Its here !!

Joomex has been launched finally: www.joomex.com
There is a big list of enhancements queued already. This should baseline the CMS/portal requirements here at Fanafzar from now on.
One of the next steps Farshid is thinking about right now is to provide a Flash UI for the portal core.

Sweeter than SugarCube...

Customer Relationships Management (CRM) has been a hot requirement for the e-business application domains quite for some time now and the number of the clients of Fanafzar looking for CRM systems is increasing everyday.

Most of these clients require the back office CRM features which will be used by the employees, most probably on the local intranet, however they have a few scenarios where the customer will directly interact with the system, usually through a self service portal. Examples for this customer interactions would be online help desks that are integrated with the internal enterprise CRM system.

Being a firm which mostly promotes the open source solutions, we had initiated an integration systems research project code named SugarCube. In this solution the Joomla CMS is integrated with the SugarCRM system. All the back office requirements are provided by SugarCRM and the front end poral is based on Joomla. However, the scenarios which require interactions and communications between these two systems will be designed and the communication protocol between the two is web services using SOAP. The fact that sugarCRM has implemented most of its UI in terms of web services in addition to normal web forms has made this integration quite feasible. The SugarCRM server will be based on the company intranet and it will communicate with the Joomla server on the company internet web server.

The next step for this integration project is using a work flow engine to manage the business processes needed and provide the flexibility for modification of these processes for the enterprise. We've studied JBPM, but some proof of concept prototypes would be necessary before any further design decisions. JBPM being a java based engine would need some web service based wrappers around it to be able to talk to other service providing sub systems, which are mostly PHP based.

Code name was SugarCube since the integration was planned for the XoopsCube portal initially. XoopsCube has got a far better architecture and design structure compared to xoops or joomla open source portal but for practicality, Joomla has been selected for the current project.

SugarCube is coming out of research phase an being implemented for an ISP client these days.

Hope we don't drop it in tea !

Surf on the Rainbow....

After spending some time to see how the open source atmosphere is doing on the .net domain, we've concluded that the good old Rainbow Portal seems to be still a good option for portal/CMS requirements.

We've selected it as the base platform for the new project which has started at Fanafzar. Tomorrow would be the day we'd have to tame this beast (Localization, RTL Layout, translations...).

Rainbow is based on c# and the overall architecture is based on separate tiers and developing new modules on top of it is rather straightforward.

It might be ready after this project for other dear .net loving clients that we face in the future, smile Billy ...

Like father like son ...

Our company has been looking for a nice open source portal and CMS system based on the .net platform and so far things are not very bright. First of all there aren't many and among the systems, many are proprietary and not open source. The ones that are open-source are either very buggy or a really simple system that really isn't worth the hassle of going over it and integrating it for the project that we have. One really important aspect of using the open source systems is the active community that they should have which in case of .net systems, seems to be an un-achievable goal.

For years now we've been quite happy with the PHP based systems. Many good solutions and lots of active developers backing the solutions. You feel the love around those systems. There are even lots of good things done in the Perl and Python domains.

Why are we looking for a .net based one now? Because the dear client says so! Because they are possessed by the magic of Microsoft.

The conclusion so far is that the attitude that MS has as a huge corporation has spread down to the users of MS technologies. This attitude is something like this : Announce a product before it really is a product, money is the most important goal, no innovation, no openness and everything proprietary, don't collaborate much and make things as easy as possible by removing flexibility. There is a river pushing in all these water molecules in this sea.

Code Liebhaber

I had the chance to go over a commercial portal/CMS solution recently (a break from the open source ones we've been dealing with). It is called Abaxx and has been developed by a German company. The software is quite good.
Seeing it triggered a thought for me, there are a lot of great German software available, some of these software are among the best in the world. What is the root reason? Well obviously these guys have a very strong history in general engineering but so do many other countries which are not necessarily as important in software and software engineering in itself is a rather different story after all.
Some research provided good conclusions. At least a good theory can be constructed based on it. A theory that I am interested in, one that focuses on the importance of individuals and the power of the subject.
In the document and many other places on the web it is evident that the German are among the most active countries doing open source development. If we consider per capita statistics, they are the first. It is very interesting to see that in the same document, it shows that IT investment in this country is not really high and the value is close to the average of the whole EU. Well what this could mean is that the government is not necessarily pushing a lot of money in this industry and the success could stem from the power of the individuals, the high open source involvement is the result of one thing and that is pure love. There are a lot of people over there who love to work on software, are very serious and should clearly believe in being able to prove many things as has been the case with companies such as SAP. Open source is about giving back to the community and man this giving back is what pushes you and your environment forward. This attitude is something that I feel is very valuable.
I wanted to do some research about their educations system related to computer science and software but I haven't found good sources yet, this study might continue later ;)
I might come up with a different theory next time and it might be focused on the relationships between good beer and good software :).
Auf Wiedersehen

Stepping on the shoulder of giants ...

The recent ubiquity of information using the internet, whether getting answers to questions, learning new techniques, or accessing open source code has enabled some possibilities that I think can not be fully understood at the moment.

Things can be done and achieved today that weren't even dreams 15 years ago. My concrete examples are expert community websites and using open source software.

However there seems to be a shift in the type of problem that we face.

The problem which was not knowing something, not having access to some code a few years ago has transformed in to not having the time to find out, or not following the information in the appropriate way. Maybe we can say that knowing what not to have is the most valuable skill that someone needs in this new era.

Focus would be a key attitude since the state space has increased tremendously, and we are limited so much in our time.

It was rather hard to find the giants to go over their shoulders and there used to be many many giants unnoticed, but right now it seems like you're in the middle of an American football field with a lot of giants as players and you'd have to decide about which one to select and be careful not to be tossed over with a tackle. Isaac Newton is watching from the private room, never thought it would become like this.

.... the most recent giant that I've found is Project Dark Star as a multi player server infrastructure software ...