The Obsessive Collaborator

About a month ago I was having one of my rants about how I hated Twitter and that it was leading to the downfall of communication and the Internet at large. I realized that in order to pronounce a more thorough judgement I ought to experience it more fully. So despite my professed hatred of the microblogging medium I registered and started to Tweet. In doing so I wanted to consider the margins where I saw potential value for Twitter.

I saw the opportunity for Twitter to be a space that I could pass along some of the notes that I keep meaning to write in this blog, but never seem to have the time to do. The benefit of being constrained by 140 characters (including a bit.ly compressed URL) is that I didn't have to feel like a short note was unworthy, like I had been feeling about any entry on the blog less than 1000 words.

I started to Tweet any time I saw a story about collaborative tools or some of the other areas of my professional interest and I started to follow a small sampling of other folks on Twitter.

A month later I have learned a few things about Twitter and found out how to make it my friend.

First and foremost I learned to ignore anyone who actually answers Twitter's question "What are you doing?" In almost all cases, I don't care to read streams of what people are actually doing. What I care to read is what people are thinking. Others have suggested that the prompt should really be "What is on your mind?" I want to read the Tweets on what ideas people have, articles that they are reading, and interesting things that they have found on the web.

The corollary to the first item is that I don't follow celebrities. I really really couldn't care less about the stream of activities that movie, TV, or sports stars (or more likely their proxies) want to share with the world. This is US Magazine, only more poorly written and without grainy photos of celebrities in sweats.

I quickly stopped following anyone who split posts across multiple Tweets (i.e. anyone who posted a "1/53" post). As noted above, I found that the 140 character limit can actually be a strength in that it makes it comfortable to share short ideas. If you need more than one post to share an idea, than Twitter is the wrong medium. I found this to be especially true of several journalists who would several times a day share ideas split across 5-10 sequential posts. "Get a blog" I say. I chose to write this post in a blog, instead of 243 Tweets. Like any electronic communication medium it is best used when you use it for what it is good at, and communicating complex ideas across split posts is not something it is good at. Don't deliver your resume via SMS and don't deliver complex journalism via Twitter.

I also found that I stopped following anyone with more than 5-10 Tweets a day. This is related to the above set of ideas. If someone is that prolific they should use a different medium or more likely they are giving me too much information.

In thinking about who followed me and who I followed, one realization I came up with is that "Facebook is for friends, Twitter is for colleagues". My list of friends on Facebook has grown over time and I have begun letting colleagues in. But what I post in Facebook is pictures of my family and thoughts relevant to friends and family. It isn't really something that I intend to be consumed by colleagues. On Twitter, in contrast, I post about things related to my professional life. I considered whether the distinction between Tweets and Facebook status updates was totally arbitrary. But in fact they are not. Facebook is about me. It not only has status updates, but pictures, likes/dislikes, etc. It builds up a personal profile. Friends on Facebook are also bidirectional (I am your friend if you are mine). In contrast Twitter just has my ideas, nothing else. And "followers" are unidirectional (by default - I don't follow many people who follow me and vice versa). In this sense it is a broadcast medium that I can use to disseminate information and ideas.

I am still not sure whether Twitter itself will survive, but this format is here to stay. That isn't all bad. It would be great if the signal to noise ratio could increase. While that isn't necessarily the trend, it just may happen on Twitter. The celebrity-obsessed may move on to a different medium and Twitter may evolve to better support real time search. Let's see what Ahston has to say about that.

After deciding to go with Knowledgetree to manage documents, I reconsidered. I started a project using Knowledgetree but wanted more than document management. While checking in and out documents went really well, there wasn't any other way to communicate with team members through the site - notes, messages, calendars, etc. So I fell back on another system that I had been testing - opengoo. Opengoo has been working really well for the small project.

Opengoo opens with a dashboard for each user. The UI has improved since the last beta.

While Opengoo is generically for collaboration, it is quite good at document management. Think somewhere between GoogleDocs and Basecamp. You create different projects within you can also tag different documents and items (instead of using folders). Documents are presented in a list that allow easy access to downloading, checking in and out and viewing (screenshots from beta 1.1).

