ensure you're all working off the same version, and that no one's changes are lost is version control. We allow you to easily check-in and check-out documents to make your changes so every time you save a new copy, the previous versions are still accessible and can be rolled back to at anytime if someone made a mistake.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Commenting: Easily write comments against your documents instead of emailing your comments back and forth!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Uploading: Nearly every system I've ever seen requires you to go to a separate page to upload your files, and generally its one file at a time, during which you can't get on with anything else. We've decided that if you're uploading loads of files, especially large files which take time to upload, you should be able to simply queue them up, and then minimise the window to the footer so you can continue with your work and get notified when the uploads are finished. When I first used SambaJAM I uploaded several hundred files, and it had absolutely no impact on the rest of my work, I simply minimised it and got on with other things on SambaJAM!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Online Editing: We've integrated with Zoho so you can create and edit your word documents, spreadsheets and presentations online without leaving your web browser! Not only does this save you having to download the file and re-upload just to make a quick change, in the future you'll be able to collaboratively edit the document with your colleagues in real time!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Workflows: Workflows allow you to send documents for review or assign quick tasks like 'Update the logo on the front page' to other users without using email. By initiating a workflow for your document, you not only generate tasks for the people you want involved to see in their Tasks inbox on their Dashboard, you can also see the progress of how far along the review process the document is.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Microsoft Windows, Office and Email Integration: I'm getting ahead of myself here but we don't believe you should actually have to log into SambaJAM to create and edit documents stored there. Wouldn't it be great if you could edit your documents in Microsoft Office and using its built in functionality, save it back to SambaJAM directly? Or map SambaJAM as a network drive to manage your documents in Windows explorer? Or map SambaJAM as an email account in Outlook so you can simply drag email attachments into SambaJAM? Or simply email a document into SambaJAM without logging in? That’s a few of the things that will be coming in later on so watch this space!

And not only ALL of the above, but all your documents are stored on an Enterprise Content Management system used by Fortune 500 companies around the world so you get enterprise class security, scalability, customisation and all the other features you'd expect from a system of this type!

Pretty awesome eh? In-fact something I heard the other day that made me laugh, but I should put as a disclaimer:

IF YOU'RE ALLERGIC TO AWESOMENESS - PLEASE DO NOT USE SAMBAJAM!!!

You have been warned... ;)

We recently made an interim decision not to support the IE6 browser due to the gradual decline in browser usage and due to the many issues and limitations its rendering engine has in meeting latest HTML standards. SambaJAM will be launched on Google Chrome, FireFox, Safari and IE8 and will have support for IE7.

The latest news on the web is that the new Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 will not provide full support for IE6, Salesforce has announced future UI enhancements will not be supported on IE6, Google owned YouTube will be phasing out support for IE6, in addition Google have announced the beta launch of their Google Chrome IFrame,  to seemlessley replace the IE rendering engine on IE6, 7 and 8.

Understandably many organisations still use IE6 due to having internal applications built n tested to work with it. Migrating from IE6 can therefore be quite costly, the Google Chrome Frame looks to be an important option in reducing the burden of migrating completely away from the old browser.

We are following the progress of Google Chrome Iframe and will review our decision not to support IE6. Ultimately we will respond to our customers needs.

For those of you who have never ventured into web development or for those who would like a good reference for common issues surrounding the IE6 Browser, the following link provide useful information about common limitations: IE6 Common Issues

IE6 is like an old car that has come to the end of it's motoring days. Repairing its parts are no longer the cost effective option. It may be time to say thank you to IE6 for its years of service, but we now need more fuel efficient engines, inbuilt satnav, bluetooth handsfree kits, power assisted wheel breaking, automatic lights and seat warmers for more enjoyable and productive web travel.

Today Google announced their new Google Chrome OS here. This is a very interesting development and something many were predicting when Google launched Chrome last year.

For those of you who aren't one of the apparent 30 million users using Google Chrome, its a new web browser from Google. Why do we need another web browser when we already have Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera and a hundred other browsers? Well Google noticed that many web browsers just aren't designed for rich internet applications like we build in SambaStream. A lot of new applications are written in JavaScript and use AJAX technology, which makes for extremely user friendly user interfaces that look and feel like your local desktop applications, but don't require any installation (saving IT departments huge headaches when rolling out a new application across large organisations) and run anywhere simply through your web browser. The problem with current web browsers is they run JavaScript pretty slowly, and unfortunately if one JavaScript application crashes, it will crash your entire browser. They don't also provide all the capabilities required out of the box (although they're heading there) for offline browsing, and slim interfaces that don't interfere with the web application's interface and available space to display them.

