Cathedral list getting smaller
While I have been a fan and supporter of open source for some time, I actually believe some applications were probably best done (or at least more effectively) as a standard software process (i. e. cathedral) we all know and love. One of the applications I use to put into this category (yes, past tense) was an enterprise collaboration portal.
I have discovered Silk and it REALLY looks good. If I were running a SMB (small to medium business) I would give this project a REAL hard look. From the project site:
Silk is an open source platform that can be deployed along side most existing collaboration applications or business processes, such as email clients, IM programs and document management applications. Due to its open nature, Silk contains features that are deemed valuable by the users themselves. Silk provides a rich set of collaborative functions seamlessly integrated together resulting in “data in context.”This function presents an item along with links to all of it’s related information, such as emails, IMs, documents and meeting notes. The user can see the complete picture of the status of an issue enabling organizations large and small to provide “smart” collaboration between team members. Silk facilitates effective collaboration by allowing an organization’s abundance of available information to be evaluated in context, delivering true value to the user and enterprise.
Sounds like Sharepoint doesn’t it. The project site has an active demo – it really looks alot like Sharepoint too!
So scratch collaboration portals off my list of cathedral candidates….. the list is already short and getting shorter.
Well just this weekend another major software item fell off my cathedral list. Most people know about open LDAP but this weekend Redhat released its Fedora Directory Server 1.0. From the directory server project page.
Welcome to the Fedora Directory Server. The Fedora Directory Server is a robust, scalable open-source server designed to manage large directories of users and resources. It is based on an open-systems server protocol called the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
The Fedora Directory Server is a world-class Directory Server implementation. Some of the more interesting features that are included are:
* 4-Way Multi-Master Replication
* Scalability: thousands of operations per second, tens of thousands of concurrent users, tens of millions of entries, hundreds of gigabytes of data
* SSLv3, TLSv1, and SASL for secure authentication and transport
* Support for most LDAPv3 features, including many common controls and extensions
* Schema update over LDAP
* Flexible in-tree Access Control Information (ACIs), updatable over LDAP
* On-line configuration and management over LDAP
* Graphical console for all facets of user, group, and server management
* For more see our Features page
Posted: December 5th, 2005 under General.