Each document presents further options, as well as a record of previous versions and related notes. Team members can subscribe to documents for alerts, though right now alerts are only sent on document notes, not check in and out. It is worth noting, however, that the development team has been very responsive to bugs and feature requests in the forums.

Opengoo also allows for live editing of documents within the browser. This includes text documents, and presentations currently with spreadsheets on the way.

The big drawback to date is that uploaded documents and documents created within opengoo are totally separate. You can't edit uploaded documents inline or download new documents as word processing documents. But that is likely to come.

Opengoo also has tasks, blogs, wikis, notes and a calendar. Just about everything you'd need.

Email in is a little limited to a beta component that pops email into a special section. But emailing in notes and documents could come in the future as well.

As much as there are features to wait for, there is enough to use as a serviceable collaboration application right now. Opengoo has been working well on my current project, and when 1.1 final comes out I'm likely to use it even more.

---

Another anticipated application surfaced recently as well. Liferay Social Office, a variant of the Liferay portal, came out in beta this week. It is a social collaboration platform billed as a Sharepoint alternative.

When users log in they are presented with a dashboard. It differs from a number of other collaboration platforms by the social components.

As is the focus of Sharepoint, Liferay Social Office has solid document management features.

You have the ability to lock documents, comment on them, update them, and convert formats (when OpenOffice headless is installed correctly). Webdav is also built in, but is somewhat buggy, at least in this beta when tested in Mac OS X and Ubunutu.

But Liferay Social Office has a lot of other features as well. It has wikis and blogs (both of which are somewhat unremarkable but fine). It does have pretty decent forums though.

While I haven't tried it yet, there is the ability to link forums and email lists, which is quite handy. Tasks are missing, but have been requested in the feature list. It is still in beta, with estimated release some time this spring. Worth keeping tabs on.

I wasn't really sure that I'd have the need for document management in the near future when I reviewed Knowledgetree just a few weeks ago. But after a recent rapidfire of document production that flooded many inboxes, I decided it might indeed be time. Another document was on the horizon, and I saw the potential of another flood.

The competitors were Knowledgetree and Alfresco. I'd reviewed both of these before, but at the time I was willing to overlook some minor annoyances as things I could work out if I needed to put them into production. Well, it was time for production and I would soon find out that it would take 80% of the installation time to get them that last 20% of the way there.

I actually found another good blog comparing the two systems about a year ago. That reviewer gave the nod to Knowledgetree, but they had both come a way in a year and thought it was worth taking my own look.

Most of the pros and cons from that reviewer still hold true as it turns out. Alfresco is more powerful, both in the features it offers through the web interface and the ways through which you can access it (CIFS, Webdav, Sharepoint, etc.). I think for the "enterprise" Alfresco is likely to be a better choice for these reasons. But for the non-enterprise Knowledgetree holds its own.

The VMware appliance that I installed last time had limitations. It couldn't be upgraded beyond 3.4.2 (at least as far as I could find) and Knowledgetree is now on 3.5.4. I couldn't find where all of the files were, and in their effort to make things easy, not all of the instructions for generic Knowledgetree installation and administration held true. I then went to the linux installer version. But that too had complications. Most importantly I couldn't get it to play well with the headless version of Openoffice. I'm also not a big fan of linux installers as I don't know where all of the files it installs go. This was less important in this case, because I was installing on a simple JeOS virtual machine. JeOS is a stripped down version of Ubuntu and is a great starting place for making simple vmware appliances. There are some very basic starting points, from there it is easy to install ssh, and do a LAMP install via one command.

Still, I thought a source install might be the way to go. I found some good Debian instructions which worked well enough for JeOS. Still I had some problems. The first was solved when I realized I hadn't install cron in the very basic JeOS. There were some other missing packages including some php5 libraries (the CLI library and the curl library). But I still wasn't having luck with the Openoffice headless server (which is required for indexing documents). For that I eventually install some more openoffice packages including a conversion library, a java library, and the writer application. I also added localhost.localdomain to the etc/hosts file.

Finally everything seemed to work. Indexing was good and the interface is pretty basic. Webdav reading works for the most part, though I haven't tried writing. I like that it is in PHP (for the most part) which makes troubleshooting pretty easy for me.

