So the latest version of WordPress, 3.0 is here . This is not much of a surprise since we get new versions almost every month. But this release stands out as a much awaited release, since it has some major fresh features for a great user interface.

I will list out a few new features here:

1. The Installation registration page

The previous versions of WordPress had a major security hole as the admin username for the backend was automatically generated as “admin”.  Users had to create a new username for the admin and delete the “admin” from the database.

The new released 3.0 covers that risk by giving an option for users to create their own username and password before the installation.

2. New welcome template

WordPress users would be very familiar with the blue drab default skin that came with the WordPress installation.

That has finally been removed and replaced by a new, fresh theme called the 2010 theme. As the name implies, they plan to have a new template every year.

This is a real refreshing sight, when compared to all the older versions of WordPress.

3. Link Shortener

This is a very helpful feature which enables us to generate short links for our articles (just like in twitter).

4. Individual Author templates

This allows us to have unique author page designs.  So each author can have his own template. It comes handy in case of multi author blogs.

5. Multi Site feature

The best feature by far, this allows us to manage number of blogs with just one admin. Imagine that you’re a web developer who wants to build and host your client’s blogs and sites — you can run hundreds of client sites under one WordPress installation.

So the new release in fact merges WordPress MU and the plain WordPress.

And finally here is the link to a more specified instructions on the new features. http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/wordpress-3-0-guide/

So this is really the best version of all, and who knows, they might come back with an even more amazing one next month!

Anyone attending a sales training course will be told to get equipped with a CRM system. So should we fill up our bar with Coffee, Rum and Milk?
No, we are talking here about the system which should help you shift your leads and sales potentials away from thunderbird or Outlook. Even Excel or a simple paper sheet will not help increase revenue and profitability.

You need to know with whom you are dealing. For this you can use a CRM system and implement a workflow to help you speed up your work.  What if you are just a one or 5 person strong team? Hey, you do not need SAP CRM to be successful but you need some kind of software to keep things tidy.

So, there are many options. Open Source offers server based software which you can install on a web server or any small computer you are not using a lot in the office. “SugarCRM” and “vTiger” offer community based versions. Sugar even offers a professional version at a moderate license fee.

So what is the best?

This depends on your needs and your location. If you are based in Europe you will find vtiger quite interesting but you should not send out any invoice or quote before having the platform customized by a professional consultant. Otherwise your clients will get heart attacks when reading that your 12k offer is grown to 12.000.000.

So what about SugarCRM?

Sugar is available in 2 editions and can be customized to quite some extend. Customization costs often prove to be lower than with vtiger. So we can expect to see a lot of interesting opportunities in the field of outsourcing.

This is due to the fact that most companies using vtiger or sugarCRM in the Open Source Edition will be consisting of 1-10 employees. Are they going to be open minded to accept products other than Microsoft CRM 4.0? Well, this could be quite the truth, when you look at the workload for an IT Expert to operate and maintain such a CRM.

With open source, you will have installed and customized the system once, then added data and organizational structures before starting to work. Once you are running on full steam you only need to keep running backups for safety reasons.

So do you prefer rum or milk in your coffee?

Getting the necessary skills to operate your own CRM can be costly and time consuming, so IT Outsourcing can speed up things for you. Besides, when recording client data you need to keep in mind that European laws require you to protect data what is quite some complicated way if you are trying to save cost by outsourcing the running of the software, too.

Best option would be to outsource the system to a hosting provider in the Netherlands, Germany or the UK. This can keep you safe from overregulated issues which are beyond the grasp of human beings.

Hence, keep it fast, simple and profitable.

That’s what outsourcing is there for.

• Your product to sell
• Targeted audience
• Number of sales intended per day
• Amount of transaction included
• Your budget
• And most important of all the time you intent to spend on this

If you are a low budget beginner, but still need a very professional e-commerce site you can consider online tools like Shopify (http://www.shopify.com/). Sites like Shopify works like your Gmail account where you get a domain name for your e-shop and get a tool to manage design. And once site is up all the content and admin features can be managed from the site admin panel. And these features roughly cost around 100 USD per month..!!

The disadvantages of these online tools come when you need a feature and you find out it’s not offered. Then you prefer to go to a web company where they can either create a custom e-shop or customize Opensource packages. And the three things which you should consider when choosing an Opensource e-commerce package are

1. Foundation or the software
2. Design or visual simplicity
3. Flexibility and robustness in managing

Foundation or the software

This is the core of your e-commerce application. This can be developed from scratch using different frameworks, which will take more time and effort and also require re-creating already existing simple features like registration, CMS etc. This can be overcome with Opensource e-commerce packages.

