It always feels good to pass a test – even one that you don’t know you’re taking. I don’t ever recall thanking someone for giving me a test, but I will thank Matt Aslett at the 451 Group for giving KnowledgeTree passing marks on his Open Core Transparency Test.

Since we agree with Matt (and others) that transparency is a vital component of the open core model, it’s important to us that we’re viewed as upholding that standard. We appreciate being recognized for our efforts! Thanks, Matt.

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KnowledgeTree is pleased to announce the release of KnowledgeTree 3.7 Community Edition (Release Candidate).

New features and enhancements in the Community Edition include:

• Deployment on Zend Server for enhanced performance
• Document thumbnail preview functionality
• Support for Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, along with IIS 6 and 7
• RPM and DEB packages for Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux
• Additions to the types of document properties provided out of the box
• Support for open standards, including CMIS and OpenSearch
• Setup Wizards that assist you during all phases of installing, configuring and upgrading KnowledgeTree
• Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese translations

For more information on the release, please view the release notes.

Download KnowledgeTree version 3.7 Community Edition now!

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Kudos go to our friends at Zoho for standing up to Microsoft with style, humor and chutzpah! Responding to a comment from Microsoft that Zoho and other cloud-based office productivity applications offered “fake Office capabilities,” Zoho seized the gorilla by the…um…horns, and quickly launched www.fakeoffice.org.

This decisive marketing coup was accompanied by a well-produced video and I’m looking forward to seeing some of the additional mileage that Zoho gets from Microsoft’s latest gaff.

It’s also amusing to think about Microsoft’s own “fake” efforts. How about the fake iPod (Zune) and the fake PlayStation (Xbox)? Now, of course, there is the fake search engine. One could also argue that Excel was the fake Lotus 123 in it’s day, and Word was the fake Wordperfect. And dare we say that Internet Explorer was also the fake Netscape? We could play this game for a long time given that the basic premise for office productivity tools has been around for a long time and there have been generations of them by now (anyone remember Harvard Graphics?!)

I hope that some similarly creative folks out there will make the most of this opportunity. Although Microsoft is incredibly easy to ridicule, it’s certainly more fun when they set themselves up for it so adroitly. Do let me know if you’ve managed to join in the fun!

P.S. KnowledgeTree's Software as a Service offering, KnowledgeTreeLive, integrates very nicely with Zoho Office, providing customers with web-based editing of documents in the KnowledgeTree repository.

Follow me on twitter: @danielchalef

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The recent and highly publicized failure of T-Mobile’s Sidekick (hosted in the Microsoft/Danger cloud) has again called into question the safety, security and reliability of cloud computing.

According to Jon Stokes on ars Technica, “This outage and subsequent data loss is just the latest, and probably the most dramatic, black eye yet for "cloud computing," since users falsely assumed that if data was "in the cloud" then it was stored with enough redundancy and fault tolerance to render such a massive data loss impossible.”

Look closely at that statement – “users falsely assumed” that their data was safe in the cloud – and evidently, Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger did as well. I would argue that this is not as much a black eye for cloud computing as it is for those companies that take cloud-based storage for granted without additional backup and disaster recovery plans.

No backup system is 100% reliable; that’s why IT departments often implement multiple strategies, such as magnetic tape, redundant servers, etc.

We rightfully get asked by customers all the time about the safety and security of their data in KnowledgeTreeLive, our cloud-based (Amazon EC2) document management system.

Well, not only do we rely on the massive redundancy of the Amazon cloud, but we also have gone to great lengths to ensure that documents and data stored in the cloud can be recovered in the event of a system failure. For KnowledgeTreeLive customers, we take daily snapshots of working data and keep a rolling 7 days worth of these snapshots. We also keep a rolling weekly snapshot for a minimum of 4 weeks. This ensures customers have a 4-week history of backups.   [Read more]

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New to KnowledgeTree? Well, we've put together a brief and informative video to help you get the most out of your KnowledgeTree experience. In this video, I'll walk you through some of KnowledgeTree's key features: working with documents in KnowledgeTree, using workflows, collaborating with team members and many more.

View the video below or have a look at our resources page for more great videos!


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Mon Dieu! I’m still amazed by the vibrancy and ardor of the French open source community, as evidenced by their participation in the recent Open World Forum in Paris. Granted, there was a home field advantage at work, but I was still swept up in their excitement over the growing use of open source for both enterprise and SMB.