Alfresco was a similar story. I actually installed the latest stable nightly build from the Labs edition, since they are very near a new release. The first part of the install was again very easy. There were some good instructions for installing on Ubuntu which worked on another JeOS machine. I applied some of my Knowledgetree install knowledge to getting the headless openoffice working, but Knowledgetree still complained. It wasn't until I uninstalled openoffice, tried to install openoffice 3 and then reinstalled openoffice, including the "headless" package. And finally I got it all to work. Still there were bugs, and some parts of the interface that while powerful would likely confuse some more novice users. Troubleshooting was a pain (granted I'm using an unofficial build). I still don't full understand the share/alfresco dichotomy. CIFS seems good, but given that I run the server on a virtual machine with a private IP, it was going to take a lot of work to get it seen by the outside world. Reading the Alfresco forums showed that in general modifying ports or forwarding behind firewalls was non-trivial.

So now Knowledgetree is in production, and I'll see how it goes. Check in and check out and straightforward and there are good options for "subscriptions" for email notification. The one thing that I would like that I haven't seen, which Alfresco had, was the ability to create a new document from within Knowledgetree. It would be useful to create simple text documents with notes from within, but it doesn't seem like a showstopper for now.

It has been quite a while since I posted here on the Obsessive Collaborator. This has been due primarily to the migration of my server to a new machine (alas, it was not purchased with bailout money). I thought it was time to retire my five-year old server, at least from the front line, and replace it with a new server that would be set up to run virtualized servers. This would allow me to both test many server applications in isolated environments, and allow me to regularly backup and move offsite full functional snapshots of my servers (I am perhaps more obsessed with backup than I am with collaboration).

The process of migrating was fairly slow (mostly due to the fact that I did my work in my spare time). I was able to keep the old server running side by side until the final switch which took about an hour. While there are ways of moving from physical to virtual servers, I didn't think that they were worth the effort. Instead I started from a new CentOS 5.2 image that I created, built up the services I needed and then rsynced over the directories that I needed moved. I also used webmin to migrate settings for many of the services I needed.

The base server is also a CentOS 5.2 bare bones image. I probably could have used something lighter weight, but I now CentOS and stuck with that. Mostly that OS needs to run vmware and lots of backup scripts. I tried some premade backup scripts for vmware images, but they didn't work real well with vmware 2.0. I wound up writing my own script that progressively has each virtual machine suspend, copies the whole directory elsewhere, restarts the server, tars and gzips the directory and erases the backup directory, With a fast eSATA external drive the copying is done fairly quickly.

Vmware server 2.0 itself is quite good. I waited to go live until the official release came out. It is as easy to use as the older vmware server, the major difference from my perspective being that all management is done through a web console. For the most part I like this, making managing servers and even running console sessions quite easy. It will install firefox plugins or activex controls to run the console sessions wherever you'd like. Unless that place is a Mac, which mine often is. So I need to default to a windows or linux host for running those console sessions. I considered the now free Vmware ESX instead of server, but it is very temperamental about the hardware it runs on, and the server I built wasn't up to it (it wouldn't recognize the onboard sata).

Now I'm exploring the world of vmware images, and am disappointed when an app I want to test doesn't have an available appliance. Fortunately there are many to choose from (and I also have a bare bones image that I can build up from, and will also build a new Jeos image to make it even lighter weight for applications I want to keep).

In my search for a Document Management solution, I've looked at Alfresco over several iterations. It is quite capable, but I'm not thrilled with the UI, and the open source version has an unclear relationship with the enterprise version. I have read a lot about KnowledgeTree, and I thought I'd give that a try.

I found a vmware appliance from Rpath. Rpath has quite a number of good vmware appliances. Their documentation is somewhat sparse (as has been discussed in various forums), but most appliances now have a wiki page on their site. I found this wiki page early on, and it gave some basic setup information for Knowledgetree. But it wasn't until I found the separate wiki page over at Knowledgetree that I was able to get everything configured.

Once I got that documentation configuration was better than easy, it was easy and filled with options through a web interface.

I was able to make changes to the appliance itself (like network settings) and configure the major Knowledgetree options that normally involve messing with a config file.

