I am currently working on a project which requires migration of content from different content management Systems to SharePoint. Are there any good, preferably open source, tools that would help me do this? Also, what are the best practices that I would have to keep in mind when it comes to such projects. One more thing that i would like to factor here is reusablity, because we might have to work on similar migration projects, from other Content Management systems in future.
You can check http://www.codeplex.com/SPMigration (open source, project started by a Microsoft consultant).
This framework gives you an importer tool, as well as some exporter example (FileSystem for example). You'll problably have to code your own exporter.
This MSDN blog also goes into some detail about the Migration API and may be useful as its generally very had to do this sort of thing without getting your hands dirty
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdeveloperdocs/archive/2007/11/30/content-migration-in-sharepoint.aspx
Also, IMHO you shouldn't dismiss proprietary products as although they can be expensive they may save you considerable time and therefore cost if you have a large conversion project.
http://www.tzunami.com/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.avepoint.com/products/sharepoint-migration
Tricks and tips -
http://www.parallelspace.net/portals/ALS305-mwherman-Content%20Migration-1-1-18-RC6_FINAL.ppt
We have had good mileage from going to the nearest university and grabbing some IT students to do a manual migration.
The students like the extra cash and it is sometimes easier when the Information Architectures of the site changes between systems.
Related
I have been planning to build a Dentist Application for the use of the Dentist to add patients(with medical profiles...), organize visits, manage balance/fees....etc
I know Java, .NET( C#) (some windows forms), and Python. Do you have any suggestions with the language I should maybe start with and the framework and IDE that will make my life easier (and help me finish in a good amount of time). This program will be connected with a database of at least 1000 patients...
IDE's I am familiar with : eclipse, Netbeans, and Visual Studio.
I want suggestions with reason explanations (why would you favor C# over Java ....compatibility....etc)
Thanks,
It's not the database side, or even the programming environment, that will be the issue for a dental practice.
I consult for a dentist friend of mine, and the opportunity arose to sell him a fully-functional contact/document management application to run his patient database.
In the end, I couldn't in good conscience recommend my own application, because not being designed for the dental sector, it lacks the specialised interfaces with dental imaging systems.
Databases, appointments, invoices, etc, are easy.
But what a dentist needs is something that integrates with the dental records themselves - the X-ray images of teeth. It needs a simple UI, easily usable by the dental nurse while she works with the dentist while he has his hands in the patient's mouth.
We could have written a suitable graphical interface to an image library (imagine a diagrammatic representation of the teeth in their relative positions in the mouth, linked to the images themselves), but it wasn't worth it - especially as there are several highly specialised dental packages around already.
I suggest to start with some research on the subject (the dentist domain) and to make a decent functional design before you start to think about IDE's and languages.
And then try to figure out some other things:
For instance, will you make a SAAS or a windows client, do all your customers have internet access. Iis the sensitive patient data allowed to be stored on the web.
I believe that question is very relative to the person programming. I think as the developer you have to figure out where you would be most successful at or what you want to get out of the project. If you are using this project to make money then do what you are comfortable with. If you are using it to better yourself as a developer then pick a language you are less confident in.
The one thing I want to add, is remember PHI (Protected Health Information). So, you have to have patient privacy in mind when building an app like this.
If it were me... I would write something in .NET and use Visual Studio which works very well for windows forms. Windows forms would work very well in an office environment.
Just my 2 cents.
First introduce yourself to the business knowledge. Healthcare programs aren't written overnight and you have to take into account that you need to have a very secure application and probably also need to keep years of information (the program I was involved in in 2001-2002 had to keep 30 years of patient history due to Belgian law).
Choosing the technology is actually entirely up to you: what are you good at? Can you find already prebuild pieces of code or controls ...
You can write such an application in any of the languages you have mentioned.
Research the features you will need and the support you can expect from each language and the different available libraries.
You need to come up with a good design first (regardless of language/platform), and make sure you have all the requirements - how many people should be supported in the system, how many concurrent users, privacy of data, security features, access patterns etc...
You should probably use the language you are most comfortable with, in particular if the features you require have similar support in the different languages/frameworks.
I have a client who has been using WebOffice (from WebEx) for a variety of tasks within their small organization. The problem is that they only really need a small subset of the features WebOffice provides (Contact list, Database, and Document Storage).
They've asked me to develop a website focused on these three features with the rationalization that this should be more cost-effective, since they currently aren't using many of the features of WebOffice they pay for.
What are some open-source alternatives that I could implement for them? Sharepoint sounds like it would be too bloated and Google Apps may not be as collaborative as they would like.
We looked at sharepoint and went like "meh". Anything interesting you want to do with it requires prohibitive licensing, and if you expose any piece of it to the internet then the cost just blows any budget away.
We are piloting a deployment of Alfresco, with KnowledgeTree also being a very decent option, IMO. As for the main site, something like OpenAtrium looks like a pretty decent and flexible fit without much configuration needed. OpenAtrium is based on Drupal.
