Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

To my suprise I found out that someone posted my presentation slides on slideshare.net before I actually held the presentation. I usually post my slides only after the presentation to update them to reflect questions that came up in the Q&A part of the session, but at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin things seem to work a little bit differently.

The presentation went very well and we had a very interesting discussion at the end, so I would guess the awareness of the importance of internationalization in Web 2.0 is rising. One of the most interesting aspects brought up was: Is providing textual translations of a web application enough?. My take on this question is that providing a multi-language user-interface is only the first step in true internationalization, afterwards you have to go for localized content, design and business processes that respects the culture of your audience.

If you are at my presentation, please make sure to give feedback at feedback.berlin.web20expo.com. Thank you.

Today is my first day in a new job. I have been hired by Day Software as product manager for their line of collaboration software, together with Alexander and Alexander, who will join Day as software developers. This means, Day has managed to hire the core team of Mindquarry and is able to absorb our know-how and ideas for Day's products.

If you ask me why - there are two answers. When Mindquarry has to close, from my point of view it did not because our topic - collaboration - had been solved by other players in the market. From my point of view, there are too many open questions in collaboration that I want to answer and too many collaboration problems that I want to solve. So the first answer is that the vision of collaborative workspaces for all knowledge workers is still intriguing for me. The second answer is that Day is the company that can execute this vision. My first contact with Day was when we started using Apache Jackrabbit for Mindquarry. Jackrabbit is the reference implementation for the Java Content Repository Specification and Day is deeply committed to both. Then I met David Nüscheler briefly at the ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam, was impressed by his deep involvement in Jackrabbit, JCR and his technical vision. Much later I learned that he is actually CTO of Day. Day also employs Carsten and Bertrand, whose work I value very highly and other prominent developers, engineers and scientists. From later talks with David and my investigations around microsling I learned that Day's vision of collaboration and content management, Day's understanding of technical problems is very close to mine and that I have found the ideal partner in terms of vision and ability to execute for creating ground-breaking new collaboration applications.

I am very happy for being able to take this opportunity and to be able to continue my work that started with Mindquarry. To everyone who supported me and my ideas with Mindquarry, I would like to say thank you and invite you to keep in touch to create better software for better collaboration.

If you would like to contact me, use lars.trieloff@day.com for e-mail or ltrielof@day.com for Jabber instant messaging.

I've uploaded my second presentation "Mindquarry for Cocoon Users" to slideshare.net. And as far as I see, Ugo has added his presentation to the Cocoon group at slideshare.net as well.

You probably have read about the end of Mindquarry PRO and Mindquarry GO, which I don't have to tell you, is very sad for all of us, but I would like to assure you that this is not the end of Mindquarry as an open source project. As long as there is a community that cares for Mindquarry I will continue to invest my time in Mindquarry.

After more than 24 hours of traveling, I am finally in my hotel room in San Francisco, ready for the Office 2.0 Conference 2007. My clock tells me it is 11 pm, but it feels more like 8 am after a night without sleep, and it feels strange to sit without a seatbelt fastened.

While Alexander and Alexander are cutting a release for Mindquarry 1.2 beta and upgrading Mindquarry GO to the same version, I will use the time to sneak-preview a new feature in Mindquarry 1.2: Faceted task search. Right now, you have to use the filter feature to get a customized list of Mindquarry talks. Instead of long explanations, here are some screenshots:

This is your ordinary task list. Please note the facet links in the upper left corner of the table header, you might have seen them in Mindquarry's search interface as well:

After clicking on the link "My tasks" you will only see the tasks that match this criteria:

By clicking "paused" you can further narrow down the search and this is the result:

I will present Mindquarry at Web Montag in Berlin. Just in case you want to meet me or get a live demonstration of Mindquarry. This evening there will be an opportunity.

There has been another release of Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaboration Software. Intended to be only a bug fix release there have been visible usability improvements additionally to the 43 bug fixes.

If you need for some reason a Mindquarry-styled wallpaper, here it is: Mindquarry Wallpaper JPEG

Even if you do not speak German, Mindquarry is now translated to German and can be translated into other languages as well. All you need to do is download the english dictionary file (it is called messages.xml), translate all english words and phrases into your tongue and send it back to Mindquarry. We will include it happily in the next release in order to support Japanese, Spanish, Portugese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and all other languages used by Mindquarry users.