When all was set up, it was a pretty straightforward operation. Log in to the site and you can upload documents, create folders, move documents, provide permissions for documents and send email alerts about documents to others.

One of the things I liked about Knowledgetree was that while it supported advanced features like checkin/checkout, workflows, etc. it also seemed like it could just be a simple document repository. Making it even easier was the ability to map the directory structure to a webdav drive. Once I actually followed the instructions, it was trivial to get the webdav working from a mac and linux clients (I didn't try windows).

I may or may not used Knowledgetree. I haven't decided whether the document management is so much better than other integrated packages I use to warrant it. But I'll keep experimenting.

A few more notes on recent upgrades. Elgg is now at 1.1 and has a lot of community plugins going for it. Opengoo just went 1.0 and looks pretty slick. And I'm looking forward to the upcoming release of Liferay Social Office. On the negative side, I've pretty much given up on Peopleaggregator. Their upgrade cycle fell short and there were too many hacks that I had to apply. Elgg looks like it is filing that open source social networking space just fine.

A while back I wrote about the open source social networking site Elgg. When it came time to choose a new social networking site for my family, I opted not to go with Elgg, since it was going through a major code revision. I went with People Aggregator instead. People Aggregator has been ok, but it is rough in a lot of places, and way overdue for an update (as far as I can tell it has missed the last two or three milestones, as it is still on 1.2pre7). This has kept me on the lookout for a new solution, and the arrival of Elgg 1.0 has me looking hard in that direction.

The new version of Elgg is the best solution for a closed social network that I have seen so far. It was super easy to install - typical PHP/MySQL install that involved setting up a database and uploading files. I did need to manually enter some info in my apache conf since it tried to write an .htaccess file that my apache configuration was set to ignore. But that was easy to spot and within minutes I was up and running.

At first glance it is clean and simple (in the style of the old one) with a bit more AJAX and the nice large sans serif fonts associated with many web 2.0 apps.

I jumped right to my dashboard where I was able to easily edit the widgets that appeared for me on my front page.

Once populated with some content, it dynamically updates the latest activity at a glance.

Before editing too much I went to the administrative console to manage plugins. The new Elgg architecture is plugin (mod) based. It can ship with the bare minimum or a "full" set of plugins. I chose the "full" set, which in fact actually does not include all of the plugins available on the site. I needed to go to the site to get the "walled garden" plugin so that I could make the site available only to those who I wanted it. By default anyone can register. The walled garden essentially takes all information off of the front page and disables the register link. I found this "full" set a little confusing. I don't know why they can't include the walled garden by default, since you can enable/disable plugins from the administrative console if you don't want to use any of them.

Once that was done I went back to creating content. Creating a blog is easy (particularly with the TinyMCE plugin).

Uploading files is also easy. And when I uploaded pictures it recognized them as such and made an album for me.

Even for a closed site it is nice to have multiple groups and separate areas in a social networking site, and Elgg delivers there. You can create groups, with private messaging areas, forums, etc. very easily.

I found a few things a bit confusing in Elgg. Like the fact that friendship can be asymmetric, that is once you friend someone that doesn't mean that you are their friend. That needs to be done separately. Once you have a friend you can send them messages like in most other systems.

I also found the status updating a little confusing. I thought this would be in my profile by default but you need to add it separately as a widget. Then you need to understand that it is editable via nifty AJAX even though it looks static.

Other things that weren't well in Elggville were the access control methods. There were some confusing things about what "private" means in different contexts. And I would occasionally get some errors posting information when the settings weren't allowed.

In the end Elgg is excellent, but I have a few reservations about where it is going. Is it going to be a bare bones social network that you are supposed to build on? What will the commercial Elgg be?

These questions will likely be answered soon, but I think that Elgg is very promising, and I'd probably even choose it now as my number 1 choice for a closed social network.

I've long been waiting for the update to the open source Alfresco. The original product was a very competent document management system. Then late last year they add a new social/collaborative interface to the open source "community" edition. This version was a little rough around the edges interface-wise, but it added things like blogs, wikis, and discussions.

A new version "3.0" was set as a milestone release that would full integrate these features, and a beta of that version was released under what is now known as "Alfresco Labs". From what I can tell, Alfresco Labs is the open source releases of Alfresco (there is also an Enterprise release scheduled for this fall).