Beauty of Open source and PHP

This is where PHP and Opensource come in. With the Opensource and free software gnu license a lot of companies create Opensource packages and distribute for free and with the ease of PHP language it is easy and less expensive to customize a Opensource package.

The basic factors to consider when choosing Opensource e-commerce software

• Availability of features: This defines the basic and advances features available in the package so that they don’t have to be custom programmed. Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/) which has around 50000 shops running on it has a good CMS with strong features.
• Flexibility: So what if you need an additional feature than the basic available feature, then you have the plugins or extensions which are developed by other programmers and available for free download. And if you still can’t find the feature you need then you can custom program it with the help of a programmer and that’s where a web development company comes in to your rescue.

Design or visual simplicity

Creating a user friendly design is a big factor in creating your e-commerce site especially if you are competing with other e-commerce site and if you are new. Then people tend to go existing competitors which they are familiar with. Using a User experience designer can help you to develop a good user friendly design. This basically means it takes the customer from product listing to payment smoothly!!!

Freedom to custom create templates

With Open source e-commerce packages you can custom create a template / design and integrate it to the e-commerce system. That is one of the flexibility of the Opensource packages, and one important thing to keep in mind is to design the elements in the structure of the e-commerce pattern. Even an entirely different structure is possible to integrate, but then you need an experience developer and designer for that particular package to do the integration.

Use of free templates

Another beauty of this Opensource package is the availability of free or paid templates. You can download free or purchase templates for most of the popular Opensource packages. Sites like Template monster can be of help (http://www.templatemonster.com/)

Flexibility and robustness in managing

And once your e-commerce application is launched, your work starts depending on how simple it is to manage your new e-shop. So choosing a flexible, simple and yet robust software makes a big difference in how much time you need to spend to manage your site.

Two important factors are products and payment. Ease of use in managing products, like adding new products and changing the availability of products should be easy to do. And also adding the images and video of the product are also easy in carts like Prestashop (http://www.prestashop.com/) and Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/). And the payment, managing of the payments and option to use different payment methods are a good advantage for your shop since it will help more payments done without hassles.

Some of the most used open source e-commerce applications are :

• Prestashop http://www.prestashop.com/
• Opencart http://www.opencart.com/
• Magento http://www.magentocommerce.com/
• Cube cart http://www.cubecart.com/

There is a really ‘open’ revolution going on. Not only in software business, there are many other products and projects based on ‘open source’ collaboration. Some say it’s the next logical step in evolution of mankind.

We (Lucius Websystems) are strongly focused on the magnificent Drupal cms: an example of a world leading open source project. We don’t build the core, but we provide services for the free product. So companies have someone to lean on. Things like consulting, training, writing documentation and coding for custom functionalities. So no charge for the product, but the services you provide for it. Currently we are also working on some modules and themes to contribute to the community. And I think a lot of products will evolve like this, were the internet provides the collaboration tools. And Google walks up front, with their free and distributed product models. With products, I also mean computer hardware, cars, food, you name it. Even Microsoft is doing some open source projects nowadays.

On http://www.ohloh.net there are over 433,883 (software only) open source projects listed right now, with over 524,039 people involved.

See also this article about open source hardware & crowdsourcing: “In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits“: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1

“Standing out, not standing in” – Jay Abraham
Why and how Drupal open source

After 1 year of Joomla! cms development, we shifted our full focus towards Drupal cms development about 4 years ago. Want to know what Drupal is all about? Check out http://drupal.org. See also http://drupal.org/features for full list. And “Drupal in 57sec.” : http://www.pingvision.com/videos/1/what-drupal-57-seconds

This is why we choose Drupal:
Well, there are many reasons to go for Drupal, here are some of them:

• Features out of the box:
  • Multi-langual
  • Multi-site
  • Very search engine friendly
  • Taxonomy, extensively categorize your content
  • Extensive user Access Control List / User management
  • Content type and field defining
  • Comment system
  • Version control
  • Download system
  • Logs -and error reporting
  • Search engine
  • RSS & RSS aggregator
• Non-technical:
  • Open source: no licensing fees
  • Open source: no vendor lock-in
  • Large and dedicated community
  • Steady association (association.drupal.org)
  • Future proof: no brick walls. Because of the API core-functionality can be altered nice and clean in a module.
  • Lots of free Modules and Themes (3500+), http://drupal.org/projects
  • Migrating to Drupal is relatively easy
  • Help all over the place:
    • Over 250 000 users op Drupal.org, 300 new users per day.
    • Over 375 000 discussion threads on Drupal.org: forums, mailing lists, groups, etc.
    • 375 000 discussion threads: forums, mailing lists, groups, etc.
    • 30+ IRC Chat channels
  • Drupal distribution: ready to go Drupal installs:
    • An intranet, Open Atrium — http://openatrium.com/
    • News management, Managing News — http://managingnews.com/
    • Mapping solutions, mapbox — http://developmentseed.org/product/mapbox
    • Publishing system, Open publish — http://www.opensourceopenminds.com/openpublish
    • Performance optimized, Pressflow – https://launchpad.net/pressflow
    • See http://drupal.org/project/installation+profiles for more ‘Installation profiles’. All these are build on Drupal, so scalability stays intact.

