Sproutit's Charles Jolley talks about how Web 2.0 applications make things easy for small businesses:

Here is the simple fact: business software costs too much for small business. And there is nothing the big software companies can do to fix it. They can’t drop the enough features, they can’t reduce the price enough. That’s because it’s not so much the cost of the software that is the problem—its the cost of maintenance.

And Joe Suicide talks about fixing the problem of direct marketing:

In targeting your campaign you need tools. Probably the most important is the register. In register you have all the information you can get. Problem with a register is the fast corruption of information. People move, change e-mail addresses, change jobs, retire or die. With current tools in most of the offices doing direct marketing this leads to endless loop of sending mail to places and addresses not in existence anymore. This is inevitable.

What is not inevitable is the handwork of fixing those registers one by one switching between one's e-mail and spreadsheet. This is an area where it is easy to change lives in offices little bit more bearable.

We're working on OpenPsa 2 to solve the simple, common business problems with open source software. Instead of building complex information architectures we want to make it easier to collect meeting notes, track tasks with subcontractors, keep customers up-to-date and handle incoming questions.

We have just contracted Yukatan to work on integrating SyncML support into OpenPsa 2. The idea is to enable users to synchronize their web-based calendar and contact registry with cell phones, PDAs and Outlook.

The SyncML implementation will be utilizing the Funambol open source SyncML server that will talk with OpenPsa through the Java Content Repository API.

Astute readers will remember that OpenPsa 1 had a PHP-based SyncML 1.0 implementation. However, this didn't work with many typical devices including Nokia handsets and so we had to look for another and more easily maintainable solution.

We should have first beta of the Funambol OpenPsa Connector in March.

With these two recent conference invitations, it looks like the spring will be extremely busy.

EclipseCon 2006

March 20th - 23rd, Santa Clara, California

In EclipseCon Midgard CMS will join the Open Source Pavilion.

7º Fórum Internacional Software Livre

April 19th - 22nd, Porto Alegre, Brazil

I will be presenting OpenPsa and the Digital Business Ecosystem

There is a new Joel on Software post about calendars. Lets see how the OpenPsa 2 calendar fares with his feature requirements:

Enter flights. Many of these calendars only lets me enter things that start on 15 minute intervals, and flights are just not scheduled that way. Many of these calendars insist I specify the duration, which I don't know -- I know when the flight lands, but not the duration.

In OpenPsa calendar you specifically choose start and end time, not start and duration. By default when you click the Create event button the new event will have a duration of one hour. The times can be entered either by writing, or by clicking the button next to time to open a calendar selection widget:

Understand enough about time zones so I can enter a flight. Flights from New Zealand to Los Angeles arrive before they departed.

Actually this we don't do yet. Now all times are supposed to be in the server's local timezone, meaning that you need to calculate the timezoned times into your local time. Would be a great idea and not very difficult to add optional timezone pulldown to the editor though.

Allow my assistant to enter appointments and see my schedule, although some things may be private.

The calendar events in the editor may be marked Public or Private. With private events, everybody can see the duration of the event, but only participants can see the details. Everybody can see the details of the public events.

Notify me in advance of a meeting using some reliable mechanism. Surprisingly many of the hot new Ajax calendars omitted this basic feature because they're web apps. At the very least, I'd like something to pop up on Windows, which means a downloadable widget, and an SMS message on my cell phone. Different meetings need different advance warnings ... I need to be notified 3 hours before a flight at Kennedy but 3 minutes before a meeting in my office.

OpenPsa calendar doesn't support alerts yet. With the OpenPsa version 1 calendar you could edit the events via webcal or SyncML, and the alerts would be handled by your mobile phone, or a desktop calendar subscribed to the event feed.

We haven't ported this feature to OpenPsa 2 yet.

Print out something reasonable that I can take with me before a trip listing my complete schedule for the trip. Some of my appointments have driving directions or complicated notes attached. I just want a list of where I need to be, when, and it's surprising that very few online calendars can handle this.

Again, this was something OpenPsa 2 did well with its Week list feature. OpenPsa 2 is fully hCalendar and CSS, and so creating a suitable print CSS should be easy.

In any case, these were important points about attention to detail. On the other hand, we also have to decide what is essential for the 2.0 release.

Dave Johnson seems concerned that Web 2.0 and Open Source seem mutually exclusive:

Web 2.0 is not about having cool software to install on your own personal web server, it's about getting locked into services provided by and trusting your data to Web sites that you do not control. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit just for fun (and hits). But maybe we need a list of "the best open source Web 2.0 software" -- and it would include things like open source blog servers, wiki servers, photo galleries, content management systems, social bookmarking clones and etc.