SharePoint sounds like a good match? Did whoever told you it was bloated also mention why?
You might only need WSS which is free (if you have Windows Server).
My company hosts LumiPortal (www.lumiportal.com) which is similar to WebOffice but with drive letters for storage. If you have inhouse technical expertise, then on the open source side we see Joomla and Drupal, which could be thought of as classic content management systems. If you have in-house technical expertise, you might look at Drupal and their document management component first.
Call WebOffice customer service and tell them. They will probably adjust your payment options to suit your needs.
There's a good roundup of online collaboration/office suites here although it is a bit dated now.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_office_2007_year_in_review.php
Webex WebOffice hasn't been updated in 5 years and has been sunset by Webex with no migration path (confirmed in their forums) so I would get off it ASAP.
With the addition of Wave to Google Apps it would seem to be a much more cost effective and modern replacement.
My company is in need of a task management system to handle scenarios as simple as "Purchase a computer for X" to "Relocate a person to another country". The simple scenarios are a single tasks handled by a single person, whereas bigger tasks can be broken down into multiple sub tasks delegated to multiple people during the workflow. Additionally the clients and vendors need their own views into the process.
We are evaluating different solutions from a custom application built on Workflow Foundation to SharePoint to BPM products like Metastorm and BPM.Net.
Here's my current understanding of these solutions:
Workflow Foundation - Low level workflow designer and/or library with no host environment. It seems we would have to reinvent some wheels if we went this route such as fault tolerance and document management. Some of the answers on stack also cause concerns such as the lack of versioning and a complete overhaul for VS10/.NET 4.0
SharePoint - Built for document management and collaboration but trying to create advanced workflows and tasking on top of that seems like a hack. Plus all workflows have to be tied to either documents or lists. I cant envision how a list (or list of lists) can address this issue.
BPM products - Mature workflow engine at a seemingly high price. BPM.Net is the only solution for which I could find some level of technical detail but im still not sure how different developing against this product would be from developing against Workflow Foundation.
Are there any workflow engines dedicated to solving all the workflow pains that can be easily deployed with their own hosting environment and initiated through a webservice?
Are there any other options I am missing?
Thanks in advance.
****Edit**
To answer the questions below the workflow needs are pretty light. Basic routing of tasks to approvers and subcontractors.
Whats driving us too look deeper than PM software is the nature of the business not the need for advanced workflow. We are basically in the business of procuring goods and services through subcontractors for our clients which can also include full employee relocation. The interface of the package should reflect this by being customer branded as well as intuitive for this line of business.
Basically if im moving my family to the other side of the world Im not sure i'd want to interface with Jira or Sharepoint or any other PM software to facilitate this.
If you are on Microsoft stack I would definitely recommend SharePoint for this scenario. As it seems to be very simple you can go with Windows SharePoint Services edition because it is free and it has everything you need.
You are right when you say that ShartePoint workflow are bit limited. IMHO the best way to overcome that limitation is to purchase Nintex workflow to create your workflows. It is cost effective solution that can help you design workflows you need.
You can find workflow samples inside the product (as workflow templates) and on the web site.
Nothing you mentioned has much to do with workflow. You're just doing project management. If that's the case, a simple bug tracker (like FogBugz! ;) would work - but if you're going to show it externally, it may not be the most professional presentation.
The closest off the shelf solution I can think of would be Project Server - though, depending on the number of projects and project managers, the desktop Project with a sync to a webserver for client views may be enough.
If that's overkill - because your projects don't require a lot of resource scheduling, Gantt charts, or other PM artifacts - you can take something like Trac and replace "bug" with "task". ;) (Seriously though, that'd probably get you 90% of the way there.....)
Have you looked at RT? I believe it can handle all your requirements, including that it's designed to let customers interact with the system by email, rather than having to log into the website. If you've emailed IT support desks then you've probably interacted with it without knowing... You can also completely customise the web interface and allow customer access.
Can't vouch for the quality as I haven't used it, but I did watch an online-demo video of Intalio, which has BPM and workflow capabilities.
We use Basecamp to control this sort of "task management" stuff. I'm not sure if it fits your needs totally, as it's a little light on the document management side, but it has a web service (REST) API, customer / vendor facing components, and basic interaction / chat capabilities.
The best part about it is that the API is simple enough where you can offload a lot of the "management" for it to admin support personnel, like assistants and interns, by providing custom scripts. If you've got people who aren't programmers using it you'll probably have better luck with it than even something like Trac or FogBugz.
I have/am going through a similar process. We wanted a lightweight workflow for internal use by our sales team. Most of the third party apps we looked at ,K2 and Skelta BPM.Net in particular, looked way over the top for what we needed. I'm now 2 months into working with Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0 and I have to say it isn't the most pleasant coding experience I've had.
