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.

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.

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.

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

Wow. I have always wanted to have my Adam Garcia moment and be an Iron Man at the La Honda Institute like in the hilarious movie "The first $20 Million is always the hardest". Looks like the invention of the $99 computer is just around the corner. My dearest mother in-law, who I have just discovered is web 2.0, sent me a link to a very interesting talk by Pranav Mistry inventor of SixthSense. Watch the clip below to see the possibilities of Pranav's invention... uses a Sony type eyecam object recognition and a mini projector to turn your panaroma and any surface into an interactive environment, I am sure a hologram version is just around the corner. May be Amazon and Sony should pack up the ebook readers and come out with some headered paper instead for the SixthSense device. It gives a whole new meaning to OLED

The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest

SixthSenses $300 Computer

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!

I just realised I never followed up on our trip to the US so thought it was about time I rectified that. Well as I mentioned on our blog while we were out there, going to the US was eye opening. The approachability of people out there, and the insights and the way they operate, puts the UK Entrepreneurship scene to a lot of shame!

One example of how approachable US Entrepreneurs are compared to the UK, is Gist.com founder T.A. McCann. Two days before we were due to fly out to Seattle, Clarence sent me a link to their site to show an interview they did showing their product. I'd never heard of them, but I thought the product looked cool, and when we saw they were in Seattle we thought why not get in touch? Within 10 minutes of emailing them, T.A. had emailed us back and we had a meeting arranged for the following Monday.

And just in case you thought he had nothing better to do than meet start-ups he'd never heard of from the UK, when we turned up, he was in the middle of a team meeting and had just received $6.75mil. in VC funding a couple of weeks before! This is a busy guy, and we really appreciated him taking the time to meet up with us, talk about what we were doing and give us some extremely useful advice.

T.A. wasn't a one off on our trip either. People out there really appreciate the importance of openness, helping each other out with good advice, and its something dearly missing from the UK start-up scene. In later blogs I'll mention so of the other great people we met on our trip.

As for Gist.com, he signed us up for the private Beta they're running, and its Great! Now that I have to start the very nerve-racking task of cold calling companies to get our product out there, I've found Gist is the perfect tool to give you all the information you need to do that! Once you send someone an email, they automatically get put into your list of contacts and when you click on their name, it aggregates - automatically - all the information about them on the web such as their Twitter account, Google searches, websites...it does what I would have to manually take 30-60 minutes to do properly so I can at least know a little about who I'm calling before I pick up the phone.

Make sure you definitely check out Gist.com, its getting some great buzz and is a truley useful tool for anyone that lives by networking. Maybe T.A. founded Gist.com for that reason, he obviously believes in the power of making new connections and his tool is all about helping people do just that!

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:

This week myself, Ale and Clarence are in Seattle for the NetHope summit at the Microsoft Headquarters. Tomorrow we head to San Francisco to meet up with some entrepreneurs and other start-ups in our space to share our product, ideas and get feedback from some of the leaders in the SaaS/Collaboration space.

Myself and Clarence arrived on Saturday in Seattle and were fortunate enough to be introduced to Kabir Shahani from Appature and Ken Kamada from HELM Capital Management through my friend Sri who I worked with in Accenture before I left. We also met up with a very up-and-coming start-up called Gist on Monday morning.

All of the people we met have provided excellent advice and feedback on our start-up and have all been completely willing to sit down and spend time with us during our trip. For example Ken spent almost his entire Monday afternoon looking at SambaJam and advising us on our business direction. T.A. McCann from Gist didn't even know who we were until we emailed him out of the blue last Thursday, allowed us to come to their offices last minute just to say hi without any particular agenda. The next week in San Francisco looks to be the same with a few key people already lined up that have never heard about us before.

It has been humbling for us that so many successful and busy people have taken the time to talk to us and give us really useful advice, and after we have spent almost a year networking around the London start-up community, it is a HUGE difference in attitude. I have to say the advice and people we've met in the last 2 days have been far more approachable and helpful than much of the start-up community back in the UK.

I think this is a key to the success of start-ups here in the US, networking just happens, it is natural and people are open to it. Back in the UK, while we're getting better, I still feel we have a long way to go to match this attitude of openness and approachability that we have seen here the last few days.

What's also surprised us is that many of the entrepreneurs we've met, even in a recession, have started to make money simply selling "paper". They have all got sign-up and even up front cash from companies simply by prototyping an idea on paper before committing any funds to development until they get it right, and through the entire process treat their customers as partners, not clients to push a product on to. I think its hard for people to appreciate that people will pay money for good ideas on paper if they see sustainable value in it for them. It also allows start-ups like ourselves to boostrap our company without requiring huge VC funds to build a product that potentially no one will use in the end.

So far this trip has been well worth the time and money, and we have received some very positive feedback from potential partners we will start to work with collaboratively over the next few months. Next week we'll update you on how our trip to San Francisco goes.