I was talking about the benefit of Open Source in Web 2.0 earlier in "Working over the web":

The great thing about using Open Source applications like OpenPsa is that you can choose between having it hosted for you, and running it yourself. At first you can get the hosted version, and get all the benefits of not having to hassle with backups, installations and other things. And if you later in your company's growth path decide it is better to run the software yourself, you can easily switch to that model.

Actually you could even run a local OpenPsa installation on your Mac or Linux laptop and synchronize using Exorcist to achieve Notes-like replication.

Via Sam Ruby.

I posted yesterday about switching to Web 2.0 business applications. However, when organizations do this they should be aware of the other side of it: privacy. Boing Boing notes:

As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

Again, this is where using Open Source applications is good, as if the service provider becomes abusive you can simply switch to another provider or install the application for yourself. And with DBE you can still keep in sync with your colleagues and partners.

Updated 17:15: In addition to privacy, another major concern with using Web 2.0 services is the possibility of downtimes:

The Dec. 20, 2005, outage cut many companies off from critical data for hours on a busy, pre-holiday business day. It also called into question how well Salesforce, which stores customer and sales records for thousands of businesses, is holding up under rapid growth.

"We don't want outages and we're doing everything we can not to have them, but we'll occasionally have them," he said. "That's part of computing...nothing runs at 100 percent availability."

Via Ditherati.

There have been some interesting posts lately about switching to use hosted "Web 2.0" applications as the main IT infrastructure. Jukka Zitting writes:

I am sick and tired of doing backups, synchronizing settings, and having trouble accessing information. These are all symptoms of keeping your data locally on multiple computers. As a new year’s resolution I have decided to get rid of all these problem[s].

And IT Redux continues about what they call Office 2.0:

No painful software upgrade. When your applications are served by online service providers, someone else is doing software upgrades for you, and if you carefully select your providers, such upgrade can be totally painless, as was related in this post.

Of course, all these benefits disappear if you cannot get access to a decent Internet connection, which is a requirement for Office 2.0, much like a desktop computer was a requirement for Office 1.0. If you need to work offline, Office 2.0 might not be the best option for you, and you should not believe people who advertise online services that can work offline as well. They do not, because they should not, so make up your mind and go with what works best for you, based on your own set of requirements.

The great thing about using Open Source applications like OpenPsa is that you can choose between having it hosted for you, and running it yourself. At first you can get the hosted version, and get all the benefits of not having to hassle with backups, installations and other things. And if you later in your company's growth path decide it is better to run the software yourself, you can easily switch to that model.

Actually you could even run a local OpenPsa installation on your Mac or Linux laptop and replicate using Exorcist to achieve Notes-like replication.

In related news, Seth Gottlieb pointed to an interesting article about the death of enterprise software by Joe Lamantia:

For enterprise software, I think organizations will turn away from monolithic and expensive systems with terrible user experiences -- and correspondingly low levels of satisfaction, quality, and efficacy -- as the best means of meeting business needs, and shift to a mixed palette of semantically integrated capabilities or services delivered via the Internet. These capabilities will originate from diverse vendors or providers, and expose customized sets of functionality and information specific to the individual enterprise. Staff will access and encounter these capabilities via a multiplicity of channels and user experiences; dashboard or portal style aggregators, RIA rich internet applications, mobile devices, interfaces for RSS and other micro-content formats.

IT Redux has a story about managing GTD with Salesforce.com:

If the item is not actionable, I trash it, store it as a long-term goal or attach a note to an object, both using Salesforce.com as data repository. Salesforce.com does not have any standard object for goals, therefore I created a custom one. A goal has a long-range timeframe attached to it, which can either be the current year, next year, within five years, within ten years, or within one’s lifetime. A goal with a five years timeframe could be the buying of a house for example. The decision to use a note rather than a goal is based on the fact that a note does not have a timeframe. It’s a simple piece of information that I want to make sure I will be able to retrieve when looking up the object it is attached to. Using Salesforce.com’s relational model, a note can be attached to any object, such as an account, a contact, or whatever custom object you might have built to store some specific piece of information.

These kinds of ideas are important as we work towards implementing a Getting Things Done system in OpenPsa 2.

Via David Allen.

I'm writing this in the DBE Project Review in chilly Tampere. Looking at lot of the presentations, it seems to be a common view that actual end-user businesses would be using tools like the DBE Studio to model their business and services.

However, we feel that this is quite a bit too difficult, and that the Digital Business Ecosystem should be something happening in the background instead.

