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IBM reveals a little more about QEDWiki
IBM demo'd QEDWiki on Wednesday at PHP|Tek in Orlando. Unfortunately, I can't find much detail; no screenshots, no *-cast. But judging by the amount of search traffic I'm seeing, it's quite a hot topic. I just wish I had more to pass along. But here's the little bit that I could find:
There are a couple of CNet articles about QEDWik (1, 2) in which we can learn a little more. First, it's PHP-based. Second, it sounds like it's really after the enterprise-content-mashup concept. The article calls it 'application assembly,' which is not a bad turn of phrase. IBM wants to enable "businesspeople [to] create their own Web pages by dragging and dropping components onto a pallet. [sic. I assume they mean 'palette'.]" The example they offer is plotting sales data against a weather feed.
Here are Dru Lavigne's notes from an earlier conference where we learn: "[QEDWiki] is both an IDE and a runtime framework," "developers can create their own WikiCommands to extend the framework as they are simply PHP scripts" and "if the PHP community shows interest, it will most likely be open sourced."
So, still nothing to look at, but we know a little more about the focus QEDWiki will have. It sounds much more like a drag-and-drop application wiki than an enterprise wiki.
If anyone know where to find any screenshots, etc. please let me know. And if you happen to work at IBM, I'd love a demo.
April 28, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Home for Easter
Wow. No posts in ten days. I'm lame. Sorry about that, folks,
And this is just a quick one to say that I'm heading home to Birmingham for Easter with the family. I'll be there through the weekend, so if you want to get together, ring me up.
April 13, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Network Computer Wiki review
Just wanted to point out this very nice article from Network Computing reviewing four enterprise wikis: Jotspot, Socialtext, CustomerVision and Confluence. I say 'very nice' because they picked Confluence as the best of the pack.
You can read for yourself why. But the article is pretty thorough and seemed to be mostly accurate from what I know of Confluence and the other products.
However, there were a few glaring errors in the article, like this one: "JotSpot is extensible, but only through 13 add-ons available in the vendor's application gallery," which completely misses the point of what JotSpot is trying to do. I'm sure that was frustrating to them.
The reviewer brings up the scalability question, but fails to address it in any meaningful way, though he does manage to call Confluence "limited."
Other interesting info: $250k/year for the Socialtext appliance? Wow. I hadn't seen that number before. Even if you figure that in typical enterprise software sales fashion, they'll immediately drop the price by 50% once you start negotiating, thats still a lot of money.
The reviewer really liked JotSpot's permissions system, I'm guessing because it is fully hierarchical as opposed to Confluence, in which only the view-and-edit page permissions are hierarchical. In practice, I think you can achieve the same results with Confluence's system (plus having the additional power of space-level permissions), but it's not as immediately obvious that this is so.
I haven't played with CustomerVision's wysiwyg editor yet, but the reviewer really liked it. Here's the only screenshot I could find. It's hard to tell much. I need to check it out in action.
This is the first non-blog article I know of that has done a real, hands-on review with all of these products. It's definitely worth a read.
Disclaimer: In case anyone doesn't know, I work for Atlassian Software, makers of Confluence.
April 4, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Dodgeball
My new phone does all sorts of cool stuff now, like IMAP, AIM and general web-surfing. And I'm happy about all of that. But the feature that I'm happiest about is a simple one: text messaging.
You see, my old phone didn't do SMS. I know, crazy, huh? Everyone at work made fun of me mercilessly for it.
I bought the Sony Ericsson T608 two years ago because it was the only phone Sprint offered at the time that had Bluetooth. Which, as a Mac owner, was very important to me: it was the only way to sync my addressbook with the phone. And Sprint, at the time, was the only provider that had moderately decent coverage at inside apartment. As this was going to be my only phone, it pretty much needed to work inside. Thus Coverage + Bluetooth = No Texting.
April 3, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