• Technical:
  • Great API, use Drupal as a framework for high-end websystems or easily and clean extend existing features
  • Hooks system
  • Very scalable
  • Modular built
  • Caching system
  • Content type and field defining
  • Node based system: consistency for content handling
  • Multi-database
  • All designs can be implemented, pixel perfect.

Drupal / open source, 2 most asked Questions I get from companies that are looking around:

1) What about the future, if I choose this product; will it still exist and be supported in the (near) future?

• Drupal has got a very strong, dedicated and well organized community. That doesn’t support commercial sale of modules. In some other communities, the core programmers earn lots of money in selling their own product / service. So they can’t pay much attention anymore for the core project. Which is really a pity.
• Drupal has an official association (association.drupal.org) that makes sure the project and trademark (http://www.drupal.com/trademark) will not be mis-used. They also organize DrupalCons. Next up is San Francisco (http://drupalcon.org)
• There are more and more companies and freelancers that support Drupal.

2) Is open source safe?

• Yes, it is. But tomorrow that can change. With a strong community, a patch for high security vulnerability will be produced and distributed very fast. So, if you programmed and deployed your websystem the right way, patching and keeping it safe is relatively easy.

Who uses Drupal
Some examples of Drupal based websites. For most prestige’s cases, check out: http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites

• http://www.whitehouse.gov
• http://www.ahold.com
• http://data.gov.uk/
• http://www.woodwing.com/
• http://www.virginradio999.com/
• http://robbiewilliams.com
• http://www.nhl.com/
• http://www.gouvernement.fr/
• http://it.usaspending.gov/
• http://oxfam.org/

“The greatest amount of wasted time is the time not getting started” — Dawson Trotman

Getting started: Drupal installation and configuration
With Drupal it’s possible to build a professional website, without technical knowlegde. With help of modules and themes you can build your site. Following links might help you with that:

• Off course: http://www.drupal.org
• Getting started http://drupal.org/getting-started/6
• Drupal handbooks http://drupal.org/handbooks
• Download module: http://drupal.org/project
• Search modules, rated and popular: www.drupalmodules.com
• And see “Drupal training”

Geting started: Drupal development
To develop a professional, scalable and future proof Drupal system, following links might come in handy:

• Drupal module development, http://drupal.org/node/231276
• Drupal security & code standards, http://drupal.org/writing-secure-code & http://drupal.org/coding-standards
• Drupal hooking system, http://api.drupal.org/api/group/hooks/6
• Drupal forms API, http://drupal.org/node/37775
• Drupal API, http://api.drupal.org/
• Drupal theming, http://drupal.org/theme-guide/6 & http://drupal.org/node/165706
• Drupal overriding system (theming), http://drupal.org/node/190815
• Populair modules, http://drupal.org/project
• The Drupal community, http://drupal.org/forum
• Drupal best practices, http://drupal.org/node/287350
• Drupal core modules: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules
• Drupal programming vision: http://api.drupal.org/api/file/developer/topics/oop.html/6

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.  Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”—Author unknown
Drupal training

• Getting started, training, documentation, help and more: http://drupal.org/support
• Books: http://drupal.org/books
• Lots of Drupal training at www.lullabot.com
• Drupal training at Lynda: http://www.lynda.com/home/ViewCourses.aspx?lpk0=413
• And some sites that provide tutorials:
• http://vimeo.com/developmentseed
• http://www.learnbythedrop.com/
• http://www.gotdrupal.com/
• http://www.drupaldojo.com/
• http://www.masteringdrupal.com/
• http://mogdesign.eu/blog/ultimate-drupal-tutorial-collection/
• http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?q=drupal
• http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=drupal&search_type=&aq=f
  

“One faces the future with one’s past.” – Pearl S. Buck

Drupal 7: The future
The brand new Drupal is currently in ‘Alpha 1′:

• For end-user enhancements: http://www.drupalcoder.com/files/drupal7.pdf
• For technical enhancements, check out the presentation of Angela Byron (Drupal 7 development): http://bit.ly/17FXly