The OpenPsa approach

With the DBE implementation in OpenPsa, the only point where user becomes aware of DBE being used is when they add new contacts to the registry. One of the contact editable fields is Digital Business Ecosystem ServiceID:

The ServiceID in this case is the identifier of the Sitegroup entry in the Midgard database, which means it is essentially the identifier of an OpenPsa installation. The identifiers follow the UUID spec and so should be unique across the scale-free network.

If the ServiceID has not been provided, the user is treated as a local user and there will not be a further thought about DBE. If it is inputted on the other hand, the OpenPsa DBE Service will start looking for a matching company in the DBE P2P network. If the company is found, the OpenPsa service will then replicate all tasks and hour reports related to the remote user to the other company's installation.

Remote users and local users are identified in person listings by different icons: satellite dish for remote user, and a person image for local user.

System architecture

Since OpenPsa has been implemented as set of MidCOM components written in PHP, it can't connect with DBE directly. To make the connection, Exorcist is being run as the DBE Service. It watches for changes in the Midgard database, and replicates them across the DBE network as required. Here's roughly how it works:

Security model

When the OpenPsa DBE service was developed there was no Identity System for DBE, and so at the moment the service must be run over VPN to be secure. We will look at utilizing the new DBE security module in the next project.

For us the challenge obviously is that with OpenPsa users authenticate with their Midgard accounts, and so DBE identity can only be established on per-company level. We'll have to see how well this works with the DBE security module.

In related news, Joel Spolsky talks about Micro-ISVs, one of the target markets for the networked Openpsa.

We spent the New Year's Eve at our favorite rock star's place having sauna, and welcoming the new year with Pikkuoravat, Verka Serduchka and Sovetskoe Shampanskoe. Globalization was really showing through, with SMS messages arriving in several languages and from several different time zones. Some samples:

• Polish: Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
• German: Ein frohes neues Jahr
• Portuguese: Feliz ano novo
• Italian: Felice nuov'anno
• Frech: Bonne annee
• Russian: S Novim Godom

While not as adventuristic as 2004 when I scaled mountains in Africa, rode the motorcycle in Caucasus and saw the Orange Revolution begin in Ukraine. The year 2005 was focused on learning and development.

Winter

The Midgard Site Creation Wizard was launched in early January making it easy to set up new websites from scratch. It also enabled creation of reusable style templates.

I started my flying lessons in late February at BF-lento, had the first solo flight in early May, and passed the check flight in August. After acquiring my Private Pilot's License I've been flying at the Malmi Aviation Club.

In February I also got the first look at the Digital Business Ecosystem, an EU-funded project to developer peer-to-peer systems to help small companies to network and work together. DBE would later feature as a major OpenPsa feature.

Jukka Zitting, the original founder of the Midgard Project returned from hiatus in February and launched his own consultancy, Yukatan. One of his earliest projects was development of a Java Content Repository interface for Midgard. Since then he has also worked on other things like DBE and development of Exorcist, the cross-CMS replication tool.

Spring

In March, Midgard got its integrated content indexer based on Apache Lucene, which ensures all content changes are immediately available to search results.

We started the process of developing OpenPsa2 by visiting a partner company in Rome during early April. In addition to writing specifications, we also spent a lot of time scootering around the city and enjoying the ancient historical sites. Pope John Paul II died while we were in Rome, gathering millions of grievers to the city.

After the trip to Rome we gathered Midgard developers for a Midgard Developer Meeting in Helsinki. We amused the group with a sightseeing flight over the city, sauna and some Georgian food. The meeting resulted in some very nice new technologies, including the Query Builder database abstraction tool.

In end of April I also visited the Russian Open Source Forum to talk about the TownPortal community portal application we originally built for the town of Bælum in Denmark. Maddog told me lots of stories about free software in Brazil.

In May, MidCOM was established as the default PHP API for Midgard development. OpenPsa2 development was happening on top of MidCOM, and the Aegir2 project was started to replace the current Midgard administration interfaces.

Summer

Sometime between May and June, AJAX started to establish itself as a valid programming technique. It and Microformats enabled us to develop some very interesting UIs for the upcoming OpenPsa2 application.

In late June I joined the Shnjaka expedition to sail on a sown Viking ship on lake Onega. The trip took me to the backwoods and small villages of Carelia, and involved many different models of transportation including hitchhiking, several trains and back of a police car.

In early July, our partner Protie acquired the majority of FTC, the biggest Midgard hosting provider in Finland.

Midgard's documentation started to move to wiki format in late July, powered by a new version of the net.nemein.wiki component. The move was completed during the fall, when all old documentation was Exorcised into the wiki.

In August we got Mac OS X packages of Midgard. The packages made installation on Mac systems very easy.

