Lost!

I’ve written about Alfresco several times, I’ve even received comments back about my writing style with respect to Alfresco. Well, tonight is no exception. I received a comment that made me think a little and my response turned into a full-blown post.

You really have it in for Alfresco don’t you? To be perfectly neutral on the subject, (I honestly have no affiliations with Alfresco), you do come across as favouring MS.

I have a very weird attitude towards Alfresco, and it’s due to two different views that I’ve come to love and hate. Specifically, they are the Pro OSS side and the Enterprise Techie Side.

Alfresco is a great accomplishment on the OSS side of things. The community parti poker netpoker regeln holdfive card draw pokerparty poker bonus,party poker 50 bonus,bonus bei party pokerpoker um geld spielensichere online spielepoker anleitung texas holdempoker no deposit bonusparty poker downloadmultiplayer championship poker texas holdempoker software gratisomaha poker rulesonline spielenpoker texaspoker kostenlosplay omaha pokerpoker stars bonus code7 card stud downloadfull tilt poker bonustexas holdem poker handsregeln zu pokerplay omaha poker onlinetexas holdem ohne anmeldungonline poker für macgratis poker gamespoker spiel downloadentexas holdem wahrscheinlichkeitpoker java gamewww poker spielenpoker taxas holdempoker signup bonuspokerstars bonusparty poker net cheatsholdem poker pc gamewo kann man poker spielenonline poker detexas holdem poker downloadmultiplayer championship poker holdemtexas holdem no limit regelnparty poker 75draw poker onlinevincere poker onlinesoftware cartepoker texano on linestip poker gratisil poker onlinestrategie texas holdemfull tilt pokerpoker roompoker texas holdem,tornei poker texas holdem,regolamento poker texas holdem is providing a great product and they’ve really put a lot of effort into it.

The other side of the fence is the IT guy that has to make a decision to buy a “more expensive product” or Alfresco. After going through their sales process (for a very real, possible sale) a year ago, they had a heck of a lot of growing up to do. They also do several other things that annoy me as well - but I tend to write about most of those.

Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I haven’t had a chance to perform another sales call to them, so they may have fixed many of my initial points (there are more than the points I freaked out on before). I was actually about to perform another sales call, but managed to land a job last Wed and ended up starting that same Friday - talk about fast.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen, Alfresco could be great, but it needs to do a few things better to be something thats going to stay around for awhile. At this point in time, I honestly believe that the company itself is growing it’s employee and cost base way too fast and I’m predicting some nasty stuff is going to happen in the next few years - and yes, I know they just received a $9M round of funding…

The software alone will not “make” this company. In all honesty, I would love to see Alfresco become a profitable company.

I will offer this piece of advice to anyone that will take it, completely free of fees, royalties and lawsuits: The first company that designs a kick-ass SharePoint alternative using C#.Net mixed with MSSQL will make a boat load of money, OSS or not.

As for being Pro-MS (aka: SharePoint), at the moment, I am and so is most of the business world. Ask anyone that has purchased SharePoint if they even looked at Alfresco for longer than a quick peek at their site, I’m willing to bet they didn’t look long at all. As much as I hate it, the business world is completely Pro-MS and some will even laugh you right out of the room for suggesting OSS alternatives. Oddly, some of these same businesses use FireFox internally. Things that make you go Hmm.

I’ve been sitting back for a bit scheming on how to make money since being unemployed. Currently, I’ve got a business plan going for a website, but it’ll be a few months before it’s even Alpha. But, within the last few weeks, several things have happened to slow down progress on that project: ECM projects that actually pay real money…

There are several ways to get noticed, but the easiest way I’ve seen is Monster. If you have an ECM background with SharePoint etc, it’s very easy to get noticed by recruiters around the globe and even Microsoft. I’ve personally gotten emails from Microsoft asking me to apply to their SharePoint team. (In that situation, I actually got an email from the Internal MSFT PM, not to mention nearly every recruiter in WA.) I’ve noticed that if you update your resume every Continue reading…

I’ve been volunteering with a group of people that serve my community and have been beefing up their WordPress Mu site. In the process, I’ve been doing a lot more research about WP Plugins, themes, etc.

I’ve heard about Themes for the Admin interface, but had never played with them until today. In true form of using a CSS file as a Template Engine (who would have thought?!), all thats needed is a simple plugin for the Admin Theme I’m using: WP Tiger Administration.

Let me tell you, I’m impressed - damn impressed.

This nice, crisp, theme is so much nicer on the eyes, but only if you use FireFox and other CSS2 compliant browsers (that means IE users will see the default Admin page).

This really makes me wonder why Admin themes are not as popular as outside themes. I’m actually considering theme’ing the Mu backend for my volunteer project because of how much more professional it looks. Try it out, have a little fun. Who knows, you might spend more time blogging than you did with the older theme. Kudos to Steve Smith…

There are a lot of posts online about about the newest version of WordPress killing Categoris, links, etc.

I got heavily involved in one such post and decided to pull some old backups of Lost into my test box and upgrade back and forth. Needless to say, I couldn’t replicate the damn issue. I went from 2.1.x to 2.3.2 with some fatal errors (it pretty much freaked because I use XAMP locallly), but my DB stayed the same.

First, anyone that complains should have a backup of their files and DB. If you didn’t backup, it’s your own fault. WP Documentation even tells you to do this first.

What Are The Symptons?
When you first upgrade, you may notice Categories, Pages, Links (Blogroll) all gone. Some people, such as myself, noticed smaller changes like a Category magically being renamed to “Blogroll”.

Whats Causing This?
I’ve read that somewhere between 2.1 and 2.3, there was a table change, but the upgrade process seems to handle this issue just fine. On top of this, I’ve personally gone from 2.1 through 2.3 (10+ times) with Categories intact. I’ve also seen cases of developers helping people through the process and things work fine when they’re being helped.

So, what happened then? Honestly, my idea is that people are rushing the installs. They’re not disabling the Plugins, they’re not performing backups and they’re overwriting files instead of deleting the old and replacing them with new.

There was one install where I could get WordPress to lose categories, but it was specifically due to a permissions issue with a database. I pretty much locked a user down to 4 basic permissions and everything choked as expected.

Alfresco CEO, John Powell, just announced that they are having DNS type issues due to their Domain Registrar, 123-reg.

Anyone attempting to visit the site needs to use the following directions sent out by Powell:

To access the web sites, please use the following URLs:

* www.alfresco.com - please use http://88.208.218.102/
* customers.alfresco.com and partners.alfresco.com - please use http://88.208.200.70/alfresco/
* forums.alfresco.com - please use http://217.174.252.22/

If you want to reach anyone in Alfresco by email, you can do so by using [email address]@alfresco.org instead of [email address]@alfresco.com.

This is hot on the heals of a news report saying, quote, “UK domain registrar 123-Reg crashes and burns, taking its customers with it”. CNet UK even mentions Alfresco in that blog posting. Basically, some are saying it’s a DOS attack while others are guessing it’s 123-reg’s screw up.