Wolfgang Maass contacted me and asked if I would like to join the board of experts of an EU project they are going to propose. They are actually also looking for Open Source CMS companies (vendors or system integrators) who would like to join as a partner.

The EU project proposal entitled „Interactive Knowledge“ is currently being developed by a consortium which is led by Salzburg Research. The objective is to develop a “next generation semantic content management framework” based on existing frameworks, but with significant technological improvements ranging from RDF-storage to easy definition of workflows and business rules, and to dynamically re-configurable web interfaces.

Some more info on the objectives in Wolfgang’s words:

Our experience is that many smaller content management solution providers find it hard to make full use of the new standards such as RDF and CSS 3.0 when it comes to keeping solutions maintainable, re-usable or when it comes to cross-media publishing on mobile and other platforms. Increasingly, content management needs to interface with the “Internet of things”, e.g. you can get additional health information about a certain food product, by entering the retail store’s product code into a web-based content management system or into your mobile PA.

This is what the „Interactive Knowledge“ EU project will offer:

• 50 smaller CMS companies can become early adopters (small grants of up to 12.000 Euro are possible)
• 7 European SMEs who have content management systems will be offered to become full partners in this project and act as requirements experts as well as getting their own frameworks benchmarked with respect to their semantic capabilities. There are budgets between 80.000 and 200.000 Euro available, at a funding rate of 75%.

So, the „Interactive Knowledge“ EU project proposal is an excellent opportunity to benefit from a large scale R&D effort.

I know Wolfgang for quite some time and he told me that the project administrators have a very good track record in this type of project, are experts in the field and can assist with the administrative entry hurdles. This is good, because it will avoid that the EU bureaucracy and lazy project partners will eat up your valuable resources. I know how important this is because I have experience as a work package leader on behalf of eZ Systems of the successfully finished tOSSad EU project.

If you are interested, please send an email to wolfgang dot maass at hs-furtwangen dot de no later than this Thursday, March 20th, 2008.

See you at the kick-off meeting after the EU accepted the proposal

Wise man are rare, but they exist and one of them is happy to share his wisdom with all tense CMS consultants and project managers to help them relax.

Martin Bauer is his name and Packt just published his book entitled Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects. In fact, this book is a tremendous work of reference for any kind of CMS project, be it eZ Publish or not, proprietary or Open Source. Only two of 13 chapters actually deal with eZ Publish specifics.

The book contains a hand full lines of code, the rest is valuable information covering the whole life cycle of a CMS project, for example:

• Project cost estimates
• How to write a specification
• Project management approaches
• Implementation and testing
• Training
• Maintenance and support
• Risk management
• etc.

What makes the book such a great source of information is its valuable combination of experience and facts. Just a few insightful quotes:

If a developer continually gives me best-case scenarios, I’ll protect myself by adding 40% to the estimate.

So, you can accomodate some delays, additions, or changes but once it gets beyond 10% [of estimated project duration], the project will be in trouble.

Risk management itself is a risky activity, but an important one. It’s a bit like insurance; you can get away without it until something goes wrong at which point you wished you had done something earlier.

If you make the mistake of thinking that the team doesn’t include the Client, then chances are you’ll fall into the “Us and Them” syndrome.

From my past experience as a Senior Consultant at eZ Systems, the creator of eZ Publish, I can wholeheartedly recommend Martin’s book - it will help you a lot to successfully cope with implementing CMS-based solutions.

If I were Packt, I’d cut out the eZ Publish-specific content from Martin’s book and make it a general reference for CMS project methodologies. Based on that book, Packt could publish vendor-specific references (e.g. eZ Publish, Drupal, Typo3, etc.). That way, Martin’s book could become a classic.

Two bloggers of the eZ Publish community also reviewed Martin’s book.

Disclaimer: The publisher approached me and asked me to write a review of the book. I agreed not without making clear that I will express my opinion independently.

