Nuxeo Lounge

Nuxeo connects to WCM and workflow solutions through CMIS

I did a presentation in february about CMIS, a ten thousand feet overview on a morning event in Paris. I explained there why this standard is necessary now, what it is about, and why we think at Nuxeo it is a great opportunity for our customers and our partners. Slides can be accessed here.

CMIS overview

The event was about Ez-Publish - Nuxeo integration through a CMIS connector. This integration makes really sense as it allows contributors to easily insert inside an EZ-Publish articles links to documents stored in the collaborative repository (Nuxeo DM). The main interest being that the document doesn't go outside of the repository : no copy, the document IS always up-to-date, and we are sure that only people that has been considered as allowed to read it will access it. A video of the integration can be viewed on our partner's website NXC, who develops and maintains the EZ-CMIS plugin. They are now working on integrating Nuxeo DAM in the same way, to be able to insert pictures stored in Nuxeo DAM in the middle of your article.

Title of my presentation was "CMIS : Overview of a Rapidly Evolving ECM Standard ". Just since that presentation, I could see two new integrations  :

• Drupal (another CMS ), same kind of integration as with EZ, even deeper as it is possible to create content from Drupal into Nuxeo (interest : if you have a to write an article with an attachment, you capitalize the content as the same time as you publish it in your WCM tool).

• Bonita a user-friendly workflow engine. You can watch the video here. Basically, you see how easy it is to configure a workflow with various steps and actions in Nuxeo repository among connection to other sytems during the process designed with Bonita

I also saw the apparition of a lower level php lib for CMIS, and there is the contribution to Apache Chemistry of a python library by Jeff Potts. Let 's stay tune there should be many good suprises in the coming months !

Manage Word document templates

Hello ! 

Today, the screencast is about Word templates management. I recently took part in a great prototype preparation where one of the requirements was to show the ability of updating the content of a word document programatically, to be able to use word templates to instantiate documents. The plugin developed to achieve this goal is committed in an internal sandbox currently, but  I think it is interesting to share what has been done there so far.

Happy holidays !

Drive your document production with Nuxeo

Hello,

It's been a while since I have posted in Lounge. Now posting from Boston office, where I will work until the end of year ! 

Today we will talk about workflows. I am quite frustrated with out-of-the box DM packaging, because since it has to be a generic product, what you can see regarding workflow is not very crunchy, it is more about document validation/review, whereas you can do so many things with the embeded business process management soft (JBPM). Having to work a couple of days on on a nice protype recently, I thought it would be great to share the use-case here. I chose to record video and voice, as there is a lot to say about this use-case. You might have to put the volume up since the sound is quite low, sorry for this. The video is 24 minutes long. The main points that the prototype demonstrates are :

• how UI can be easily customized to serve the use case, without having to do a full re-design, and how also you can make it really simple and straight for some profiles (see translator profile)

• how you can manage task affectation in different ways :

• automatically (ex : automatically affected to the translators for a translation request)
• reading a permission on the document : the task is then affected to users/groups who have, for instance, the validate permission in the case of our video
• based on user input  : when the production user ask for the production of the video, it is automatically affected to the video group. If I had chosen the flash production, it would have gone to another team
• by directly choosing the participants (not in this demo, but in default DM product)

• how you can launch several workflows at the same time using the document worklist

• how you can modelize a complex document structure  : the Learning Object document type here has various content fields, with sub-characterization for each file

• how workflows can handle automatic steps, where content is processed by third party application or moved into various folders

For those not having time to watch this 24 minutes long video, here is a little synopsis :

User Administrator connects and try to create / modify a Learning Object manually to present the structure of LO. Then Technical user drops a file into Nuxeo, this file is the story-board of the training. Then he launches a Learning object production, which is validated by Validation user. Then the document is automatically moved to the Assembly workspace were the "production manager" will subsequently start video production  and translation workflow. Finally the document is published into a public space, in pdf.  

Next on workflow topic would be to show you how you can also modelize multi-steps worklows in Nuxeo, where your document lifecycle is totally controled by a workflow, from end to end. Stay tuned !

Display news on the dashboard

Hello !