Autumn

In September, Midgard got recognized in two categories of CMS Watch Vendor Kudos of 2005 list: Templating and Page Assembly.

Later in the month I flew to Tbilisi to present Midgard in Georgia. We spoke with several ISPs, the Georgian Parliament and Ministry of Education, and it will be interesting to see what will come out of that.

While in Georgia we also visited the Cave city of Varzia, and scaled the dangerous walls of the Vanis-Kvabebi cave fortress.

In October we got a new event calendar for Midgard, redesigned from ground up to support Microformats and the Pyhä skiing center activity calendar requirements.

In the last weekend of October we had another Midgard Developer Meeting in Linköping. As the AnyKey office is located in the nearby countryside, we were able to avoid the riots in the city.

During November we started fencing with Kerttu. As the only participants in the sabre course at Ylioppilasmiekkailijat, we got very good private instruction.

Tuomas Kuosmanen introduced us to the Tango Desktop Project by designing new user interfaces for both Aegir2 and OpenPsa2. Tango will play an important part in the visual identity of Midgard 2.

In late November I flew to Brazil to present Midgard and the DBE project at several conferences.

While in Brazil, I also attended the Nivea Sun Regata in Porto Alegre in the beginning of December. After brief run aground we finished fifth in the Ocean class.

In December we got the Pear packaging of MidCOM finally going. While the old PEAR versions gave us some problems, the PEAR 1.4 packager worked very well.

Conclusion of the year

During the year 2005 my blog readership rose steadily from about 500 visitors per day to over a thousand. In December I had 33,600 visitors reading the site from 10,300 IPs. Pretty satisfying growth, though I guess it will plateau now.

As for new year's resolutions, I'd like to learn sabrage, and become better at customer service.

Harpers.org has a quite different kind of summary of 2005:

It was revealed that the CIA had set up a secret system of prisons, called “black sites,” around the world; it was also revealed that the National Security Agency was spying on Americans without first obtaining warrants. Journalist Judith Miller was released from jail and said she wanted to hug her dog. U.S. Congressman Tom DeLay was arrested; U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was indicted. The Pentagon admitted to using white phosphorus during the 2004 attack on Fallujah, Iraq, and allocated $127 billion to build a robot army. The total number of American soldiers killed in the Iraq war rose to 2,174, while the total number of Iraqi civilians killed rose to 27,636. “We are all waiting for death,” said an Iraqi soldier, “like the moon waiting for sunset.” The U.S. Defense Department, in violation of the federal Privacy Act, was building a database of 30 million 16- to 25-year-olds. The Department of Homeland Security announced that it had wasted a great deal of money and needed much more. Starbucks came to Guantanamo Bay. Scientists began work on a complete, molecule-level computer simulation of the human brain. The project will take at least ten years.

We wanted to make the beta release of OpenPsa2 this week. However, there are two issues preventing this for now:

• OpenPsa2 under Midgard 1.7.3 causes strange SIGABORTs in Apache when saving data
• Installation is currently quite involved process

As to the installation part of this, you all can help by commenting the new packaging proposal in mRFC 0021.

And if you want to install it anyway, read the OpenPsa 2 installation instructions.

We have recently been contracted to develop a new workflow engine on top of OpenPsa to support different pharmacovigilance and drug regulatory processes from the viewpoint of a drug manufacturer.

The specification process is still ongoing, but for now the main requirements seem to be:

• Definition of workflows through an UI (or possibly via an XML import)
• Handling roles through Midgard Groups
• Connecting alarms and escalations to schedules of some processes ("this step must be completed in 10 days")
• Making the actual activity handling easy and GTD-ish (complete with filtering based on contexts)
• Supporting deliverables that may be objects or actions in other MidCOM components ("Write a new Word document with this template")

Since workflow is a big topic, it would be great to be able to share some of the development efforts with other PHP-based applications. Galaxia is a PHP workflow system that is shared between projects like TikiWiki and Xaraya.

The problem with Galaxia is however that it uses direct SQL for its data storage, whereas we would like to use MgdSchema and Query Builder. We'll have to see whether it will be easier to write our own, or adapt the Galaxia system to our framework. Also, the UI would probably require quite much tuning to fit our concept.

Another issue of consideration is how to fit the workflows into our Social Network of Projects model of using OpenPsa within a network of contractors connected via DBE.

My DBE tutorial in Fórum GNOME went quite well. Learning from the translation issues in Saturday's Midgard tutorial, this time the presentation was held in the main auditorium of LatinoWare Mercosul with simultaneous translation.