If your workflows will truely be simple then it is pretty easy to build a workflow and hook it up to some web pages for the UI. But if you need to be able to change it on the fly, or do versioning (ie the user says we want another step added, then its a whole lot of hacking to get it to work - and it only works if you limit your workflow to being really simple), then you are in for a fair bit of work. And forget about it if you use an Oracle database.
The next version of windows workflow will have it's own runtime environment, code name dublin, with will provide a WCF interface into the workflows.
If your timeframe allows you could use that.
For information on Dublin and the next version of WF see:
http://www.microsoft.com/net/dublin.aspx
My vote is for FogBugz. Unless I am missing something in your requirements, why would you want to reinvent the wheel by using a code based workflow solution where you have to code up the flows yourself when you can use a perfectly good project dependency solution like FB or even MS Project Server - which lets you create nice dependencies for resources and people.
Check FileNet
FileNet is expensive but makes a good job with content and process management, but I guess is not what you are looking for.
We use Captaris Workflow, it is pretty good but it may be expensive for your needs.
In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.
What open source toolkit does fatwire compare to and are there some particular advantages to fatwire?
How hard is fatwire to export out of and move to a free alternative?
How stable is it as a platform to write java extensions on?
From a development persepective, FatWire can be unfriendly. Having worked on a number of sites using this application it can easy bloat, and become difficult to maintain.
From a user perspective there has been alot of effort in the UI and this has led to a highly functional tool.
From a client perspective all clients bar 1 (a large news agency) were happy with the end result. FatWire can slow when using complex logic to generate menus or breadcumbs for example or when you have a large amount of content. This is the main reason the one client was unhappy. The FatWire site regularily struggled under the load. It sometimes seen as a solution to all web needs.
As such FatWire succeeds in serving Static Content & Semi Dynamic content, but can flounder when forced to do fully dynamic sites (from my experience).
From the original press release:
FatWire Software announced the rollout
of FirstSite, which is a set of tools
and best practices that helps
companies using FatWire Content Server
get their first Web site or
application running quickly while
providing a foundation for future
expansion. FirstSite includes a
collection of standard templates and
site components that are common to
most sites, combined with
documentation, training, a rich
developer community, and best
practices methodology. FatWire and its
solution partners are using FirstSite
as the basis for developing
content-centric applications for
specific vertical markets. With only
minor, cosmetic alterations,
developers can use the code in
FirstSite to implement a first site,
while simultaneously learning how to
utilize Content Server's capabilities,
such as dynamic content delivery,
personalization, caching, and product
catalogs.
Firstsite is not a product, unless this has changed since 2004 (unfortunately I cannot look, since their developer site is down). Fatwire's Content Server does not compare to any Open Source CMS that I know. It's scope goes much further. I will answer your questions one by one:
Advantages - There are many (or nobody would buy it, and it is not cheap)
On the delivery side: scalability, fine-grained cache control, stateless servlet architecture, ....
On the back office side: virtually no limit to asset types, dynamic content attributes, find-grained security and access control, ...
On the development side: Intelligently architected API with good coding productivity, tag library, ...
Openness
You cannot easily expect to migrate content between any two CMS products, open source or not. While there are ways to extract contant from the database in XML and other forms, using product tools, or simply at the database level, I don't think that this can be an argument for or against using a particular CMS. Ever tried to migrate from Drupal to Joomla?
Stable
I worked on several Fatwire implementations from 2000 to 2004 (back then it was OpenMarket Content Server, then Divine Content Server). It was stable enough for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the S&P sites, and I would expect stability not to be an issue today.
Fatwire is really unique concept from developer point of view. It builds everything on a very abstract, extremely flexible clever asset modeling framework which is stored in relational database.
Application logic is based on "templates" which actually are pieces of JSP code. This JSP code is not like conventional Java, but tags instead. It takes very long from a developer to learn these tags and Fatwire asset api. Expect even months before skilled develpers start to be productive.
Almost nothing useable samples ships along the product. There is advertized "FirstSite" but it is way too simple for the purpose this product is used normally (huge complex sites). So pretty much everything has to be built from scratch.
Cache control is advertized to be one powerful feature. Yes it is, but we had extremely long learning curve and it never worked exactly like one assumed.
Wysiwyg editing has been missed from this product even it is advertized. At least during 2009 it had serious conceptual problems which practically prevented using it in live environments. But it was cool feature for demos and marketing of course. Today it might be fixed.
As a summary and if I were a customer with limited budget, I'd select any open source alternative instead. Mostly because development costs with Fatwire are high due the uniqueness of the product, lack of good documentation and extremely long learing curve. Of course the product price tag is also thing to consider.
And to answer to questions: you have to start from scratch if you move from Fatwire 6.0 to any open source alternative. And it is stable to build Java extensions on.
Fatwire stores content in relation database and file system. Depending on what type of content (structured/unstructured), Fatwire can be evaluated.