Before I get into the details of Alfresco Labs 3.0a, I have to say that it took me some time to wade through the many versions and interfaces even though I've followed Alfresco for some time. It seems like the new version actually comes with two interfaces to the same repository. The old "Alfresco" interface that is quite document and workflow centric, and the newer Share interface that is collaboration centric. You need to log into them separately, but they have common data that can be accessed through either.

The old interface suffered from a complex array of fancy drop-down menus. This allowed savvy users to do things quickly, but novice users just got lost. The new Share interface not only focuses on collaboration, but also provides a much simpler interface. The new interface is reminiscent of the simplicity of Basecamp, and makes it much more feasible to invite outside users into a collaboration space. Share's other big feature is support of the Microsoft Sharepoint protocol. This is great since it can be integrated with MS Office. Sharepoint is the clear target competition for this version.

I actually can't say much about the installation process, as I just picked up the Windows executable full installer. It installed a JRE, tomcat, Alfresco and Open Office (for document conversion). I didn't have to do much, though if I wanted to do anything more than test, I probably should have installed MySQL on my Windows machine, rather than using the built-in Java database.

After install, I logged into the Share interface and was greeted with a simple Dashboard.

I was able to quickly create a new "site" that provided me with the basic Share components - a wiki, blogs, calendar, forums, and the document library.

Each of the components is simple, albeit a little rudimentary at this point. For example the Wiki has a nice clean interface with a small palette and WYSIWYG functionality.

But in order to embed a picture you need to upload it somewhere and provide the URL for the image. Many wikis do this, but it winds up relegating that task to experts, which somewhat defeats the purpose of a simple collaboration site. Similarly, adding links to other pages in the wiki requires some expertise. I am hopeful that these features will be refined in future iterations (this is a beta), but right now they are showstoppers for deploying to basic users.

Alfresco does really excel at document management. Not only can you easily upload, download and version documents...

...but you can also access the repositories via webdav, CIFS, and now Sharepoint. This is really easy and fantastic for document collaboration. I've been using Sharepoint recently on a project and I found Alfresco a lot easier to use.

There are some very basic "social" components to Alfresco, mainly profiles and avatars. But I think that is sufficient for its intended purpose.

There are some shortcomings to this release that made it somewhat painful to use. I couldn't change my password in the Share interface, nor could I add new users. For that and several other activities, I need to log in separately to the old interface. This made it feel a bit more alpha than beta, but I think Share is the interface of the future for Alfresco and I suspect all of this will eventually get rolled in. Then I might look to Alfresco for document centric collaboration, as best of breed.

While I'm killing time waiting for the 3G iPhone(s) I've been working on an upgrade for Movable Type, which The Obsessive Collaborator runs on. I've been using Movable Type for about five years and have gone through two or three major upgrades along the way. Movable Type 4 was released quite some time ago (and made open source), but I wasn't that compelled to upgrade from the version 3.3x that I was using.

Then I wound up checking out Worpress. I was setting up a simple website that I would be using with a few other people and decided I wanted to do a little experimenting. I wanted something that would be super simple and wouldn't take a lot of time to install or manage. I was intrigued by Expression Engine, and read a lot of good things about it online. But when I looked at the set of features that the free version had, it didn't look any better than a lot of other alternatives.

I had also read a lot good things about Wordpress. It had a famous "5 minute install", lots of plugins and styles and an active community. I couldn't resist the 5 minute install, and got the first install it much less than that (though I had to reinstall in a different directory, by which time at least 6 or 7 minutes had passed). It was very easy to set up and run. I did wind up searching for a number of plugins, none of which were really necessary, one of which added nifty ajax features and another added polls. The templates were easy to use and flexible (as were the plugins), and I realized (as have others) that Wordpress can pretty quickly become a capable CMS.

I then spent a lot of time messing with themes, and finally found Brian Gardner's themes, which were better than anything I put together and required absolutely no work.

Some of the terminology around "pages" and "posts" I found to be a little perplexing. And that made the setup of different sections of the blog a little difficult, but I think that was just a little local lingo that I had to get used to.

When I went to make my first test post, I was really impressed by the simplicity of the interface and ease of use.

