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 an awesome video to help you get the most out of your KnowledgeTree experience. In this video, I'll take you though some cool features like working with documents in KnowledgeTree, using workflows, collaborating with team members and many more.

Check out the video below or have a look at our resources page for more of these awesome 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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The vibrancy of the European systems integration community is very evident at the Open World Forum in Paris this week. Companies exhibiting at the forum include NXC, Smile, solinux, and the sizable Bull. Many of these companies are quite large, with hundreds of employees and distinct practices (which often include ECM-related services).

What is interesting about these companies is their focus on open source and their significant customer engagements. These firms, and many like them, are actively contributing to the open source communities that they participate in.

What is driving the growth of this SI community? Or perhaps more importantly, why don’t we see a similar groundswell in the UK?

Yes, government policy, in particular the preference for spending locally and on open source, is driving money towards SI’s. Many of these policies are however in place in the UK and we don’t see a similar effect. Additionally, most of the SI’s I have spoken to have very many private sector customers, with some of the SI’s earning more revenue from these contracts than from public sector engagements.

So why, compared to Europe, is there such a dearth of private sector demand for open source in the UK? I asked Matt Aslett from the 451 Group, an analyst firm, and he had a rather interesting answer: language and culture. He believes that in the UK, it is just too easy to purchase English language proprietary products and associated services, many of which originate from the US. The European desire to localize and customize for local norms is both supported by open source and drives open source innovation, to the benefit of all.

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It’s always tricky from a sales and marketing perspective to talk about performance improvements to a product. Implicit in the statement about making performance better is the underlying thought that maybe performance wasn’t as good as it could have been all along.

In my experience, software companies that take significant steps to improve performance underplay them, for fear that users, analysts and pundits will jump to that implied conclusion. So let’s set the record straight on KnowledgeTree’s switch to Zend Server. It will improve product performance. Period.

As far as I’m concerned, no matter what guise this message takes, it’s good news for customers. Not only is Zend Server improving the application response time by close to 40%, it also means that KnowledgeTree is now running an enterprise-grade version of PHP with support from the experts at Zend.

Hey, I’m a sales guy. I don’t always say what my marketing people want me to say. But I think that any improvement in application performance is good for customers and helps me sell more product.

The Zend stack will be available with KnowledgeTree 3.7 — coming soon! For more information visit http://www.knowledgetree.com/knowledgetree-boosts-performance-using-zend or to arrange a demo, contact sales@knowledgetree.com

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From its original design as a way to create dynamic web pages, PHP has evolved into a language (and supporting environment) that is particularly well suited to rapidly developing web-scale applications. Examples of these include Facebook and Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, its genesis prevented it from being taken seriously as an enterprise-grade language and environment, especially when compared to the incumbent 800 pound gorilla, Java.

PHP is enormously popular, with some estimates putting the number of internet domains running PHP at over 28 million. PHP’s popularity largely stems from how it, as an interpreted language, supports rapid development cycles, and the ease with which novice developers can learn the language.

Until only a few years ago PHP lacked strong object orientation and other features of modern development environments. PHP’s low barrier to entry also led to much of its criticism: developers just coded, often with no separation between presentation and business logic. The result: badly architected and unmaintainable applications.

Java’s rich ecosystem of frameworks, libraries and application servers (from Spring to JBoss) have underpinned enterprise use of the language. Frameworks provide architectural patterns and scaffolding, leading to rapidly developed, maintainable code. Application servers provide robust and rich environments for enterprise applications to exist within.    [Read more]

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