Today, no big deal, no big announce, just a little feature I am very often asked when going at the customers'.  People often wants to have a "News publishing" feature. We don't speak about the big corporate top-down communication tool, but just a simple mean to communicate information to the DMS users. Although not OOTB in Nuxeo DM, this feature is though very easy to implement as a plugin. I let the plugin attached to the post if you want to try. Please, note it is just a demo, and you would probably want to adjust some behaviours or extend the features.

What I did is redirecting systematically the user to the dashboard page when he connects. The dashboard page in Nuxeo is very useful : it gives you a personalized view of the repository content : which documents are yours, which workspaces you belong to, what the last published documents are, ... It really makes sense to first see this view before going on the browsing interface.  On this dashboard view, I added a new entry that I called "The projects' news" which displays the last 3 published news. A news is an article with a title, a body and a file that would propose, in my scenario, the "complete version" of the news. But you can consider it as attachement, or whatever you want. This dashboard entry is diferrent from its sibbling on the same page because it really displays the full HTML content of the news, not just the title in a line of a table.

To make those news appear in the welcome page, you have to create a Note document in a workspace, fill the title and the body,optionnaly attach a file and most of all publish it in the  "News" section. I consider here you now how to publish a document in Nuxeo, and also how to create this "News" Section. Anyway it is a matter of 2 or 3 clicks. With this plugin, every user having wirte permission in a workspace and in the "News" section will have the right to publish the document. If he doesn't have the write permission on the "News" section, then a validation worklow is automatically fired.

I really find this simple and efficient, that's why I want to share :-)

Here is the plugin. Note I did it for post 5.2.0 version, which should not be a probleme anyway on 5.2.0 Download Com-sample-newsinwelcomepage-5.2.1-I20090728_0305

And here are the sources, I will commit it in the sample box in Nuxeo soure repository in two weeks.Download Com-sample-newsinwelcomepage-5.2.1-I20090728_0305-sources

Nuxeo Websites available now!

Hi Folks!

What if you could have, for your workspace, a simple way to present your documents to the public?

Nuxeo Websites gives the opportunity to create, in 10 minutes, a website that offers great functionnalites :

- TinyMCE editor to create your webpages from the web view

- Picture insertion and management for your pages

- Possibility to use wiki langage to create your pages and tree

- Possibility to comment each page for users, with moderation options

- Grant anonymous access to the site

- Tag service and tag cloud for each page

- RSS subscriptions for the comments and the contents

You will discover all those great features in this screencast :

Next post, the Nuxeo blog feature!!

See ya

Delphine

RSS feeds in your dashboard

Let's see how you can display RSS feeds inside pages from your  Nuxeo application.

What are RSS feeds ? RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works in a standardized format (more here). You can aggregate many sources of information in one single page, thus allowing you to stay tuned on your favorite topics.

Web sites often offer their visitors to subscribe to their RSS feeds, which means that you, as an RSS feed consumer, receive a list of title and description of their new articles, with a link to directly access the website.

Let's see how you can display RSS feeds from The web site of Nuxeo and from the blog Lounge into your Nuxeo Dashboard.

Plase note that the next sequence requires some special configuration that can be done by the Administrator of your Nuxeo App. I'll explain right after what this configuration is.

Now let's say you want to add feeds from Nuxeo Lounge, Florent Guillaume's and Eric Barroca's blogs into your Dashboard, like this :

• 1 - Connect to Nuxeo, go into your dashboard, then type "ctrl+w". It makes a vertical bar appear on the left, and a yellow "webwidget area" in the middle. Deploy this bar (by clicking on the arrow) and then choose "Feed Reader".

• 2 - Drag 'n drop a "Feed Reader" box in the webwidget area. If you don't have a yellow webwidget area, see instructions below (you will need help of a user with Administrator profile).

• 3 - Now click on the "edit" button and fill the address of your xml feed.
  
  • ex :
    • http://blogs.nuxeo.com/sections/blogs/florent_guillaume/exportrss
    • http://blogs.nuxeo.com/lounge/rss.xml
    • http://blogs.nuxeo.com/ebarroca/rss.xml

• 4 - You can then close the webwigets menu, and see the result :

How to configure a Webwidget area ?

The webwidget area should be inserted as a NXTheme fragment in the theme used by your application. This sounds quite technical, but it only requires few mouse clicks from your application's Administrator:

• 1 - Click on "Theme management" link, then on "dashboard" page. It should display the content of the dashboard page.