If you follow the PHP blogs, then you are likely to have read Matt “Wordpress” Mullenweg’s anti-PHP 5 rant:

PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a complete flop. Most estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or at best the low teens, mostly gassed by marginal frameworks.

He makes some good points in the post. He also manages to make himself seem like a bit of a dick

The thing that I keep wondering is if we aren’t seeing a slowdown in general PHP adoption due to other technologies being able to get a leg up while PHP 5 was in development and the succeeding slow migration from PHP 4 to 5.

Now that I work for a company creating Java-based software, I see:

• Zend on the PHP-side, who are happy to announce version 1.0 of object-oriented Zend Framework and J2EE on the Java-side already out there on the market for quite some time.
• On the Java-side, Alfresco continuously and quickly building a high-quality ECM based on Open Source Java components and on the PHP-side eZ Systems who yet do not have their flagship ECM product migrated to PHP 5.

Finally, with PHP 5, it is possible to build OO libraries able to compete with Java libraries as far as quality is concerned - but, well, those Java libraries already have a long market track-record, i.e. have been in production use for a long time.

My impression is that PHP 5 slowed down the development of PHP applications able to compete with similar Java-based server-side products. The problem being that migration from PHP 4 to PHP 5 consumes quite some developer resources for complex PHP applications. Additionally, PHP 4 keeps developers busy with finding workarounds for their applications due to limited OO features.

Did PHP applications lose market share or at least not grow as fast as their Java (or C#, etc.) counterparts due to the slow adoption of PHP 5? Unfortunately, I did not find an informative basis to answer this question sufficiently and would appreciate any hints.

Open Source software is often being referred to as commodity products. This is particularly true for OSS databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Developers of such systems can heavily make use of defined standards. In this case, it’s the various SQL standards. These standards define the general functionality set your product should have. They help you define the commodity features of your software.

The question is: where do you get your software requirements from if the OSS product you are developing cannot rely on any or only a few standards?

Let’s take a look at two other types of OSS products: Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and collaborative software. I used to work for an Open Source ECM vendor until recently and just started to work for a company offering Open Source collaborative software. Hence, I might be able to provide some useful information.

For ECM vendors, there exist a few standards in different areas of ECM. This is because ECM comprises a very broad set of functionality, e.g. content editing, workflow management, document management, accessibility, etc. Yet, these standards cover only a small fraction of what makes up a full-fledged ECM system. In fact, ECM is very much about customer-specific implementations and integration of legacy systems. It is a lot about experience, best practices.

Hence, a successful Open Source ECM project can define the set of commodity features by listening to its:

• customers
• partner companies
• developers and users community

These groups have different impact in different OSS ECM projects.

For example, eZ Publish is equally influenced by all three of them. At Alfresco, there is massive know-how of customer needs, simply because they have John Newton on board, co-founder of the very successful proprietary Documentum ECM. It will be interesting to see how eZ Publish and Alfresco will compete in the future. This will largely depend on how well the eZ Publish developers react upon market needs and on how fast Alfresco can grow its Open Source community. It’s actually not black and white, because customers can be a part of your developers community.

Before I talk about the interesting aspects of commodity features in collaborative software, one more note about highly standardized products: Of course, the MySQL developers need to also think of market needs. They first implemented the very basic features which made their RDBMS useful for simple, yet common scenarios in Web development. Standards do not free you from deciding which ones to implement first, but they help you to save time collecting all the potential features.

Now about collaborative software: Most development here is based on best practices. The interesting point is: these best practices are mostly already available in the Web. To be more precise: in the Web 2.0. At Mindquarry, we implement collaborative software which includes a Wiki, task and document manager (conversation tools for email and instant messaging coming soon).

Where do we get our basic ideas from? Well, from Wikipedia, Jabber, Bugzilla, etc. Mindquarry’s commodity features are out there in the Web and have been tested by a lot of users for several years. With Mindquarry, the trick is not about simply imitating an already existing and proven software infrastructure. It is about connecting the various bits and pieces of social software into one coherent infrastructure which you can use e.g. in your Intranet.

