If ever there was a company I want to root for it's Jive. This little company is churning out some great product right now and the most recent developments in their collaborative tool Clearspace make me think this support is not unfounded.
This tool is a light weight wiki/DMS/IM platform that plugs in beautifully with their open source XMPP (GTalk/Jabber if you aren't hip on the lingo) offering - Openfire. It also has plugins to connect to all those nasty proprietary networks as well (MSN, Yahoo, etc).
The applications themselves are well designed, have very clean UI and the admin console is very shiny and usable. The bonus to all of this: they just work. By using clever engineering and good architecture this platform combination will run on practically every Java supporting host known to business. I like that.
In addition the integration of the IM piece with the collaboration piece is well thought out and seamless. You can see who is where and if they are available... presence to the N'th degree here folks.
And it's cheap. Free for less than 5 people and 29$ (US) a year/user for more.
If you have the time/inclination - check it out! You will not be disappointed.
Yesterday, I received a very friendly invite from Boris for the Joost - the new peer shared TV property from the makers of Skype.
In the short amount of time I have had to explore the software that they may have the nose for a winner.
The interface is simple, snappy and intuitive. It's fun to explore the, admittedly, beta content but word through the grapevine is that CNN, NHL and other more interesting properties will be finding their way onto the small screen.
Small screen? On my iMac the fullscreen quality is fairly smooth with minor jaggies and rendering artifacts which are most likely the result of our bursty internet connectivity here in the North. The quality is far better than YouTube and the content is more interesting... mostly, we are definitely in beta territory here.
The profit model on this? Probably the much craved "carte blanche" ability to buy individual channels without having to pay for all the cr$p you wish you didn't have to pay for. As a non-cable, no-tv household I would love to have a wish-list of: CBC, A&E, TSN, CBS, NBC, Weather Channel and Teletoon :). Perhaps some others but it would be nice to have the ability to buy 'em as singles.
Anyway, I will explore this service a bit more but will need to watch out for exceeding my data bit-cap as this is a Peer to Peer application you are uploading and downloading information.
I have just updated/upgraded to the latest Drupal (5.0!).
The upgrade went fairly smoothly on my "work" site but the two version hop on the "personal" site was a little less smooth... I had forgotten to keep that site upgraded as well as I should have. A couple of tries and some manual database checks later; I am golden.
All in all, the response time is much quicker, the re-organized administrative console is great and the new default theme "Garland" offers this truly slick javascript colour picker!
In addition, I have taken advantage of the multi-site support that Drupal has built in and now only have one code base to maintain!! This version really sings and once I get back into the groove of customizing it I think I will invest some quality time making it look a bit less like every other Drupal site with the default theme installed.
Oh, and Greg, I nuked your last comment post ... Sorry!
