chieftech’s blog

Something to investigate over the summer break, NoSQL:

Next Generation Databases mostly address some of the points: being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontal scalable. The movement began early 2009 and is growing rapidly. Often more characteristics apply as: schema-free, replication support, easy API, eventually consistency, and more. So the misleading term "nosql" (some call it "not only sql") should be seen as an alias to something like the definition above.

I'm particularly interested in the schema-free variety of NoSQL databases, like the Apache CouchDB project. However, this is just one variety of NoSQL.

Hat tip to Redmonk.

OPEN source software offers one cure for clinical system implementation woes, as authorities struggle to find solutions that meet all medical requirements, a leading health informatics researcher says.

...

Rather than the all-in, big-bang approach of a full CIS (clinical information system) implementation, an open, standards-based approach would allow a more incremental, lower risk approach, with organic expansion based on lessons learnt.

I think the mixing of terminology around open source software and open standards is a little confusing in the piece. However, what is clear is that complex environments, like we find in health care, need new approaches to information technology to avoid the mistakes of the past. This includes open source software, open standards, etc but also new approaches to procurement, support, solution design and project management. Just focusing on open source software itself is missing the bigger picture of the challenge. And what about the hardware too?

Of course, it's easy to imagine that the use of open source software will slash the government's IT budget. After all, this software is freely downloadable. I have a feeling it's quite a bit more complicated than that.

First off, government has a huge number of special requirements (remember the flap over President Obama's blackberry?) Second, don't underestimate the difficulty of doing business in Washington. Procurement is done through a complex ballet understood by few open source companies. Third, a big IT deployment like this requires coordination between many companies, each providing a piece of the puzzle. According to techpresident.com, no fewer than five firms were involved in the switch: prime contractor General Dynamics Information Systems, Drupal specialists Phase 2 and Acquia, hosting provider Terremark, and CDN-supplier Akamai. (Disclosure: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Acquia.)

The special nature of the government marketplace is one of the reasons why I launched the Gov 2.0 Expo, which will be held in Washington DC next May. There are huge opportunities for open source, web 2.0, and new media companies in government, but there are also challenges reaching that market. One of my goals for the event is to increase the visibility of cutting edge technology firms not just to government agencies, but also to the prime contractors who are putting together these complex procurements.

The net-net is that I suspect that simply using open source software won't slash government IT budgets, at least not right away. What it will do is increase the amount of value we get for our money and the speed with which new technology can be adopted. Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts.

It's also important to realize that using open source is very different from contributing to open source. Despite the exaggerated claims in the AP story, that "the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit", the White House has not yet released any of the modifications they made to Drupal or its operating environment back to the open source community. The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared. In my conversations with the new media team at the White House, it is clear that they are exploring this option.

Giving modifications back to the Drupal community is the next breakthrough announcement that I'll be looking for.

Personally I think there is way too much emphasis on 'free as in beer' when it comes to stories about governments using open source. Glad to see Tim O'Reilly bringing some reality back to the conversation.

You might have heard me talking before about Google's SideWiki and I said:

"wouldn't this kind of functionality be great on an intranet? It would be one way of upgading legacy apps with some social capabilities?"

Well, Scrumptious could well be it. And perhaps even more elegantly, it is based on solid RESTful principles and uses the open source TiddlyWeb server as a backend (TiddlyWeb is the back end for TiddlyWiki), which offers a range of potiential benefits in terms of this being an inhouse version of SideWiki - e.g. browsable, searchable, mashable and 'securable'. I really hope Scrumptious continues to be developed.

Michael Mahemoff (Scrumptious' creator) also pointed me to this list of del.icio.us, digg clones and Open Source Social Bookmarking Engines.

Hat tip to the comments on Mark Morrell's blog.

A good post from the CTO at Alfresco (and founder at Documentum) explaining the origins, business model and purpose of commercial open source - including the role of large commercial vendors in the history of open source. He also make a good point that:

"Professional open source works well when enterprise software is commoditized. Alfresco was created because of the increasing difficulty in differentiating one enterprise content management system from another.".

If you think quality, enterprise grade open source software is as simple as 'free software', you need to read this.

No, this isn't a product endorsement ;-)

However, the Drupal crowd make a lot of noise in my online neighbourhood and have been getting some good press coverage recently. So, this new Drupal-based intranet package caught my attention today. However, its not the fact that its Drupal powered that interests me, but more the pattern of features in it. Open Atrium includes features such as a dashboard home page, wiki pages, blogging, editing, project spaces, private microblogging (Twitter-style status alerts) etc. This is of course a very similar pattern to what we have already seen emerge in products like Thought Farmer, Social Text and Confluence - and even to an extent SharePoint (with the right Webparts and 3rd-party extensions of course) and IBM Lotus Connections (when partnered up with the right wiki solution).

There is a growing gap between these wiki- or collaboration-centric "suites" and information structure and publishing workflow centric web content management systems that have been the bread and butter of large corporate intranets.

Records management and enterprise content management is probably the one big omission in these new Intranet 2.0 suites, with products like Alfresco being one of the few to bridge both worlds with its Share module. However, out of the box Share lacks some of the richness of the other solutions out there.

If people really want strong document management features in their wiki suite then the open standard Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) should make it achievable in the future. But I think the trick is that there needs to be demand for this type of integration to be made available... and being tired with the constraints of old publishing-centric intranets, I don't hear many people calling out very strongly for that just yet. The reality is that those people who are adopting the new style of intranet suites want to use them as a work platform, not a place for managing content for the sake of it.