Books about open source / free business models

If you are interested in open source and the ‘Freemium’ model then you really should consider reading these books. They provide a really nice insight about the whole open source, free, gratis model:

‘Free’ — Chris Anderson:
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/1401322905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258817407&sr=1-1

‘What would Google do’ — Jeff Jarvis:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Would-Google-Do-LP/dp/0061719919/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258817367&sr=8-1

And this one is more marketing focused, but also very interesting and covers some free models:

The Sticking Point Solution — Jay Abraham:
http://www.amazon.com/Sticking-Point-Solution-Business-Stagnation/dp/1593155107/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258817478&sr=1-1

A very interesting documentary that covers some current open source deployment:
GNU / Linux : The Codebreakers: http://blip.tv/file/388239/

Greetings,

Joris Snoek
Lucius Websystems
www.luciuswebsystems.nl (redesign will be live in 2 weeks )
I tried my best, but I knów there is feedback. There luckily always is, so……
…please hit me!

joris@luciuswebsystems.nl

http://www.twitter.com/joris_lucius

http://nl.linkedin.com/in/jorislucius

Most of you will know renowed Open Source applications, like Joomla and WordPress for Content Management. Some applications however, are less familiar, but nothing less useful or powerful. As consultant specialized in planning and forecasting, I use a lot of Open Source software with Operations Research functionality, that can be used for advanced decision making processes. With it, I help organizations make better decisions that lead to higher revenues.

Many projects in my line of business start off with data gathering. Whilst documents and spreadsheets load easily into OpenOffice for basic review, anything more sophisticated would require date to be loaded in a structured database. Data extraction, transformation and loading is therefore required, and one of the applications you can use for that is Pentaho’s Kettle (http://kettle.pentaho.org/). Kettle was once a seperate project, but it became a part of the Business Intelligence project Pentaho.

Once loaded in a structured database, you can use Pentaho’s analysis modules to work your way through the data, but for more powerful statistical analysis you can turn to the R-project (http://www.r-project.org/). R is a powerful platform for statistical computing. It is similar to the commercial S-Plus language which was originally developed at Bell. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are many specialized additional packages available to suit most needs. Another useful software package for econometric analysis is Gretl, the GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library (http://gretl.sourceforge.net/).

After the creative process of data analysis and problem modeling, the optimization of decisions can be done using lineair programming techniques (LP). By solving LP’s one can find optimal solutions for planning situations. There are a number of open sourced LP solvers around. One that I use is GLPK, the GNU Linear Programming Kit (http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/). It is used for solving large-scale linear programming, mixed integer programming (MIP), and other related problems. It is a set of routines written in ANSI C and organized in the form of a callable library. Another good choice for solving linear programming problems is Lpsolve (http://lpsolve.sourceforge.net/).

This brief listing of open source software packackes is not ment to complete, nor does it represent the best choice for every situation. It’s just a small list of very useful tools that I use for my work. You’ll find some more suggestions at http://bit.ly/orlist, partly in Dutch. I hope it will trigger you to get new insights. If you have remarks or suggestions, please send me an e-mail.

Paul Mars

Management Science consultant

Alkmaar, The Netherlands

e-mail paul.mars@managementscience.nl

website www.managementscience.nl

The past months I have intensely observed the ‘open’ movement in various forms. At Bridge we do a lot with open source. We organize open coffee. And we are an open company with open people.  I wonder whether in the future ‘open’ will become a new economic/organizational principle.

Open source software is known to many people in the IT industry. It exists since Linus torvald initiated Linux in 1991. The past few years, open source technology starts becoming popular in domains where previously only closed source software vendors were active (Business Intelligence, CRM, ERP). Today’s wisdom says that open source software brings many advantages to companies, among which: better quality software, no licensing costs, no vendor lock-in and higher speed of developments. One might predict that in the software industry, open source will become the dominant way of developing and distributing software.

With open coffee we experience ‘self-organization’. To ‘launch’ our open coffee Alkmaar initiative, Maikel created a group in linkedin. Then Maikel and I invited our networks to join us at the open coffee meeting. Few weeks later, over 60 people joined that first open coffee meeting. Without any organization, Sybren Arnoldus brought a professional camera. Paul Mars liked that and took the microphone. The next day the video was published on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFT6kFzpEfk) and watched 690 times till today. The second meeting we motivated people to have brainstorms in small groups, separately from the regular meeting. We posted a call for the first brainstorm in our linkedin group and 8 smart people volunteered. The first session was held last Thursday (about the business model of Bridge with very inspiring results).

