ECM presentations at eDocument Japan

We are giving two presentations at the eDocument Japan conference:

- The place of Open Source in the global ECM market

- Social Content Management with Open Source software Alfresco

The presentations will be in English, translated to Japanese.

Tokyo Big Sight, October 13th, 10:00 AM and 12:20 PM.

Alfresco's CTO in person is coming to Japan for the occasion.

Organized by JIIMA (Japan Image and Information Management Association)

AnkiDroid one of "The 100 best Android apps"!

AnkiDroid has been growing a lot recently: the number of users has quadrupled in the last 6 months!

With now 75.000 installs, AnkiDroid has just been selected by makeuseof.com as one of The 100 Best Android Apps!
Congratulations to all of the team!

I will soon release AnkiDroid 0.8 with a lot of bug fixes, and a version with a totally re-engineered database and a much more efficient SRS algorithm should be out before the end of the year.

Applying Business Intelligence to Bug Tracking

Last week I released AnkiDroid 0.5.1, and judging by the Android Market's comments, people seem to love it :-)

Since a few releases already, an opt-in feedback mechanism sends us a report everytime a problem happens. The anonymous reports are automatically scanned by a Google App Engine application to determine whether it is a new bug or just an additional occurrence of an already known bug. The data can be exploited in two ways:

1) An online application allows one to browse the reports and bugs, see which bugs happen the most often for a given version, and associate them with issues in the bug tracker.

2) A set of Business Intelligence tools allows one to drill-down reports in a multidimensional OLAP cube, and generate reports to show any interesting findings. As a quick example, here is the distribution of crashes among Android versions. Those tools use the open source Pentaho Business Intelligence suite.

Automatically deploy Alfresco WCM content to an FTP server

In Alfresco WCM, deploying means generating "baked" web content from XML content and templates, into a local FSR directory. Here is how to take this further and also deploy the content to your web server via FTP automatically.

1. Make sure you have both Alfresco WCM and an FSR (now called File System Deployment Target) installed and working.
2. Edit the Deployment Server's deployment/default-target.xml file and add a "postCommit" section linking to a postcommit script (example).
3. Create the postcommit script, calling the lftp tool in mirror mode (example).
   

Unfortunately, the default Alfresco Deployment server does not report anything about the script's activity and potential errors. To see or log messages, please download Alfresco's source code, modify ProgramRunnable.java like this, recompile, overwrite alfresco-deployment-3.3.2.jar with the one you just generated, and then restart the server.

Video of my AnkiDroid presentation at Roppongi Hills

Here is a video of my recent speech in Roppongi Hills about AnkiDroid. About 200 people attended, including a Japanese company who is considering reusing the code as a part of their educational offering. I licensed the slides under a Creative-Commons-Share-Alike license, so feel free to reuse or modify them and speak about AnkiDroid at other events!

Automatic report generation now possible in Pentaho Data Integration

Last Friday, Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) developer Matt Casters posted a preview of a new tool that allows Business Intelligence designers to include report generation (PRD) as a step of PDI. This is extremely useful, because the obvious step after ETL is often to generate reports.

Let's say a retail chain wants to send, everyday, to every shop manager, a report detailing this shop's performance and trends.
Imagine you have a data warehouse that contains all sales records, and a PRD report template. Then here is how to create a system that will automatically generate and send the reports everyday:

1. Install the bleeding-edge PDI 4.1.0 RC1
2. Add Matt's plugin as explained here
   
3. Open PDI "Spoon" and create a new Transformation
4. First, create a "Table Input" step to get for each shop it's code, name and email address.
5. Second, create a minimal JavaScript step to compute the output's filename and set the PRPT file's name.
6. Third, use the new "Pentaho Reporting step", and configure it to use your freshly computed PRPT and output filenames, as well as the shop codes.
7. Finally, create an "Send mail" step and set it to use each shop's email address, putting the generated report as an attachment.
8. Save and configure your cron to launch this transformation every night via the pan.sh command-line tool.

Presentation about AnkiDroid in Roppongi Hills

I will give a presentation at Hills Breakfast on Friday 10/22, 7h45, in Mori Tower, just at the left of the Goldman Sachs entrance.
I will be speaking about AnkiDroid and Open Source in general.

Last month's presenters were the Director of the Mori Art Museum and two Google managers.
My friend Yuko Mizutani of Mori Building Co. is organizing the event and invited me to give a talk. I first thought I would talk about ECM, but she figured out it would sound too much like an advertisement for my company, so I will be advertising Open Source instead!

Released AnkiDroid 0.4.1

I just released AnkiDroid 0.4.1, result of the collaboration of about 8 developers and tens of other contributors!

AnkiDroid will always be open source, but it is starting to get attention from companies as well: a Chinese company contributed the Simplified Chinese user interface. This version brings in a lot of new features:

First, the user interface has been translated by volunteers in 13 languages:
- Portuguese
- Swedish
- Romanian
- French
- Spanish
- Italian
- Simplified Chinese
- Traditional Chinese
- Catalan
- Russian
- Polish
- Greek
- German

Second, you can now download decks that have been made by other people. Hundreds of good-quality decks are available in a multitude of topics: sciences, law, languages, medicine, etc.

And lots of other improvements!
In Google's Android Market, search for "Anki".

Just released the first integration-oriented CMIS explorer webapp

In a lot of ECM projects, employees who are not back-office-power-users are offered a simple web-based interface to browse a portion of the documents.
Sometimes, clients are offered another web-based interface to check their bills, read their contracts or other papers.