The point is: You can see the difference between the Web 1.0 and the Web 2.0 also in how OSS vendors define the commodity features of their products. An RDBMS is largely a Web 1.0 tool. It has at least one foot in the old days, when companies fought about software standards. Social or collaborative software is Web 2.0, you can find and influence its standards in the Web by providing efficient and rich user experience.

Of course, Web 2.0 standards rely on Web 1.0 standards, but the Web 2.0 is more about best practices and de facto standards on the user level compared to logical definitions of standards on the developers level. Again, the reality is not black and white. Take a look at MySQL’s and PostgreSQL’s ANSI92 SQL-defying LIMIT clause. It’s a best practice approach and shows that OSS developers always listened to their developers community just like Web 2.0 developers today listen to their users.

Hurry up, submit a paper! The LinuxTag Call for Papers ends tomorrow, February 16th.

Short info about LinuxTag from the homepage:

LinuxTag 2007 opens doors from May 30 to June 2, 2007 on Berlin Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users and experts to learn at Europe’s leading conference and expo more about the potential of Linux, Open Source, and Free Software.

March 1st, I will start my new job at Mindquarry as VP Marketing.

Mindquarry’s Open Source product is enterprise social software, simply called “Mindquarry”. It supports spontaneous collaboration by including a Wiki, task tracker, file management, etc. The software is MPL licensed, version 1.0 will soon be available to the public. There’s an early access program available upon request.
The company was founded in 2006, it is located in Potsdam, Germany close to Berlin. The main investor is HP Ventures of SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner.

I’ll be in charge of strategic and operational marketing and community relations.

What I like most about this new job is:

• I move from an Enterprise 1.0 Open Source company (eZ Systems and its eZ Publish ECM) to an Enterprise 2.0 Open Source company (Mindquarry).
• Having 5 years of PHP programming experience, I am now looking forward towards working for a Java company. Although programming is not part of my job, I am very interested in digging deep into the code to really understand the application’s inner workings.

I actually have known one of Mindquarry’s co-founders for a few years via internet: Lars Trieloff. We only recently met in person. His expertise always impressed me.

I created a dedicated Mindquarry RSS feed for my future postings about Mindquarry, also served by the newly created Planet Mindquarry.

At this cross road of my professional life, I would like to especially thank the following persons who always supported me:

• Zak Greant
• Georg Richter
• Aleksander Farstad

Thanks guys! And of course, thanks to my wife, my biggest supporter

I’ll be at the 3rd Free Software World Conference in Badajoz/Spain from February 7-9. Last year’s event was huge with 6500 attendees.

I will be one of the presenters of the tOSSad EU project, where I am a member of the steering committee on behalf of eZ.

Will you be there as well?

Thomas Nunninger did some research in better ranking of search results within eZ Publish. He implemented a nice test implementation with some fancy AJAX drag&drop. Feel free to try out the implementation. By doing so, you also help Thomas to get some more test cases for his diploma thesis.

Should you be interested in more information about his implementation, read his recently published article Creating a Search Engine.

Bård published a short note on his blog that the call for papers for the 5th annual eZ Conference is now open. Deadline for submissions is February 1st.

The conference is worth attending not only for eZ Publish or eZ Components users and geeks, it is also interesting if you’re interested in content and knowledge management or PHP/LAMP in general. Last year, I enjoyed talking to guests such as Martin White and Anne Jubert, Rasmus Lerdorf and David Axmark - and some more of the 350 attendees.

… and thanks so much!

I have had a great time at eZ systems, both from a professional and a personal perspective: Having started as a System Developer in Nov 2004, I learned more about the technical details of eZ publish. My following roles included consulting, training, conference and customer presentations, pre-sales, etc. After 1 year at eZ and having gained a good overview of most business areas, I became part of headquarters management and ended up being the VP Communication, doing strategic governance of all global marketing and knowledge management at eZ systems.

Now it is time for me to start something new, with a different focus, where I can apply and further extend the broad skill set I was able to develop at eZ.