Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

I've blogged a bit about using Wiki's recently and for my current customer I've been using Jive Software's Clearspace X (Version 1.6). This was certainly not a personal choice but rather a case of using an existing Wiki and social networking environment.

Over the last few weeks I've used Clearspace extensively to create an methods framework.  I would have created over 40 documents in the wiki and collaborated with several people on another 15 or so documents.

It's definitely been a mixed bag as I do like Clearspace and how it designed. I do like the simple workflow engine and the nice use of Ajax. I have to say though Clearspace has quite a few niggly bugs that make even basic content creation in Wiki documents difficult in certain circumstances and there are a couple of missing features which would really help me. I'm not sure how much of it is to do with my customers setup of Clearspace or direct issues in Clearspace itself.

Judge for yourself as I thought I would publish some my issues (and some workarounds) to hopefully help other people (Note these are very clearspace specific):

1. There are random problems with some of the text editors particularly for the homepage content - the general document wiki editors have less issues but I've seen some funny formatting problems with the formatted text box in the homepage of my wiki space. One strange thing I found is that once the formatted text box on the homepage got over about 6 paragraphs I could no longer edit it. It just would display the edit box but with no text to edit. I added three formatted text boxes to the homepage to get around this.

2. There does not seem to be any easy way to consolidate an entire wiki site into one document in Clearspace. My work around for this was to spider the site and run a PDF converter offline. Not ideal but it works.

3. In some cases images in pages don't resize properly and there is wrap around scrollbar that occurs. Workaround is to manually resize images or remove any URL stuffing in between the image formatting.

4. In general image resize after upload produces strangely grainy pictures. I know this could probably work a bit better but I've seen this on other wiki's too. Workaround is to create/resize your images to smaller sizes.

5. Wiki Images do not appear in PDFs. This is the number one issue for me - consistently PDFs from Wiki pages do not have images I upload to the wiki pages. It only works if I add images the first time I edit the document. Any images uploaded after the first edit while they appear in the wiki page do not appear in the PDFs. Very strange bug...

6. Spell Checker issues - I've stopped using the spell checker as it every time I use it ruins all my formatting and just rolls all the content together as one long string. Very weird, but this is a consistent problem. I couldn't seem to find a workaround for it.

7. Widgets errors on home page - widgets positioning getting mixed up. I've had this happen a few times when I setup a home page. Widgets would end up in place different to where I placed them. It seemed quite random and at other times it was fine.

8. Wiki pages do not like file URLs (e.g. file:// rather than http://) and once placed in and saved in a wiki page, the page just drops the URL. Very nasty. The workaround was to drop in an html page as a attachment. The html file when opened redirects to the file:// resource. Messy, but works.

I have used Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 and Confluence for creating similar content - It's my belief they are better products out of the box wiki wise. None the less, I have completed my framework using Clearspace and will continue to use it.

So last night I ran the Great Fronde ECM event. We had a reasonable turn out of people and the event was a resounding success. One of the proposals I floated with the audience was to setup a vendor-independent, integrator-independent NZ ECM online community and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Another principal here at Fronde will probably end up front and running it with help from me to get it up and running. If you are keen to be part of this community, drop me a line on LUKAS AT FRONDE DOT COM.

On Wednesday the 2^nd of May I'll be hosting an event on Enterprise Content Management with Helen Rayner from Telecom and Clark Thomborson from Auckland University. It should be a really interesting event with Helen and Clark presenting as they are ECM experts in industry and academia respectively.

Full details including speaker bios are at the Fronde News Website but a taste is below:

The Great Fronde Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Event

Date: Wednesday May the 2nd 2007 Times: 4:30pm to 6:00pm Venue: Fronde, Level 7, 131 Queen Street, Auckland

Overwhelmed by mountains of information and yet not able to locate anything useful? Feeling alone trying to outline information management strategies and drive the implementation of content management solutions? Confused about how to organise and manage content in your organisation? Come and hear from a panel of information management experts and users on how they have addressed the situation and what results they have achieved. Learn from the collective experiences and best practices, and understand the capabilities of the technology to better manage your information assets.

Our Panelists are Professor Clark Thomborson, ECM expert from the University of Auckland, Helen Rayner, Information Manager Policy & Strategy for Telecom and Lukas Svoboda, Principal Consultant at Fronde. The panel will go through theoretical and practical aspects of Enterprise Content Management as well as demonstrate some of the features in Microsoft's latest ECM offering – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

To book: To book yourself on this event please phone Wendy Watson on 09 377 2400 or email her at Wendy dot Watson at Fronde dot com

Further Information: If you would like to know further details on this event please phone Lukas Svoboda on 09 377 2400 or email him at Lukas dot Svoboda at Fronde dot com

Wellingtonian Ian Morrish (and an old friend of mine from Advantage Group days) has been posting loads of information on WSS v3 and Sharepoint 2007 on his updated www.wssdemo.com website. Follow the link for tons of new sharepoint information.

Also congrats to Ian on his move to consulting services :)

I've got a customer who is having problems with a sharepoint installation where there are more than 4000 documents in a doc lib. In general this is not an issue for sharepoint but it seems to cause issues with their backup software. So I did a bit of research and found some interesting guidance on stopping performance issues with sharepoint doc libs. Resources and reading:

• Michael Ekegren Blog post on what happans when you put in 1 Million items into a sharepoint.
• Microsoft Resources - Setting up sharepoint as a collaborative filestore (good metrics on doc lib performance guidelines)
• Post on Mart's Tam Tam sharepoint Blog (Some similar quotes from the MS resource, but a few other notes)
• Microsoft General Sharepoint FAQ for background information