Day 2 of Enterprise 2.0 is nearly over and I have officially run out of business cards. In the morning, right after breakfast we met Marc Orchant and Michael Sampson, right after it we had a marathon of meetings with analysts, journalists and bloggers. One of the most interesting discussions I had was with Irvin Lazar who told me how big enterprises are increasingly opening up to Enterprise 2.0 technology and how independent teams deploy this technology without awaiting aproval from their CIOs.

At the demo booth I had around 100 presentations, talks and met a lot of interesting people. Stephan's presentation went extraordinarily well, and I dont't need to tell you, as Alex already wrote it: Mindquarry GO is out and you can apply from today for a hosted Mindquarry server provided by Mindquarry.

Finally I met Matt and Greg of Jive Software which gave me a demo on Clearspace X, a really cool proprietary software that combines blogging, wiki and file sharing.

Boston is a great city. I am always impressed when I visit a city that has an actual skyline. Living in germany this is something I am not used to see every day. Today I got up much to early thanks to my european inner clock. The conference took an slow start, but I had no time to visit any of the tutorials even if Michael Sampson's Mindmaps on the IT Manager 2.0 look really interesting.

I spent most of my time getting Mindquarry 1.2 ready to be demoable tomorrow, dealing with support questions on the forum, helping Nadia with internationalization of Mindquarry (Yes, I would love to see a Japanese version of Mindquarry) and meeting interesting people with interesting blogs I have to subscribe to.

For more coverage of Enterprise 2.0, see Stephan's post on the Mindquarry Blog.

Due to a harddisk crash Planet Mindquarry went last week offline. Thanks to Planet Venus and Open Source Web Design it is back to life now.

My slides for my talk Supporting Technical Documentation Processes with Open Source Tools held at Linux Tag 2007 in Berlin are available at SlideShare: Supporting Technical Documentation Processes with Open Source Tools Slides.

For Mindquarry 1.1 we offer again a VMWare Image. This time, due to the size of the download (we have included a graphical desktop environment to allow everyone to make immediate use of the image) it is only offered via Bittorrent. The torrent file can be found in the Mindquarry 1.1 Download Repository.

This leads to to the question wether there are any tools available that can automatically create torrents for files in a download repository and that are able to create an initial seed. This would be a nice addition to our Maven Repository Browser.

We just released Mindquarry 1.1 the latest version of our open source collaboration platform. Since 1.1-beta we have fixed lots of bugs, updated documentation and changed the design of some dialogs slightly. Since 1.0 we have added lots of new features including timelines for all content, an AJAX-powered interface, a better WYSIWYG Wiki editor and some more things I already blogged about when Mindquarry 1.1-beta was out. In other news, I will go to Boston this weekend and for the whole next week, because Mindquarry presents at [Enterprise 2.0. I am very excited, not only because I am visiting the united states for the first time, but also because I am going to present some new features in that will be part of Mindquarry 1.2.

If you are visiting Enterprise 2.0, please send me a mail, I would be delighted to meet you, present our new features and talk about collaboration, open source and web technology.

We recently released Mindquarry 1.1beta. Most of the changes center around the user interface.

• we have re-worked the user interface using an UCD-process. In my point of view this gives us a much better usability and has made me from an user-centric-design agnostic to a true believer in UCD.
• Activity timeline (based on the SIMILE Timeline) to view older versions of files, Wiki pages, tasks. When I saw Stefano's presentation at ApacheCon Europe I learned that the SIMILE folks created this widget to lure ingenuous developers into creating a web of data. The widget is really easy to use, I only had to write a small wrapper script to turn it into a Dojo Widget for SIMILE Timeline.
• Include tables and images in Wiki pages. This is a side-effect of the transition to Dojo 0.4.1 that Jeremy contributed to Cocoon in January and that took us some time to pick up, because the API and implementation of the servlet services we are using heavily had changed (before they were called block servlets)
• Conveniently link to a file, a task or another Wiki page from within the Wiki. In the window for adding a link, you can search for the item you intend to reference. This is another heavy Dojo widget that uses the JSON data we produce internally.
• Desktop client for Mac. The Desktop Client for Mac 1.1-beta included a bug, this is why I released 1.1-rc as a release candidate today.

