Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

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.

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.