This week I visited the open source conference in the Amsterdam Arena (http://www.opensourceconference.nl/). A central theme was ‘co-creation’ and I even got a practical course in co-creation. We have implemented SugarCRM (one of the strongest commercial open source initiatives so far) a few months ago. 2 months ago I wondered whether there was some plugin available to see twitter messages inside a contact’s record. Wednesday Maarten Plomp (Brixcrm) made me aware of the fact that a plugin already existed. This plugin was developed for some company somewhere on the planet. I search in google and find an interesting presentation meanwhile (http://www.revver.com/video/1045051/sugarcrm-social-marketing-and-twitter/). Then I visit sugarforge and I can download the twitter plugin for free (http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/twitter4contact/). This is all made possible by the ‘open’ organization principle.

Another stunning open initiative I came across is Innocentive (http://www.innocentive.com/). On this platform, people can post a ‘problem’ or ‘scientific challenge’. Experts from all over the world can login to the site and start working on the solution to that problem. The best solution is then financially rewarded by the poster of the problem. This means a company doesn’t need to hire a large R&D staff anymore to find the solution. They can simply tap into the ‘brightest minds’ on the planet. The solution is achieved at a fraction of the costs it would take when the bright minds would be on the payroll.

With all these open initiatives, the question arises whether the traditional ‘corporation’ will still be needed in the future to create value. If groups of people come together in networks to organize, to co-create, will we still need companies and employees?  This question intrigues me, so I hope that you can share some of your thoughts with me.

Bridge specializes in open source technology. Our focus is mainly on content management using packages as Magento, Joomla, Os Commerce, Typo3 and WordPress. Custom applications are built on the open source Zend Framework. A separate team in Ukraine uses Java technology to build applications.

Open Coffee is an informal gathering where everybody that has a link with ‘online’, can meet, share ideas, knowledge, brainstorm, keep meetings or cooperate. Relaxed networking, taking pleasure from a cup of coffee.
Open Coffee is an open concept that started in London and is organized worldwide on more then 100 locations. The time and content differs per city, but everywhere you meet nice and interesting people.

The underlying meaning is of course to see if you can add value to each other. But the atmosphere also invites to simply chitchat and show interest in your colleague-entrepreneurs. We will organize this meeting every first Tuesday of the month. Open Coffee Alkmaar is organized at ‘het Gulden Vlies’ at the Koorstraat in Alkmaar, the Netherlands. This cosy and homely grand cafe opens the doors for us early so we can start our day in an informal manner. Everybody is invited. So you don’t need to be a ‘kaaskop’ to drink some coffee with other people from Noord-Holland!

Join our initiative on linkedin and drink some coffee while networking. Want to taste the atmosphere???

One of the major denominators of web 2.0 is ‘online collaboration’. As Don Tapscott puts it in his book ‘wikinomics’: ‘The old notion that you have to attract, develop, and retain the best and brightest inside your corporate boundaries is becoming null. With the cost of collaboration falling precipitously, companies can increasingly source ideas, innovations and uniquely qualified minds from a vast global pool of talent’.

While offshoring has been growing in popularity over the past 10 years, the real breakthrough is yet to come. And while Linux started about 15 years ago, the open source movement has only started to gain momentum.

Offshoring

Many people describe offshoring as a ‘hype’ and believe it will start declining. But considering the major benefits a company can achieve from offshore outsourcing, why would it be a hype? People are merely ‘getting used’ to working with people on the other side of the globe. Standard ways of working are being developed and choices are being made between captive offices or working with a vendor. Once it becomes ‘normal’, any job that can be done with the use of a pc screen can be done from any place in the world. With the high western wages and the problems of finding skilled people, offshoring will grow into a normal way of doing business.

Companies are still used to the idea of having to keep the people inside their company. They perceive knowledge as major competitive advantage and believe this can only be sustained by keeping the people on the payroll. With more work moving offshore, this perception will change and people will start realizing that having a lean organization within a strong network will create a much stronger competitive edge then the old notion of ‘do it yourself’.

Open source

The same happens with open source. In the Netherlands, the government has set out a task group ‘NOIV’, to stimulate open source and open standards within the Dutch government. With the amount of open source solutions available on sourceforge and more packages that are launched every day, it seems an unstoppable development. Even ERP solutions, which have been one of the major cash cows of the software industry in the past decades, can be downloaded from the Internet.

There are a few developments needed in the open source world. We need more open source system integrators that specialize in the implementation of open source solutions and deliver support. We need more big organizations that lead the way and share their open source success stories. Once these two develop, open source will become a normal way of ‘doing software’.

Bridge helps companies benefit from both web 2.0 developments. We have a solid experience in several open source solutions and deliver our services from our 4 offices around the world.

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