Especially the activity timeline is a huge step forward for us, because it brings us closer to our goal of an ultimate undo/redo of all collaborative content within Mindquarry. This allows teams to have full revision control and provides a good overview of a team's productivity. We are already versioning all contents since 1.0 thanks to the ease of versioning JCR and Jackrabbit provide and have found a convenient interface to access this data using the timeline widget.

The Mac client has proven to be very useful while testing it internally at Mindquarry. Most of us run Mac OS X and of course we use Mindquarry for daily work to share files. My colleagues especially like that they can now easily comprehend which files have been added by others to the server's files repository and also see the changes to the local copy they made to the repository on their computer. Simply by hitting the "Synchronize" button, they can commit and retrieve changed or added files. Furthermore, they also value that they can use the Mac client to manage tasks offline and synchronize once back online again.

You'll find more information about this release on the Mindquarry 1.1 Release page. This release would have been impossible without the great work of open source communities of our core components, especially the Apache Cocoon, Apache Jackrabbit and Dojo Toolkit community.

We are currently in the process of cutting a new release of the Mindquarry Collaboration Server and the Mindquarry Desktop Clients that will be named 1.1. The main focus of this release has been user interface optimization, Alexander Klimetschek has written some words about the user-centered-design approach we have takes to get a user interface, that is from my point of view much clearer and from our testing we can see that it is actually easier to use and comprehend for first time users.

The three main aspects of the new user interface are separation of list view and content view, introduction of a second level navigation, and the introduction of a sidebar that currently contains only a teamlist, but may contain custom widgets, gadgets, portlets in the future.

For Wiki and Tasks, we have a much requested feature: Tracking of changes. The Mindquarry Wiki and Task Manager did track all changes made to wiki pages and tasks since the beginning, but there was no way to actually track these changes visually and no way to see older versions of a wiki page or tasks. With Mindquarry 1.1 this is history. Now you have three ways of tracking changes: With the scrollable timeline integrated into every wiki page and task, with the recent changes list and the ATOM feed of recent changes. The latter is linked from an OPML file, which makes it easy to build a community portal using Mindquarry and a web-based OPML aggregator. Watch this space for more information.

There are more things that improve the wiki, most important the new Wiki toolbar which fits to the overall icon design of Mindquarry, with icons from the tango-icon theme and similar icons from the Mindquarry Artwork project. Taking a closer look at the toolbar, you will notice that there is a table icon and, yes, Mindquarry 1.1 offers support for inserting and editing tables. Secondly we have overhauled the link dialog. Mindquarry offers two modes of linking: Hot linking will turn the currently selected text into a link to a wiki page with the same name. If it does not exist, you can create it by following the link. The advanced link allows you to link to any resource in the system, to files, tasks, web sites and other wiki pages.

We could not add the scrollable timeline to Wiki and tasks without adding it to files, so there is now an easy way of tracking changes and activity in the file browser.

A part of the new release that I found especially cool and that I blogged about before is the new Mindquarry Desktop Client for Mac OS X. This client is a native cocoa application with a very slick looking UI and has some unique features: It allows integrated task management, offers one-click synchronization of your files, supports multiple server setups and it is able to deal with Keynote and Pages files, and is thus as far as I know, the only subversion client so far that offers this feature.

For the desktop client for Linux and Windows users, we have included lots of bug fixes and user interface polishing. It will be available as a standalone download and the web-start deployment has been eased, so you do not have to enter your username and password three times before you can get started.

These are the features that I am looking forward most for Mindquarry 1.1. If I have forgotten some features, please mention them in the comments of this post.

Whoo hoo! The Mindquarry Desktop Client is now able to synchronize Apple Keynote and Apple Pages files without having to deal with strange workarounds. This is Subversion without .svn directories.

Update: The DMG image is available for download here. Please note that the changed working copy format requires a complete new checkout of all teamspaces, so you should move your old teamspace directories out of the way.