So Google created a new open-source web browser called Chrome to address these issues. Because we build our own applications at SambaStream on Google Web Toolkit, which essentially allows us to provide rich and fast JavaScript/AJAX applications for users, Chrome is great! Not only do our applications run faster, we can (in future) make them work offline (useful if you're on an airplane and have no internet but still want to use your applications) and also if another application crashes (because ours would never do such a thing!) it won't shut down the whole web browser and lose all your work. It also allows us to provide simple desktop icons so you can launch and use our applications just as you would a normal desktop application.

This is the future of how applications will be delivered. Through a web browser, with no installation required, just sign-up and point your web browser to use it, and all your data will be securely stored, backed up and accessible anywhere in the world. Not only does it save money, it opens up the whole way we work allowing you to do so much more than you could on you current desktop.

However, even Chrome is just a web browser, and needs to be run on top of another operating system such as Windows, MacOS or Linux, so while you can use your web applications on your browser, you still have to switch back to your local desktop applications, look after your data and manage your local applications, upgrading and patching them regularly as new updates become available. Now Google has announced the beginning of a new class of operating system (OS) - essentially all the OS does is load the computer, the browser will now become your user interface on which you will run all your applications, browse the internet and communicate. And better yet its open-source (also known as free to the rest of us!)

So why is this such a big deal? As we're a business software organisation I want to give the example of what small and medium size businesses currently do (the potential benefits and cost savings are FAR greater for large global enterprises but I'll leave them out for now).

Imagine this - right now you buy pretty expensive PCs, you install them locally, buy some servers to run your email and other applications, put them somewhere secure in your office, hire an experienced IT guy to run and manage them if you can afford, or if you can't, hire an IT support firm that will come in to fix your PCs and servers if needed, and generally that's quite a lot of the time. The fact is your current PCs and Servers run very complicated operating systems and software (such as email servers for your email). Complication = Complexity = more chance of something going wrong. On top of that, you manage all your data locally, if you're not experienced enough, you may have a security hole you're not aware of, if you forget to backup you could lose all your data...the cost of managing your data properly is actually very expensive, and the more security and redundancy you have the more expensive it becomes.

Now imagine the future - you buy a very cheap "thin-client" PC, which essentially has a screen, a keyboard and some memory. You switch it on, instead of waiting a few minutes for your PC to start-up, it starts almost instantly, because the fact is the operating system does nothing more than start your web browser. Its light, simple and as a result less likely to crash and have problems. You've just saved a lot of support calls and money. Secondly, the server can now go, because all your applications such as email, Microsoft Office tools, accounting systems, CRM etc. are hosted securely by SaaS vendors like SambaStream. The vendor provides the online software through your web browser, looks and feels like a local desktop application, but because the vendor provides it as a service, they take care of all the security, data backups and updates to the system. You now don't need an IT guy to support it anymore.

This is the vision we have at SambaStream, to provide enterprise-class applications for organisations of all sizes that need little more than a web browser and a simple monthly subscription to run. One day businesses won't need to pay lots of money to setup their IT systems. Just pay a monthly subscription, and get support for each application from the experts, the people who actually built the application in the first place and will be able to fix it faster than an IT guy who has to manage several applications and probably isn't an expert in any of them.

I personally don't think Google Chrome OS will have a huge impact anytime soon, Windows has become an institution for many people and I believe many businesses will take time to change the current mindset to move away from their current applications and way of working, but its a start and I'm sure within the next decade we will see a significant shift towards the vision I described, in fact I bet our company on it!

In an effort to provide more value to our customers, we will be publishing a series of white papers to share the years of experiance we have accumulated around Document Management, Online Collaboration and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

The first white paper - An Introduction to Document Management, is a nice introduction for those who have little or no knowledge in this area on what it is, and how it helps organisations.

To view this paper, and all the others we will be publishing - just click on the 'White Papers' link above or go here.

If you have any suggestions for white papers you would like to see, please leave a comment below and we'll try our best to provide a useful white paper that addresses core topics and issues people have in the above areas.

It's been some time, so I thought I would try and post another informative blog.

I thought my second blog would involve detailing the trouble points and steps involved in migrating between Gwt-Ext and GXT, however, it’s now been such a long time that I can no longer remember what the trouble points were except for a few:

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At SambaStream we live and breath Content Management and Collaboration technology. Our team has a wealth of experience across a number of sectors and types of projects. SambaStream Professional Services are available to assist clients in the planning and delivery of Web Solutions for Content Management, Content Publishing and Collaboration.