openroad, thoughtfarmer, & if/then
So the cycling postings have been light here in the last few weeks, in large part due to the fact that I haven't done much. I stepped off the bike at Bradner and haven't been on it since. Not that I haven't been thinking and working on lots of cycling stuff recently -- if I trained as much as I attended cycling-related board meetings, I'd be kicking ass.
me and Timmy at Bradner on a sunny Sunday
But this post isn't about cycling, it's about work. While not out on my two wheels, I happen to be the Vice President and a partner at a 10 year old web development firm in Vancouver called OpenRoad Communications.
And lately we've been very busy.
Two announcments of note. We launched a product during March: ThoughtFarmer, a wiki-inspired content management system for intranets. Woah. Catch all those buzzwords? Basically it's an intranet where any user can edit any page, hence the "wiki inspired" part of the description. Unsure of what a wiki is? Check out Wikipedia, the world's most famous example, for a definition of wiki.
Call it anarchy, call it "dangerously easy to use" as one of our clients did: it's our response to the fact that all intranet software we have seen sucks. And it was time to change that. We teamed up with the talented Mr Chris McGrath of One Intranets and are in the midst of rolling it out for a few very large and recognizable clients, who will go un-named at the moment.
We're very excited about it. You can check out ThoughtFarmer and some screenshots over at the ThoughtFarmer intranet site. And if you want a demo, drop me an email and I'd be glad to give you a tour.
On the other work front, my business partner Darren and myself have fired up a corporate blog focusing on user experience design, the software development process, and emerging technology trends called if/then over at the OpenRoad site as well. I kick things off with a post about 7 Tips for Getting Better Software Estimates. So for those readers of a more technological nature (instead of all the cyclists and yacht-spotters who dominate my webstats), we hope that it will be a useful contribution to the ongoing dialogue about software that exists across some fanastic blogs and websites these days. It's an exciting time to be building software (again).
Technorati keywords: [intranet] [thoughtfarmer] [wiki] [openroad]
me and Timmy at Bradner on a sunny Sunday
But this post isn't about cycling, it's about work. While not out on my two wheels, I happen to be the Vice President and a partner at a 10 year old web development firm in Vancouver called OpenRoad Communications.
And lately we've been very busy.
Two announcments of note. We launched a product during March: ThoughtFarmer, a wiki-inspired content management system for intranets. Woah. Catch all those buzzwords? Basically it's an intranet where any user can edit any page, hence the "wiki inspired" part of the description. Unsure of what a wiki is? Check out Wikipedia, the world's most famous example, for a definition of wiki.
Call it anarchy, call it "dangerously easy to use" as one of our clients did: it's our response to the fact that all intranet software we have seen sucks. And it was time to change that. We teamed up with the talented Mr Chris McGrath of One Intranets and are in the midst of rolling it out for a few very large and recognizable clients, who will go un-named at the moment.
We're very excited about it. You can check out ThoughtFarmer and some screenshots over at the ThoughtFarmer intranet site. And if you want a demo, drop me an email and I'd be glad to give you a tour.
On the other work front, my business partner Darren and myself have fired up a corporate blog focusing on user experience design, the software development process, and emerging technology trends called if/then over at the OpenRoad site as well. I kick things off with a post about 7 Tips for Getting Better Software Estimates. So for those readers of a more technological nature (instead of all the cyclists and yacht-spotters who dominate my webstats), we hope that it will be a useful contribution to the ongoing dialogue about software that exists across some fanastic blogs and websites these days. It's an exciting time to be building software (again).
Technorati keywords: [intranet] [thoughtfarmer] [wiki] [openroad]
5 Comments:
ThoughtFarmer is the best wiki-style intranet package since sliced bread! I think everyone and their grandmother should buy a license immediately. I challenge anyone else to say otherwise!
:D
By
Anonymous, at 11:59 pm
gordo,
sounds like you need a little crossfit in your life to get you over the training blahs.
come join me for a workout, it will shock your body a little bit.
it's a little harder than cycling so you'll have to leave your purse at the door.
s
By
Anonymous, at 10:40 am
Holy moly that ThoughtFarmer sounds like fun to use. I'll bug you for a demo later, but I sure wish my place of business was about to transition to that instead of someone else's big scary CMS.
Evil question: how well does it handle the importation and managment of existing content? This seems to be a scary bugbear for other systems, including the one we're transitioning to.
By
Ryan, at 11:10 pm
Ah yes, content migration. Taking what you have in your current system and importing it into a new system is never very nice. It is one of the most underestimated parts of any CMS project. The reason: content exists in a structured and unstructured manner. Intranets are often comprised of lots of unstructured data (Word docs, PDF's, Excel files, random HTML pages). Rarely do you get a well-defined format to work with, one where the content import can be automated.
The article Migrating Legacy Content at CMS Watch and Web Content Migration Project Design both tackle these problems.
In their CMS seminar, user experience / web gurus Adaptive Path acknowledge that migration of content is simply dirty. The tempation will be to try to script the whole thing, they write, but ultimately you wind up with the ACV approach: Ctrl-A (Select All), Ctrl-C (Copy), Ctrl-V (Paste). I like to refer to ACV as "the cut-and-paste-athon." Their commentary mirrors our experience on this and other projects, using custom CMS systems, off the shelf CMS systems, and now our own Intranet tool.
As we use a SQL Server backend for ThoughtFarmer and store the new content in a structured manner, there are opportunities to migrate content in a scripted manner. We did this with some news articles from an existing intranet recently and some blog posts from another one. If your data is structured to start with, you've got better chances of getting it into a structured system.
Perhaps when one-day, we're all using the latest and greatest version of Office that stores everything as an XML file, we'll all be better off. But right now, it's still an ugly, time-consuming, and source content dependant process.
By
Gordon, at 9:35 am
c'mon gord, i think you're ducking the challenge with all this compu-speak mumbo jumbo.
By
Anonymous, at 12:08 pm
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