One thing that I wasn't ready for (which explains the movement of directories upon installation mentioned above) was that by default Wordpress is designed to run a single blog. I later found that there is a multi-blog version known as "Wordpress MU", but there is some pretty strong wording there that MU is only meant for huge installs. There is also a Virtual Multiblog plugin that looks like it will do the trick if I need more blogs running from that install.

All of that got me thinking that maybe it was time to upgrade Movable Type to get a more current UI experience and make blogging more enjoyable. I decided to do a parallel install of Movable Type on my system, using new directories and a new database. That way I could slowly upgrade my system. I was pretty sure that my templates (mostly for another site) were going to take a fair bit of work to get working correctly, and configuring plugins might also take some time.

That was the right move. Installing Movable Type was easy, and I quickly found that the user interface was close to that of Wordpress.

I also found that upgrading templates was a nightmare. One of my sites uses a pretty complex system of style sheets and templates. Getting that working took several nights of small adjustments. That said, the new system of templates in MT 4 makes them much easier to manage in the long run because templates are broken out into reusable parts. I finally got the templates working and then it came time for the plugins. I narrowed it down to two that I needed MT-Privacy and Better File Uploader.

Privacy has been in a long beta for the current version of Movable Type, and in the end I had to give up on it, as it didn't work with the version of Movable Type I installed. I found many other generic privacy solutions that I was able to get working so it wasn't a huge deal. Better File Uploader is essential though, and on first pass I ran into some small difficulties with it. But within hours after filing a trouble ticket, I had a working version sent to me by the author and all was well again.

Then I found that there were no more notification options in Movable Type. Fortunately there is a plugin for this too, but that meant additional cost. The plugin seems to be doing the job just fine.

I wound up just importing the entries from my old blog into the new database, which went pretty well. And same went for this blog. The old template here wasn't worth saving so I went with one of the stock styles for this blog. Movable Type seems to have much more limited availability of up-to-date styles than did Wordpress. In time I'll come up with a better solution.

If I had to do it all over again, I may choose Wordpress over Movable Type, but the new version holds its own pretty well, and is definitely a marked improvement over the last version.

Other news in the works. Opengoo has a slick looking new interface that I'm trying to get working. And I've put Redmine into production. Next up are some forums for use with Drupal.

I vetted many of the project management tools that I've been looking at with teams at work and Redmine was the overwhelming winner. The one thing it was missing was a calendar, but we've found a makeshift way of dealing with this by inserting a static google calendar with reminders.

http://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/show/950

Still a work in progress but it seemed to work well enough.

Then came time to install Redmine on our production server instead of the test one. Installing Rails wasn't too hard as I found some good tutorials

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnCentos5

I had been running Redmine via lighttpd with fastcgi, but I wanted to go with Mongrel for this install as lighttpd was a bit problematic.

Good instructions on the Redmine wiki and another site
http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/HowTo_run_Redmine_with_a_Mongrel_cluster
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=674598

Figuring out how to fire up Mongrel on boot was harder, but found that eventually too (wish I could remember where I found this one)

mkdir /etc/mongrel_cluster
ln -s /home/redmine/config/mongrel_cluster.yml /etc/mongrel_cluster/redmine.yml
cp /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel_cluster-1.0.5/resources/mongrel_cluster /etc/init.d/
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/mongrel_cluster
chkconfig mongrel_cluster on


Ok. Now the hard part. I knew that there would be some non-technical folks using the site, and I knew that I wanted at least logins secured with ssl. Problem is that Redmine runs under a subdomain, and in fact in this case it was a subdomain of a name based virtual host. I had tried once before to configure certificates to work in this case and failed. But I wanted to try again.

This time I won.

First I had to edit ssl.conf and add in the virtual host (as in the httpd.conf file) and also added this line to take name based virtual hosts
NameVirtualHost *:443

Then I edited openssl.cnf

Under both [usr_cert] AND [ v3_req ]
I added
subjectAltName = @alt_names
and
[alt_names]
DNS.1 = name1.com
DNS.2 = name2.com
DNS.3 = sub.name2.com

where name1.com is the owner's name as well (in the certificates, essentially the FQDN).

