August 2008 Archives

A while back I wrote about the open source social networking site Elgg. When it came time to choose a new social networking site for my family, I opted not to go with Elgg, since it was going through a major code revision. I went with People Aggregator instead. People Aggregator has been ok, but it is rough in a lot of places, and way overdue for an update (as far as I can tell it has missed the last two or three milestones, as it is still on 1.2pre7). This has kept me on the lookout for a new solution, and the arrival of Elgg 1.0 has me looking hard in that direction.

The new version of Elgg is the best solution for a closed social network that I have seen so far. It was super easy to install - typical PHP/MySQL install that involved setting up a database and uploading files. I did need to manually enter some info in my apache conf since it tried to write an .htaccess file that my apache configuration was set to ignore. But that was easy to spot and within minutes I was up and running.

At first glance it is clean and simple (in the style of the old one) with a bit more AJAX and the nice large sans serif fonts associated with many web 2.0 apps.

I jumped right to my dashboard where I was able to easily edit the widgets that appeared for me on my front page.

Once populated with some content, it dynamically updates the latest activity at a glance.

Before editing too much I went to the administrative console to manage plugins. The new Elgg architecture is plugin (mod) based. It can ship with the bare minimum or a "full" set of plugins. I chose the "full" set, which in fact actually does not include all of the plugins available on the site. I needed to go to the site to get the "walled garden" plugin so that I could make the site available only to those who I wanted it. By default anyone can register. The walled garden essentially takes all information off of the front page and disables the register link. I found this "full" set a little confusing. I don't know why they can't include the walled garden by default, since you can enable/disable plugins from the administrative console if you don't want to use any of them.

Once that was done I went back to creating content. Creating a blog is easy (particularly with the TinyMCE plugin).

Uploading files is also easy. And when I uploaded pictures it recognized them as such and made an album for me.

Even for a closed site it is nice to have multiple groups and separate areas in a social networking site, and Elgg delivers there. You can create groups, with private messaging areas, forums, etc. very easily.

I found a few things a bit confusing in Elgg. Like the fact that friendship can be asymmetric, that is once you friend someone that doesn't mean that you are their friend. That needs to be done separately. Once you have a friend you can send them messages like in most other systems.

I also found the status updating a little confusing. I thought this would be in my profile by default but you need to add it separately as a widget. Then you need to understand that it is editable via nifty AJAX even though it looks static.

Other things that weren't well in Elggville were the access control methods. There were some confusing things about what "private" means in different contexts. And I would occasionally get some errors posting information when the settings weren't allowed.

In the end Elgg is excellent, but I have a few reservations about where it is going. Is it going to be a bare bones social network that you are supposed to build on? What will the commercial Elgg be?

These questions will likely be answered soon, but I think that Elgg is very promising, and I'd probably even choose it now as my number 1 choice for a closed social network.

I've long been waiting for the update to the open source Alfresco. The original product was a very competent document management system. Then late last year they add a new social/collaborative interface to the open source "community" edition. This version was a little rough around the edges interface-wise, but it added things like blogs, wikis, and discussions.

A new version "3.0" was set as a milestone release that would full integrate these features, and a beta of that version was released under what is now known as "Alfresco Labs". From what I can tell, Alfresco Labs is the open source releases of Alfresco (there is also an Enterprise release scheduled for this fall).

Before I get into the details of Alfresco Labs 3.0a, I have to say that it took me some time to wade through the many versions and interfaces even though I've followed Alfresco for some time. It seems like the new version actually comes with two interfaces to the same repository. The old "Alfresco" interface that is quite document and workflow centric, and the newer Share interface that is collaboration centric. You need to log into them separately, but they have common data that can be accessed through either.

The old interface suffered from a complex array of fancy drop-down menus. This allowed savvy users to do things quickly, but novice users just got lost. The new Share interface not only focuses on collaboration, but also provides a much simpler interface. The new interface is reminiscent of the simplicity of Basecamp, and makes it much more feasible to invite outside users into a collaboration space. Share's other big feature is support of the Microsoft Sharepoint protocol. This is great since it can be integrated with MS Office. Sharepoint is the clear target competition for this version.

I actually can't say much about the installation process, as I just picked up the Windows executable full installer. It installed a JRE, tomcat, Alfresco and Open Office (for document conversion). I didn't have to do much, though if I wanted to do anything more than test, I probably should have installed MySQL on my Windows machine, rather than using the built-in Java database.

After install, I logged into the Share interface and was greeted with a simple Dashboard.

I was able to quickly create a new "site" that provided me with the basic Share components - a wiki, blogs, calendar, forums, and the document library.

Each of the components is simple, albeit a little rudimentary at this point. For example the Wiki has a nice clean interface with a small palette and WYSIWYG functionality.

But in order to embed a picture you need to upload it somewhere and provide the URL for the image. Many wikis do this, but it winds up relegating that task to experts, which somewhat defeats the purpose of a simple collaboration site. Similarly, adding links to other pages in the wiki requires some expertise. I am hopeful that these features will be refined in future iterations (this is a beta), but right now they are showstoppers for deploying to basic users.

Alfresco does really excel at document management. Not only can you easily upload, download and version documents...

...but you can also access the repositories via webdav, CIFS, and now Sharepoint. This is really easy and fantastic for document collaboration. I've been using Sharepoint recently on a project and I found Alfresco a lot easier to use.

There are some very basic "social" components to Alfresco, mainly profiles and avatars. But I think that is sufficient for its intended purpose.

There are some shortcomings to this release that made it somewhat painful to use. I couldn't change my password in the Share interface, nor could I add new users. For that and several other activities, I need to log in separately to the old interface. This made it feel a bit more alpha than beta, but I think Share is the interface of the future for Alfresco and I suspect all of this will eventually get rolled in. Then I might look to Alfresco for document centric collaboration, as best of breed.