Sandro and I had a small discussion today regarding Planet Mindquarry: I manage the subscriptions that will be aggregated in Planet Mindquarry and Sandro proposed to remove two bloggers who are Mindquarry developers but do not blog about Mindquarry as such. For me this is no big thing, as honesty and diversity is what makes a planet living and worth reading. This is why Planet Apache is one of my favorite reads: It allows me to see what people of a community I respect and value think. This means everything, not only Apache specific stuff. I see who moved recently, who makes great holidays and of course who codes interesting stuff. On the other side planets like Planet PHP or Planet Gentoo have a different policy: If you want your post to be on this planet, make sure it is relevant to the topic 'Gentoo' or 'PHP'. After having been subscribed to Planet Gentoo for a while (as a Gentoo user I thought it might be interesting to follow this planet), I quickly unsubscribed because the posts where too one-topic focused to keep me interested. Sure, the posts are relevant to the topic, but are they relevant to the people?

I see planet software as a community tool. I read blogs to learn about people, so I read planets to learn about communities. This is why I am looking forward to Planet JBoss: I am not a JBoss user, I am not that interested in the JBoss software, but I am interested in the JBoss community, as there are some clever guys behind this software.

Some days ago I was asked "Why are your spending your time and energy on Mindquarry? The topic of collaboration has been around for over ten years, shouldn't it be solved by now?". I think the topic of computer supported collaboration, or collaborative software is a topic that will be still hot in ten years of now, simply because the focus of collaboration is changing in the same way as the work humans are doing is changing.

And the topic of collaboration has been around for some time. To underline this, I researched the roots of the concepts we are covering and combining in Mindquarry: file sharing with version control, Wiki, task management and group conversations: Some of the roots of the concepts and tools we are using are reaching back more than 35 years. For instance SCCS, the source code control system can be seen as a predecessor of RCS which was a predecessor of CVS which is a predecessor of Subversion which is used in Mindquarry's file sharing.

Taking the Usenet which is seen by many as the predeccessor of Web 2.0 and many styles of group conversations: It dates back to 1979, preceding even SMTP, the technology driving today's E-Mail system. Instant messaging applications, first found in form of UNIX talk program have been reinvented in the 90's as ICQ and with Jabber there is an open source IM protocol that was mainstreamed with Google Talk in 2005.

Even computer-managed todo lists probaly date back to one of the first uses of interactive text editors in the 70's, but it took years to come from an MS Project top-down approach of task management to the distributed approach of Bugzilla and other issue tracking software.

Another example: The idea of the WWW as an read-write medium date back to the initial development of HTTP and HTML in 1990, but it took five years to the first Wiki that practically implemented this vision and another ten years until Wikis became mainstream with Wikipedia breaking the 1 million articles barrier.

To answer the initial question: Collaboration is still a hot topic, because not only the people and the way they work changes, or the way they perceive technology changes, also technology itself takes it time to mature, to become adopted by a mass audience. The collaboration tools of tomorrow will have their roots in todays software.

Jonas and I are currently starting to implement the new Mindquarry Conversation Management. This is a good showcase for implementing a new block in a REST-based Cocoon-Application that integrates into an existing application. The general workflow, as outlined in the Conversations Wiki is:

• define the resources and their representation in the content repository
• define the REST API for accessing the resources
• write clients for the REST API

The philosophy behind is that we want to expose every functionality of the Mindquarry blocks that is used in the web interface through a REST API. This makes the creation of new applications on top of our web interface possible that we have not even thought of. An example is the upcoming desktop client for Mac OS X, which is a very powerful interface for task management and file sharing that was implemented using only the existing REST API.

What are the the clients for the conversation management system: First a little program that can be hooked into an existing MTA like postfix that will read a mail from stdin, and pass it to the right conversation via PUT, second an embedded mail server for those that do not already have a mail server running that does the same thing, and third - the web interface itself, which will be a combination of mailing list archive and online forum.

Adrian Sutton attempted to try out Mindquarry and failed. To be honest, I have to agree totally to his criticism. Mindquarry is hard to install, as it requires two complex software systems to play together nicely: Apache (with Subversion) and Mindquarry, running in a Java Virtual Machine. To combine these two requires either creating an enormous package that contains everything needed by Mindquarry (and possibly duplicating a lot of existing infrastructure), or leaving it up to the user to find out how to set up everything (after all installing Apache 2, Subversion, mod_perl, a Java Virtual Machine, a Servlet Engine and setting some configuration variables is not hard for the average geek). We decided to find a middle course: We provide packages for some operating systems and a generic binary that leaves enough freedom to adjust the configuration to other scenarios.