Then I found this post that took me through the rest (with the exception of the path to the certificates, which is in /etc/pki/tls in Centos/RHEL 5).

http://nixcraft.com/server-configuration-tutorials/3075-postfix-mail-server-create-self-signed-ssl-certificates-cent-os-redhat-linux.html

Did a little magic with the SVN repository as I had before, and voila it is up and running.

This week I had an occasion to start up a social networking site for some family. I wanted it to be a closed site where Internet newbies and parents of kids who are participating would feel safe. For those same newbies I wanted it to be easy to use.

I had previously looked at Elgg. But I decided to cross Elgg off my list for two reasons. First, it is transitioning to this part framework/part ready-to-run solution, and right now it isn't really either. Second, I think the "classic" version (which is the existing ready-to-run solution) serves as an educational networking space really well, but as a pure social space it fits less well.

I searched around and found several potential candidates. I narrowed it down to Insoshi, Lovdbyless and PeopleAggregator. There are many other solutions out there, but I wanted something that didn't have pluggable components that needed to be upgraded or any particular advanced tools that I don't think this community will need. I also wanted something that was under active development.

Insoshi and Lovdbyless both run on Ruby on Rails. I've been increasing my expertise in deploying RoR apps, but I'm still relatively new so these both took a while to install. PeopleAggregator is a standard LAMP app and took quite a bit less time to install.


Lovdbyless

Lovdbyless took the longest to install. It required quite a number of Ruby gems, not all of which installed in an entirely straightforward way. The biggest problem was rmagick, which is a Ruby library for ImageMagick. I run CentOS 5, which only has ImageMagick 6.2.x, which is not sufficient for the latest version of rmagick. Luckily I found this post on getting the previous release of rmagick to run. I also needed to install the ImageMagick-devel package for it to compile.

The instructions are pretty detailed for Lovdbyless, but they only get you running under WebBrick, which should be considered for testing purposes. In fact they brush over instructions for running this in any kind of production environment. The lack of details on getting this running under other web servers or in a production environment makes it somewhat frustrating. I got close with my existing knowledge, and I'm sure that a more experienced RoR sysadmin could get it going with Apache/mongrel or Lighttpd, but it shouldn't be that hard.

In the end the application was reasonable but pretty bare bones. Blogs and photos.



The administrator capabilities are limited to deleting users, and there was no way (at least in the GUI) to do anything else such as close or partition the community. In the end, I think that Lovdbyless is intended to be a framework for others to build on.


Insoshi

Insoshi is trying to do just that (build on Lovdbyless). They have developed their own social networking package, but have borrowed some pieces from Lovdbyless. It was a bit easier to install, though I still couldn't get it running just right under anything but WebBrick. Even then I had to jump through some hoops (also true of Lovdbyless) to get it running in production mode. I had to manually start the Ferret search server.

Insoshi shows a lot of promise. It has a good community for its age (which seems to be numbered in weeks or months). But it is even more of a bare bones app than Lovdbyless.




PeopleAggregator I'm still trying to get a handle on the story of PeopleAggregator by Broadband Mechanics, but it is LAMP app with a reasonable (though still not great) community that seems to support it. I found a wiki and some discussion threads for a few of the problems that I had during configuration.

Unlike the RoR apps, it got rolling pretty quickly. I did need one extra domxml php package that was available via yum, and in order for it to spawn extra subdomains (or sub-subdomains in my case) I needed a little DNS magic, but all of that was pretty well explained in the setup section.

PeopleAggregator has a much more robust set of tools. You create different networks (subdomains) that can be made private. Within those you can also create groups . Individual users can create posts of several types (blog, audio, video, photo) and with a simple checkbox they'll appear on the network's home page.



There is a pretty extensive configuration section, but some configurations need to be made in the local_settings file on the server. It would be nice if there were an admin account that configured all of those settings, but I couldn't find it. It did, however, make the first user I created have special configuration powers, but it still couldn't touch all of the settings that could be made by hand.

After some tweaking I was able to make a network private, and in fact I was able to make all networks private by editing some things by hand. That doesn't prevent people from creating accounts on the server, but they can't join any networks. It is notable that PeopleAggregator accepts IDs from other sources (Yahoo etc.) and it also will read status from Facebook, AIM and a few others.