One item of particular note is that many French systems integrators are focusing purely on open source applications. Even those that were traditionally proprietary software implementers have established open source departments or practice groups. For example, Accenture was a sponsor of the event – not really a company that we think about as having a stake in open source, but there they were. At least in Europe, Accenture is seeing supporting open source as a very viable business opportunity.

A recent market survey by research firm, Markness, in France shows that 96% of the public sector is using open source. Next to running databases and web sites, open source is mostly used for IT administration. Markness expects that in 2011 some 63 percent of firms and organizations will use open source office applications.

Already, many municipalities are moving away from Microsoft-based environments toward a Linux OS and FOSS, like OpenOffice.org. The French Gendarmerie has saved 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org in lieu of Microsoft Windows and Office.    [Read more]

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Hi there, Tim the sales guy here again. This week, my marketing people want me to talk about a new capability that allows documents scanned by Kofax Capture to go directly into the KnowledgeTree repository via our Hot Folders.

What this basically means is that organizations that are already using Kofax Capture for bulk scanning have an easy way to get those documents en masse into KnowledgeTree along with the document properties (metadata) that describe them. This is because the Kofax Capture Release Script (that our partner Red Eagle Consulting provides) exports that metadata in XML that the Hot Folders understand.

So to break it down, if an organization already has a license for Kofax Capture and wants to use KnowledgeTree to store the scans, the release script makes it a no-brainer. We’ll sell you the KnowledgeTree license, and Red Eagle will sell you the release script. Of course, call us first and we’ll make it easy for you to get both.

If you don’t already have Kofax Capture, but want to implement it along with KnowledgeTree, then we can help with that too. Red Eagle is a Kofax Gold Certified Reseller, and they’ll implement the Kofax side of the solution and work with you to configure it.

Any organization that is paper-intensive needs a bulk scanning, capture and document storage solution. Reducing paper is smart business that cuts costs and increases efficiency. Plus, it’s good for the environment, since the average worker can use up to 10,000 sheets of paper per year!

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Earlier today we announced the availability of a KnowledgeTree Release Script for Kofax Capture. As discussed in our announcement, the script outputs processed documents and their properties (metadata) in a format accepted by KnowledgeTree Hot Folders. The result is an end-to-end solution for document capture and management. Scan your paper-based invoices in at one end, let Kofax's OCR, barcode recognition and other imaging technologies extract the properties, and output everything to a secure, and centralized document repository for processing and storage.

KnowledgeTree Hot Folders is a simple, high-volume integration interface for third party applications, such as back-office document imaging workflow applications and fax servers. It is a Windows service designed to monitor and automatically process content copied or moved to a specified Windows file share.

KnowledgeTree already provides a number of easy-to-use interfaces for importing content but there are two distinct advantages to using KnowledgeTree Hot Folders:    [Read more]

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The KnowledgeTree community is extremely fortunate to have members who are actively involved in developing and supporting open source software.

For this month's featured KnowledgeTree community project, we'll be showcasing the "Wemag Online Document Viewer" plugin by Aart-Jan Boor from Wemag Consulting.

DW: Briefly, describe this project and what it entails?
This KnowledgeTree plugin allows users to view the content of documents without downloading the document or having any special software installed on their computer.

DW: What inspired you to create this project?
Often you simply want to view a document quickly and this is exactly what this plugin allows you to do. We just wanted to support the KnowledgeTree community by adding even more functionality to the KnowledgeTree application.

DW: What business problems were you looking at solving specifically with this project?
The software has not been developed to solve a specific business problem but it is useful in many business situations. For example, if you need your users to be able to read documents on PC’s without relying on Microsoft Office software, you can use this plugin to view the documents.   [Read more]

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The next release of KnowledgeTree is in the pipeline. During our planning we took a moment to think about what we could do for our customers that would make their lives easier. We realized that the one thing KnowledgeTree could do better was to provide better document previewing functionality. The only available option was to use the inline viewer, however, this only supports a small set of document types. With this in mind we set about adding two new features.

The first feature creates a thumbnail of the first page of the document. The thumbnail is displayed in the left panel of the document view page, in addition a thumbnail column can be added to the browse view for easy scanning of documents and images. Clicking on the thumbnail produces the second feature (also available as a document action), a flash-based preview of the full document. Full navigation around the document is provided, zooming is enabled and the document can be full-screened for easier viewing. If the document is an image then it will display in a modal window.

The new flash-based preview allows the full document to be previewed online without needing to download it. It will be available in the KnowledgeTree 3.7 release.

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