Adrian made some suggestions on how to improve the installation experience:

1. Include the installation requirements, specifically tailored for the particular package, in the package itself. The Windows package should only contain Windows installation instructions, the Linux one only Linux instructions etc.
2. Include even a brief note on where the heck the server is going to be running when I start it. A getting started guide would be better, but I'll settle for a simple port number.
3. Write something to the logs. If there's a permissions problem and you can't write to the logs, write to the console when the server starts up. The logs should tell me whether or not the server started successfully at the bare minimum. If it does start it should tell me what ports it's listening on or what URLs it thinks I should use.

This week I have made following adjustments to our packaging and documentation (without modifing the souce code, so some of Adrian's suggestions have to wait for the next release)

1. We have a VMWare image of Mindquarry available at the Mindquarry 1.0-M1 Download page for a quick start
2. There is a binary installer for Linux and Mac OS X that checks that installation requirements are met, adjusts permissions and writes configuration files
3. There are separate installation guides for Mindquarry on Linux, Mindquarry on Windows and Mindquarry on a Mac made using profiling support in the Maven 2 DocBook plugin. Of couse there is also the combined installation guide covering all operating systems.

Unfortunately I cannot test all configurations and operating systems beforehand, but I am happy to hear from your experiences and your ideas for improvement.

There is a first snapshot of the Mindquarry Desktop client available for Mac OS X. It is written natively for Mac OS X, as the standard SWT Java client crashes due to problems in the SWT library, especially when it comes to more advanced features like system tray integrations.

The feature set so far:

• Shows a task list
• Allows updating a task's status, title, summary and priority
• Supports multiple servers

Enough said, here is the screenshot:

You can download a development snapshot (as all our development snapshots) from snapshots.mindquarry.com. The client was created by Jonas Witt who is also developer of Aurora.

Yesterday we moved to our new office in the newly built second building of the Hasso Plattner Ventures High Tech Park. Our intern Jonas made this shot after a three-hour briefing by Alex on Cocoon, Spring, Mindquarry and User-centered-design.

From my posting history (only del.icio.us links in the last five days) you may have seen that I have been very busy in the last days. The reason for this is now visible for everyone: The new Mindquarry Website is online and, even more important Mindquarry 1.0-M1 is available for download.

Mindquarry is a teamwork support software that supports the teamwork of software developers, technical writers, engineers, scientists, designers and analysts by enabling file sharing with version control, easy-to-edit WYSIWYG-Wiki and a flexible task management system that features customizable fields that can be added on-demand. The basic idea of Mindquarry is to use tools that have proven their ability to solve teamwork problems in the open source community like version control systems, wikis or bug trackers and to make them available to other information workers (those without a degree in CS) by integrating the tools and providing a simple, streamlined user interface.

Mindquarry is open source (Mozilla Public License) and uses many of the great open source products of the Apache Software community, most notably Apache Cocoon, Apache Jackrabbit, Apache Lucene and Apache Maven. Additionally Subversion, DocBook and Dojo are used intensively in Mindquarry. So my thanks goes to the open source community, especially to Jeremy and Ellen who helped us getting up to speed with open source development.

Webmasters and bloggers that want to publicise their content often add links at the footer of their website that allow posting a link to a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us, digg.com, reddit, ma.gnolia and others. But with the increasing number of social bookmarking services in use, and webmasters that want to support all of them, those litte icons are slowly taking over your website. (See David Trowbridge's blog for an example).

But there is relief: With Share This Link bloggers and webmasters get the opportunity to support many social bookmarking services at once by linking to Share This Link which is a meta-social-bookmarking service that forwards the bookmarker to her favorite service.

Share this link is heavily inspired by Alex King's Share This Wordpress Plugin, uses the icons provided by the Share Icon Project and was written using Apache Cocoon in one afternoon.