It isn't perfect. But it is pretty good, and I like the ability to svn update to bring in any patches rather than having to download, and transfer settings. For now this is my choice. I'll see what the rest of the people say.

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Redmine Revisited

I've briefly reviewed Redmine before. But I saw that they updated to a new version recently and in my search for a project management package that spanned technical and non-technical users I thought I'd give it another spin. It is another RoR app. But this one has quite good documentation on getting it installed and running under a number of different servers. That combined with my past experience had me up and running pretty quickly.

Redmine offers a nice suite of tools in a not too complicated package. With the improvements in this new version the usability is quite good. The one thing that I struggled with was integrating SVN. I just couldn't get it to connect. I posted in the Redmine forums (which use Redmine, which is a good sign) and had some suggestions, but nothing worked. But then another user in the forums solved it. With the SVN integration, the package really stands out. News to the front page of a project includes SVN updates and checkin comments, which is great.

The rest of the tools (Wiki, Files, News, Documents and the Forums mentioned above and shown below) are also pretty good.



There are better wikis and I miss being able to submit tickets by email (though there was word of this appearing in the next release). But it is above the minimum in just about every category that I'm looking for and could replace several apps (Wiki, Ticket Manager, SVN viewer, News) in one fell swoop.

Shortly after I posted about IceCore, I noticed that there was a VMWare image available on their website. That was the easiest way to get going with IceCore, so I fired it up on VMWare Fusion on my Mac. I did have some problems connecting at first. It turned out that the image was only listening to eth0 and my connection was being detected on eth1. I went to edit the network settings, but alas my favorite editor (nano) was not in the image. I limped through vi, and got the settings to work, and poof there was IceCore.

In terms of features, I think IceCore has the perfect (and I do mean perfect) mix. It is easy to create new groups ("Teams") of users to work on projects, and then provide them with a common set of tools that includes Blogs, Calendar, Discussion, Files, Milestones, Surveys, Tasks and a Wiki. This is great combination of tools



There is tons of ajaxy responsiveness in IceCore (note that the proprietary version goes by "Novel Teaming"). But the UI design needs some work. Threaded discussion take up a lot more space than they need to, and some of the features and layout will not be obvious to novice users.

These shortcomings sent me in search of related projects, when I found Liferay. At first, I couldn't tell the difference between Liferay and IceCore, but then Liferay did an update to version 5.0 and I was able to tell them apart. It turns out that IceCore is built on (the earlier version) of Liferay. Both have a similar portal display that allows you to add lots of widgets (both internal "portlets" as well as external sites and google gadgets).



It does add quite a number of features that facilitate working in teams, but much of the underlying functionality remains. There are numerous bundles of Liferay available, and I chose a bundle with Tomcat 5, which simply required me to run a start script. This uses hsqldb (which is fine for testing) and also installed a lot of sample data (which users on the forums have told me how to get rid of if I choose to continue with Liferay).

The new release of Liferay (which I assume IceCore will eventually incorporate) makes some welcome changes. For example, this is how threaded discussions appear in Liferay 5.



While this is how it appears in IceCore



Notice the popup frame that I'm sure seemed like a good idea at the time, but it isn't how much discussion forums work. New users like to have familiar functionality.

Similarly, this is how you see Wikis in Liferay.



And this is how you edit them.



These are pretty straightforward. But IceCore adds additional complexity with a Wiki that takes up more space, multiple views that are confusing and popup frames.



But where IceCore shines is in having all of the functionality that is needed in a one step install. Liferay is missing tasks most importantly. These could probably be added with a portlet, though I couldn't find one that was free and easy to integrate. IceCore also makes it really easy to manage teams. Liferay has similar functionality in Communities, but the Teams, along with the spaces that get created for them, are easier from an admin perspective.

I've seen some new UI designs for IceCore in their forums, and if they follow through on those and then build on the new Liferay, I think they'll have a real winner. Still, at this point in time IceCore is one of the best products I've seen. Speaking of which Chronopolys has gone 1.0 final and now includes an easy installer. I've also started looking at the community edition of Alfresco which has some new collaboration features in there. I'll try that next (after I can get it to install - it has been fighting with Liferay).