The presentation generated lots of interest in the Digital Business Ecosystem, and I was asked to give a short briefing on the subject for students of the ESEEI university together with Nathan Wilson from DreamWorks.

Digital Business Ecosystem slides in English (392KB PDF)

DBE was also being presented in the World Summit on the Information Society, and the Brazilian delegation including Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil got interested in bringing the concept to their country. The Free Software movement is very strong in the area, and it will be interesting to watch where they will be able to take DBE.

Some local developers are already waiting for a stable OpenPsa 2 release to become available so that they can start experimenting the the DBE connectivity. One Brazilian blog has a photo of me discussing DBE with Nathan and Jon "Maddog" Hall after my speech.

Updated 2005-11-30: I will be presenting DBE also in SOLISC tomorrow.

Also there are two photos of my talk on the LatinoWare site.

I'm traveling next week to the Fórum GNOME conference in Curitiba, Brazil. The actual conference is held together with Latinoware Mercosul on November 26th - 27th.

My two sessions in the event are:

Saturday 26th: 14:00 - 18:45

• Midgard CMS - four hour tutorial for building your first Midgard-powered web site

Sunday 27th: 16:00 - 17:00

• Digital Business Ecosystem - Manage your projects and subcontractors with OpenPsa in a P2P network

This will be my first time in that part of the world, and I really look forward to both the conference and seeing Brazil.

Updated 2005-11-22: It seems we're also going to the OpenBeach open source event in Florianópolis on Dec 3rd - 4th.

Updated 2005-11-25: Updated the schedule from here in Curitiba. The venue will be the Centro Politécnico da Universidade Federal do Paraná.

OpenPsa appears on Best help desk software guide:

We have made our OpenPSA demo server publicly available. Get the address and user accounts from the OpenPSA demo page. OpenPSA is an Open Source Professional Services Automation system built on top of Midgard and PHP. The system provides management tools for software companies and consultancies. The modules include project management, CRM, help desk and group calendaring.

The site seems quite a lot like a splog to me.

As hinted earlier, we have integrated the OpenPsa project management system with the Digital Business Ecosystem P2P network.

This allows organizations to manage projects handled with subcontractors or a Keiretsu using tools that can communicate across corporate boundaries.

See my slides from the Tampere workshop

This weekend is being spent in the Midgard developer meeting hosted by Anykey Solutions in Linköping, Sweden. Besides the ferry Suicide Tequila episode reported by Edi, the time has been both productive and fun.

Happened so far:

Tarjei ran a pretty interesting demo and presentation on the Aegir 2 project. It seems that once the object browser is done, we can safely remove both old Aegir and SpiderAdmin from the distribution.

After some initial bugs had been hammered out, we also were able to run the promised demo on managing subcontracted projects with OpenPsa 2 over the DBE P2P network. I'll try to post screenshots of the whole project workflow after the Tampere demo on monday.

Another result of the demo was that everybody agreed heartily that Exorcist should replace Repligard as Midgard's replication system of choice. This will make replication faster, easier to handle two-way, and push the use of Java Content Repository in Midgard CMS.

We also had a very good discussion about refining Midgard's style engine to work on a clearer stack model. This will make MidCOM's style template system integrate transparently into Midgard's powerful page composition system, and make the eventual page transition of MidCOM much easier.

Also, the annoying MySQL 4.1 typecasting bug got fixed, Midgard 1.9 feature requirements got decided, and many people wrote their first MidCOM component based on Tarjei's tutorial.

In the saturday evening we had a thai dinner in the SmallOne Mansion.

Something interesting is going to happen with OpenPsa and Digital Business Ecosystem:

The DBE integration can be seen in action in Linköping Midgard developer meeting this weekend, or in Tampere DBE workshop on monday.

Flash designer Joonas Kallioinen of Itse Valtiaat fame contributed a minor refresh to the OpenPsa 2 style:

Compare with the OpenPsa 1 Calendar and the previous OpenPsa 2 design. The new design is also much more IE-friendly.

This is just the default style. OpenPsa 2 can be run with any Site Wizard template.

After a bit of thought we've returned the Group Calendar module of OpenPsa 2 to using horizontal layout for days. The earlier versions used a vertical layout designed with Tigert that proved to be a problem with larger number of resources. This should solve the scalability issue:

In addition to being more flexible, the new calendar layout provides the events in the hCalendar microformat. The vertical layout of org.openpsa.calendarwidget will be modernized into similar state and made into a configuration option useful for small organizations. Alan's XUL calendar interfaces could also be useful although OpenPsa already integrates with desktop calendars and mobile phones.

Besides regular group calendar usage, OpenPsa Calendar is being used for things like airplane reservations and work shift planning of medical staff.