So, it is time to act now:

1. Share the Share This Link page with your favorite social bookmarking service
2. Clean up your blog template with Share This Link

Wikis are a hot topic in technical documentation. Adrian Sutton has some interesting remarks why he thinks, Wikis and user-contributed documentation do not lead to high-quality documentation: Creating Great Documentation:

First and foremost, if you're thinking about improving a product's documentation, read Kathy Sierra's How to get users to RTFM. Make sure your documentation covers each of the five types required: Reference Guide, Tutorial, Learning/Understanding, Cookbook/Recipe, Start Here.

Adrian says that Wikis tend to create mostly reference documentation. Additionally Wikis are not versioned with your products source code.

I would add that Wikis often lead to topic-oriented authoring, Norman Walsh has some interesting takes on the consequences of topic-oriented authoring: Good for reference, bad for tutorial, learning and understanding, bad for start here documentation.

Scott Abel points me to Tom Johnson's Using Wikis as Project Documentation Tools. His main complaints are:

Wiki wysiwig’s are primitive (technical documentation can have some complicated styles, with several levels of lists).

Once all the info is in the wiki, how do I generate a manual or online help? I don’t want to maintain two separate files.

I would agree to this complaints because Wikis are not the best tools for technical writing, they are websites that are easily editable, nothing more and nothing less. But there are reasonable arguments for using Wikis and user-contributed feedback for documentation:

I’m saying, let the technical writer use a wiki as his or her documentation base,” says Johnson. “Make sure all project members are familiar with the wiki’s location and procedures for editing it. Then, encourage the project team to comment, review, add, edit, and otherwise adjust the documentation through the life of the project. The writer can shape, stylize, make consistent, and organize the content to make it usable. Most likely the writer will write 75% of the content anyway, but it will be more informed and accurate.

Wikis and user-contributed generation are a way of generating feedback and an additional source of information of the technical writer. Another example are the user-contributed comments of the PHP documentation Adrian points to.

My methodology of creating technical documentation uses Wikis in two places:

1. I plan and organize the documentation project using an issue tracking system and create tasks for every step in the documentation process
2. I 'harvest' product development Wikis for information about the software I am documenting. This is the first use of Wikis - a source of information
3. I create a content outline of the planned document in the Wiki and invite other team members to comment and correct the content outline. The Wiki here is a space for distributed brain-storming.
4. I write the document using DocBook-XML, WYSIWYG-XML-editors and share the in-progress document and illustrations using a version control system. As I am using DocBook and Mindquarry's file sharing, concurrent editing of modular documents is easy.
5. Reviewers and copy-editor use the issue tracking system to create comments and remarks to the documentation.
6. After releasing the document, the issue tracking system is used to track comments and suggestions for improvements. As the Wiki keeps evolving I have a good starting point for a second revison of the document.

Via Gordon Meyer I found Dan Wood's weblog. Dan is one of the developers of Sandvox - one of the easiest and best-looking ways to publish a web site (I've blogged about Sandvox before) and describes his technique of using a Wiki for creating a user manual.

The important thing to note here, is that the Wiki is not the user manual, it is just the tool for creating it. Most wikis have serious problems with usability when they are used as user manuals (no wonder, they are designed to ease the publishing and editing process) - an issue Dan mentions and one thing Dan does not mention, but that often occurs in Open Source projects: Wikis are a good excuse for forgetting documentation and delivering bad documentation.

What Dan and his team does is authoring the manual in the Wiki, then converting it into a proper Mac OS X online help. From my point of view, Wikis are not the optimal tool for authoring technical documentation, there are many specialized tools for this purpose that yield higher productivity, but this does not mean that Wikis do not have their place in a technical documentation process.

Wikis are ideal for drafting documents, creating content outlines and collecting resources before writing technical documentation. When it comes to actually writing documentation, specialied tools like XML-editors for DocBook come into play. In an ideal world you could at this point continue using the Wiki-principle of collaborative authoring and with Mindquarry's combined versioned file sharing, wiki and task management you've got all tools in one package.

fazjob.net, the career network of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the leading german quality newspaper is featuring a (german) article on the HPI (my alma mater) which mentions Mindquarry (my company): "Der Mäzen kommt zum Chili con Carne".