Just released as open source by Aegif (Japan), Struts2CmisExplorer is a new way to build those kinds of web interfaces. It is a CMIS explorer application that focuses on simplicity. This means you can very easily get it running, and modify it to fit your extra requirements, or integrate it into your existing portal.

It should work with all CMIS servers (Documentum, Nuxeo, Open Text, FileNet, etc), for instance here is how to get it up and running on Alfresco:

1) Install Alfresco 3.3 (Community or Enterprise). Check that it is running well at http://localhost:8080/alfresco

2) Download Struts2CmisExplorer and put it in Alfresco's tomcat/webapps directory.

3) That's all! Use it at http://localhost:8080/Struts2CmisExplorer_0.1

Struts2CmisExplorer is not intended to be a full-featured explorer, instead it targets the usual need for a simple web-based documents access. The goal is reusability/ease of integration. Struts2CmisExplorer does not rely a particular framework, dependencies are kept to a minimum (Struts2 and OpenCMIS), which means you can easily integrate it in any IoC framework you might want.

More on Struts2CmisExplorer.

Helpdesk software solutions

If you are selling software products in Japan, you might need a helpdesk tool to keep track of your clients' questions and problems. I performed an evaluation of 10 helpdesk software solutions and here are the results. I first selected 30 tools (including bug trackers), and restricted my choice to ten tools that are open source, actively maintained, and localized in Japanese.

In the QSOS spirit, I defined criterions and filled the matrix. I gave a weight to each criterion according to what is important to me, but using this OpenOffice spreadsheet you can input your own weighings according to what is important for your company.

My winners are SiT! and GLPI.
But OTRS would be above if it were officially localized in Japanese.

Released AnkiDroid 0.2

I just released AnkiDroid 0.2 !
You can install it on your Android phone using the Google Market. AnkiDroid is a memorization software with already 900 registered users. Of course, it is open source.
Many new features for this version 0.2:
- Basic spaced repetition.
- Preferences dialog to enable various things.
- Sample deck.
- Starts much faster.

Working in Milan

This week I am working in Milan in the offices of Sourcesense. We are about twenty people from Brazil, Australia, Europe, India, the U.S. and South Africa, our goal is to brainstorm and define how Alfresco certifications will look like: Which different certifications will be proposed, what will be their content, price, modalities, difficulty, and many other things. We reached a consensus on most things, and tomorrow we will produce sample questions for each of the certifications.

In other news, I released OxygenGuide 0.3, which fixes bug #6, and AndroidBigImage 0.1.

Got hired to work on Alfresco

I got hired by Aegif (イージフ) to work on the open source ECM Alfresco! I would like to thank my former Japanese employers W3C Tokyo and Expresso for the great projects and wonderful time I had with them!

For my first week, my company sends me to Milan, Italy for an Alfresco "Train the Trainer" training.

Created OxygenGuide, an open-source offline travel guide

A lot of people were asking for it, so this weekend I developed OxygenGuide and released it under an open-source license.

Imagine you are traveling around the world and suddenly find yourself in Riyadh looking for a restaurant or a place to sleep. Carrying travel books is a pain, and browsing the Internet on your mobile phone abroad will probably cost a lot.

That's where OxygenGuide comes in: It is a compact offline travel guide that takes only 150MB of your smartphone's storage space. The data is based on Wikitravel, but customized for small devices. With this world travel book on you mobile device, you will travel lighter and further. The current version works for notebooks such as the Eee PC. I will try my best to release an Android version during the next weekend.

Update: Now usable on Android too.

Created a social rating framework today

Today I was at FujiSoft for the OpenSocial Hackathon organized by Google. Tomomichi Ono, Robert Gravina and I implemented a rating framework (and a sample movie rating social application using this framework) based on the idea I had proposed last week.

This framework allows anybody (without any hardware) to create a social rating application for social networks. This can be book ratings, news rating, or anything that can be rated. "Social rating" means that the act of rating can be shared with friends and commented on, and in addition to the average rating you see the average rating from your friends, among others.

There is a lot to do before it is usable, so contributions are welcome! This Open Source project's code is available: server-side code in Python for App Engine, client-side code in JavaScript for OpenSocial. Today was a lot of fun!

Attending Google Developer Day 2009

Even though inscriptions closed months ago, today I finally managed to get what they call a "VIP invitation" for the Google Developer Day 2009 tomorrow at Pacifico Yokohama. I will skip the morning sessions because they look boring, but the afternoon session sounds very promising:

• Life of an App Engine request
• Java で動かす Google App Engine
• Potential of the Social Web
• OpenSocial in Japan
• Google & Open Source
• Performance Tips for Geo API mashups
• Google Wave APIs
• HTML5 により拓かれる次世代 Web

Mozilla Party Japan

Today the もじら組 (Mozilla Gumi) organized a party in Tokyo to celebrate 10 years of Mozilla. My W3C colleague Kazuyuki Ashimura gave a short presentation about the multimodal web, and community coordinator Asa Dotzler detailed the history and perspectives of the Mozilla project. Chao Po-chiang reported on the Taiwan group's activity, and an Ubiquity developer explained how natural language interpretation differs between Japanese and English, which was a great grammar exercise for me!

Alfresco's CEO in Tokyo

Today I attended the Alfresco seminar organized by aegif, at the 49th floor of the Mori Tower. Alfresco's CEO John Powell exposed the strength of the open source Enterprise Content Management system, and several Japanese integration companies demonstrated their Alfresco-based offerings.