Notes on Forrestor Research IW vs ECM

Notes on Forrester Research:

For Enterprise Collaboration, Focus On Information Workplace Platforms, Not ECM Specialists

by Erica Driver

for Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

June 26, 2007

This article distinguishes between Information Workplace (IW) Platforms and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems. It covers the similarities and differences and when and where each should be implemented. This article goes into detail about the offerings of the major vendors in the space.

While Both IW platforms and ECM Systems offer collaboration and productivity services ECM is trending towards more industry specificity allowing IW to offer more general, core services. These core services include messaging, team collaboration such as on documents and social computing tools like blogs, wikis, and tagging. It has not yet been fully determined which services should be included in IW and which should be specific to specialized collaboration applications. Examples of Specialized collaboration applications include drug approval process facilitators and collaborative software development tools.

Of particular interest for our team are the comments about Microsoft including:

“• Microsoft is a leading collaboration platform vendor.
• Microsoft offers the core collaboration platform pieces: messaging, team collaboration, real-time collaboration and communication, and some basic Social Computing tools.“

The major recommendation of the paper is to implement IW and look for ECM providers for process specific collaboration needs that provide integration points and synergies with IW.

Forrester SharePoint Research Notes

Notes on Microsoft’s 2007 Enterprise Content Management Platform
By Kyle Mcnabb

MOSS provides a single environment for collaborative document management, Web content management, records management, workflow, and eForms support

MOSS now supports defining content based on its type — such as contract, deal, article, or customer presentation which facilitates more discrete management

Document Management supports Check and Check out (standard and enterprise?)

MOSS now includes serial and parallel document review and approval workflow support.

Administrators can create new workflows using Office SharePoint Designer 2007, and developers can use Visual Studio 2005 Extension for Windows Workflow Foundation to create new workflows.

MOSS integrates with Microsoft Office 2007 client applications such as Outlook and Word. Document libraries can be natively accessed through the Outlook client. Employees can subscribe to document libraries, and they can get notified of changes to documents via RSS feeds and email alerts through Outlook. Furthermore, SharePoint documents and folders connected to Outlook can be synchronized with local desktops for offline access and editing

Per user price points for basic document management have hovered between $50 and $100 for the past 18 months. Moss offers basic document management abilities plus a host of additional features at that cost.

Troubles with MOSS stated in this document are not of much concern for us:

• No federated policy management support across SharePoint libraries.
• Not an issue now, nor a requested feature
• MS forces customers to migrate, not simply upgrade, existing implementations.
• MOSS 2007 implementation should work for us for years to come
• No digital asset management support(such as video).
• Teams dealing with this have their own systems in place
• Some value-added capabilities are only available with full Office upgrade.
• We intend to upgrade
• Very little support for transactional content processes. Lack robust Business Process Management (BPM) support
• Could be enhanced with supporting products

How many people are on your server right now?

To view how many users are currently connected to your Windows Web Server you can use the M$ Performance Monitor.

Run perfmon.
Right Click in the counter table and select 'Add Counters...'
Change Performance object to Web Service
Change counter to Current Connections.

You should now be able to see the number of users currently connected to your webserver. Save this Configuration by doing a save as.

How to force users to print using Spry

You can't actually force users to print but you can have the browser's print dialog displayed using a simple, properly placed JavaScript command. The JavaScript I'm referencing is "window.print()", which could be launched on submit if it weren't for the form validation which it will conflict with.

If you are using the Spry Framework to assist with form validation you can place the window.print() command in the Spry JavaScript file such as, SpryValidationSelect.js in the Spry.Widget.ValidationSelect.prototype.validate function immediately before the return true. This will cause the print dialog to display only if the input passes validation.

Simple ASP contact form processor

If you have a contact form like this:

First Name

Last Name

Address

City

State

ZIP Code

Age

Your Question Is?

Email Address

Phone Number



you could use a simple ASP script this to send the submissions via email:
<%
dim emailFrom, emailTo, emailSubject, emailBody
dim objMail, iConf
emailFrom = Request.Form("emailAddress")
emailTo = "hross@jmsonline.com"
emailSubject = "JMS Website: Contact Form Submission"
emailBody = "The following information was submitted from the JMS online contact form:" & vbcrlf &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "First Name: " & (Request.Form("firstName")) &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "Last Name: " & (Request.Form("lastName")) &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "Address: " & (Request.Form("address")) &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "City: " & (Request.Form("city")) &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "State: " & (Request.Form("state")) &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "Zip: " & (Request.Form("zip")) &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "Age: " & (Request.Form("age")) &vbcrlf &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "Question: " & (Request.Form("question")) &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "Email Address: " & (Request.Form("emailAddress")) &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & "Phone: " & (Request.Form("p1")) & Request.Form("p2") & Request.Form("p3") &vbcrlf &vbcrlf
emailBody = emailBody & vbcrlf
set objMail = server.CreateObject("CDO.Message")
set iConf = CreateObject("CDO.Configuration")
With iConf.Fields
.Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing") = 2 ' CdoSendUsingPort
.Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver") = Application("EmailServer")
.Update
End With
objMail.From = emailFrom
objMail.To = emailTo
objMail.Subject = emailSubject
objMail.TextBody = EmailBody
objMail.send
Set objMail = Nothing
%>

Easiest way to hack a Windows admin password

Say your pc becomes disconnected from your network and there by your domain where your user accounts are controlled or someone dies it may be necessary to hack a windows Administrator password.

While the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, Bootdisk / CD seemed like easiest method for resetting windows passwords I had trouble with it and had to find an alternate method.

This alternate method consisted of booting up the machine with Linux distro Knoppix, and copying the system32/config directory which contains the SAM file onto a usb flash drive. The SAM file is the Security Accounts Manager Windows uses to store password "hashes" which amounts to essentially encrypted passwords.

I then copied the necessary files to another windows machine on which I had installed SAMinside. SAMinside was instantly able to tell me all the user names for the locked box and offered the ability to do a brute force / dictionary hybrid attack that tried over 4 million passwords a second. Luckily, the password i was trying to crack was a simple 6 letter dictionary word so it only took about an hour.

Intro to Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0

Yesterday I installed the .NET framework, WSS 3.0, the SharePoint Application Template Core and a pre-built application template for a Document Library and Review which included threaded discussion. Out of the box, the whole thing ties into our user accounts so all our actions are linked to our usernames as we move through the app. There are many pre-built app templates available on Microsoft's TechNet

Despite being a M$ product, WSS seems like an excellent, full-featured web app framework. Installation was slightly more complex than normal for M$ products, involving uncompressing files and utilizing the ol' command line, but a cinch coming from a Linux background.