• 2 - Right click in the page and select "add fragment", then choose "Webwidget panel"

• 3 - You can see the new fragment (in orange/yellow). You need to configure it to be able to use it : right click on the fragment, click on edit, and set a title, the provider (provider determines what list of widgets users will be proposed and how their own configuration will be saved, here you should use "user provider").

• 4 - Then, you need to give a style to your newly added fragment, otherwise, it will have the appearance of very poor html. To do so, click on "Style" and choose "common style".

• 5 - You can now exit the theme editor. Users can follow the first steps of this post

As you can subscribe to RSS feeds from the Nuxeo repository (folders content and search results),  you can literally configure  your own view of the document repository :

Note also that for security reasons, authorized RSS urls are pre-defined by configuration, to avoid abuses.
Enjoy !

New feature: e-mail archive box

How easy would it be, for content capture, if you could directly inject content into your ECM system using emails? Would be great I think. That is exactly what Nuxeo Email Archive offers: here is how it works...

First, you'll need to create, in Nuxeo, a Mail Archive folder. You can create as many as you want.

That way, you bind an email box form your email system to this folder.

Folder configuration is very simple : Apart from the email address, password and host, default values will fit most of the times.
For the rest, you have specific fields for your custom values.

For example,you can choose betwen IMAP or POP3 protocole.

Once the folder is created, system retrieves every new email sent to this box.

For folder refresh, you have two options: manual trigger, via a button in the folder, that will immediately retrieve the new emails, and automatic fetch, each 10 minutes for example (this number is configurable by administrator)

Of course, mails are still available from the mailbox, they are just copied in Nuxeo. 

When a new mail is detected, an "email archive" document is created in the folder, including fields  “sender”,  “recipient”, “date”, “subject” contents and attached files. 

The text and metadatas of this email are indexed, and thus can be easily retrieved via the search.

To find out more, check out the screencast:

Don't hesitate to comment for feedback!

See you,

Delphine.

New feature: Content Annotation Service

This might be the best new feature offered by the new version of our ECM platform: Nuxeo EP 5.2. Nuxeo annotation service, let you add annotations directly on the content of any office document or picture. Just select some text of an office document (a line, a whole paragraph, a table cell), or any portion of a picture, type in a comment, and validate: your annotation is shared with everybody. Of course the document is not modified whatsoever, annotations are stored separately and displayed as a layer. All of this directly in your browser. It just rocks! :-)

Check out this screencast to see it live:

Impressive, isn't it? ;-) Now, here is some details and background about what it does and what if can do...

Documents
I have uploaded a MSOffice document in Nuxeo, and I intend to read it, study it and annotate. Nothing is simpler : I just go to my document, clic on the preview tab, read it, and highlight the sentence I want to explain : a pop up automatically opens, I enter the remark here, and validate. A new annotation is created.
On the left panel, you have a foldable column displaying the listing of the annotations, with author, date, and an icon. This icon allows to focus on the annotations selected (for a text annotation, the page concerned becomes current page, for images, the frame changes color so that you can see it. 

Images
In the screencast, you'll see live how easy it is to add an image annotation, by defining a frame on the interesting portion, and entering the text in the pop up.
Plus, you'll use the tiling service, that allows you to display a very big image on your web browser without having to scroll. In the screencast, my picture is 4500*3000. What you see is a rendition adapted to the browser! 

Of course you don't loose the good definition of this picture : When you zoom in, the browser displays the needed tiles of the picture, and the thumbnail on the bottom right shows your position in the whole picture.
That way you'll be able to annotate very precisely a detail of a picture, and when you set zoom to original, you can see all your annotations.

For any annotation type, on mouse over, a tool tip shows the text of the annotation, the author and date.
You can even create several image annotations on the same image portion, image overlapping is supported.

Last, if you just need to read the document, and you don't want to be distracted by all the highlighted text or images, you can hide the annotations : the left panel will still display the listing, but the annotations will be hidden from the document.

Disclaimer: This service supports Firefox 2+ already and very soon Internet Explorer 6+ (still need some tricks for IE :-)

Hope you'll like it. Don't hesitate to give us some feedback about this great new service. I can't wait to demo the next step: time-based video annotations (point in time and and time range annotations)!

Be back soon,

Delphine.