JumpBox Official Blog

Introducing the JumpBox for Tracks (not to be confused with the JumpBox for Trac). This elegant application gives you the ability to implement the popular “Getting Things Done” methodology in a clean, accessible manner with ubiquitous access to your data. It’s part of our free collection of JumpBoxes and has all the juicy Web 2.0 goodness you could ask for:

In this brief five-minute screencast we’ll run through the Tracks application and get an overview of its capabilities and features. Visit their web site to learn more and take it for a spin with your own private trial instance by clicking the orange button below.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

Introducing the JumpBox for MindTouch Deki, an enterprise collaboration platform that makes it possible to bring together data from disparate sources and present it in a common space to facilitate better collaboration. The video below is a rapid introduction to Deki, a discussion of the capabilities that distinguish it from traditional wikis and a brief example of how to use it to embed live data from an external system. For a more in-depth understanding of Deki and what makes it unique, read our interview with their senior sales engineer and see a video demonstration from their CEO.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

We recently had the chance to catch up with MindTouch sales engineer, Mike Diliberto. Below is our interview with him on what makes Deki important as a collaboration tool.

There are many wikis on the market today, but there are far fewer true collaboration environments. Wiki is a concept much like a door; a wiki interface is a portal through which any user of a site can enter or extract information. What matters much more than the door itself is what is on the other side. Many wikis today are little more than standard web pages with a wiki interface, which is fine if you want to lock your content away in static web pages. MindTouch, on the other hand is an environment built for data interaction and collaboration. Our pages have a wiki interface, but that is far from the only way for users to interact with pages and data in the MindTouch environment. Users can add and digest content in many ways; a user can easily add content via the wiki interface and another user can query that very same data through our API.

So what do you mean when you say “Deki is the ‘connective tissue’ of the Enterprise?”

When we speak of the enterprise and specifically, the data systems of the enterprise, we understand that almost all enterprise data systems are really a collection of distributed, heterogeneous subsystems, and each of those systems has it’s own methods for accessing the data contained within. It is not uncommon for a medium to large enterprise to use SalesForce for CRM, Sage for accounting, PeopleSoft for internal HR management, Microsoft Active directory for computer user management, and so on. What prevents most businesses today from maximizing their efficiency is the inability to easily analyze all of this data together. MindTouch has created a product that acts as the “glue” to connect all of this disparate data together. Using MindTouch data extensions, users can easily query data from all of these systems and build true business intelligence by analyzing all of this data together in one environment. Furthermore, once all of these data points and queries are in the MindTouch environment, they are not stuck there; users can access any of these data points, variables, queries, and dekiscript functions through our RESTful API.

What are the implications for users of the underlying RESTful architecture in the product? Why did you go with this design?

While it may not have implications for casual users, the power of our RESTful architecture quickly becomes apparent when performing any task that requires a separation of the business logic from the user interface. By creating a completely RESTful architecture, the short answer is that anything that can be accomplished within the MindTouch user interface, from simply viewing data, all the way up to building an new page dynamically from a template and posted data, can be accomplished through the API. Another very powerful benefit of this architecture is that users can completely change the user interface without putting any data at risk; since the user interface is just another method to interact with the MindTouch API, breaking the user interface does not break MindTouch. Lastly, our underlying architecture allows MindTouch to scale to any size necessary, splitting components and extensions across multiple servers as needed to support the diverse needs of enterprise customers.

Which capabilities are available in the commercial version that aren’t in the open source version?

The commercial version builds on our open core by adding many valuable enterprise extensions to the MindTouch environment. Extensions to connect to Microsoft Access data bases, Microsoft SQL server, and many other enterprise data sources are included, along with our desktop suite, a set of tools that adds the ability to publish direct from Word and Outlook and a MindTouch explorer, which allows you to manage all of the pages and files in your Mindtouch environment as if it was just another network drive.

Anything else we should know about Deki?

MindTouch is not a wiki with some extra enterprise features bolted on top; MindTouch is the single most powerful data interchange and analysis tool available on the market today, that happens to have a wiki interface as one of it’s many data access methods.

MindTouch has many millions of ecstatic users, hundreds of thousands of installations, and a long list of marquee customers, such as: Mozilla, Microsoft, Intel, Intuit, The Washington Post, US Army, EMC, Harvard, Timberland, The United Nations… most of which are reporting double digit percentage increases in productivity and orders of magnitude of return on investment from using the MindTouch platform. We allow you to connect and collaborate smarter. Period.

What are the best resources for someone who wants to learn more?

The Mindtouch developer community is thousands of members strong, and many members play vibrant, active role in our forums and discussions. Chances are, if you can think of a data interchange problem, someone is probably discussing it on the forums; it is these community requests and discussions that play a significant role in defining the MindTouch product roadmap.
Additionally, we have many video tutorials demonstrating the features of MindTouch and every other Tuesday we host free, live training sessions in a webcast format. They can be found at www.mindtouch.com/Training

Thanks for your time Mike.

By popular request we just launched an updated version of the JumpBox for GLPI Asset Tracking that bundles the OCS add-on to facilitate automated inventory management. If you’re using it already to track your inventory, you’ll want to upgrade to this newest version (v. 1.1.2) and follow the steps below to take advantage of this capability:

1. Launch the latest version of the JumpBox for GLPI that bundles OCS. Make a note of its IP address. You access the OCS application on your GLPI instance by appending “/ocsreports” to the base url. So mine in this case looks like the following:
   
2. Go to the OCS web site and download & extract the appropriate agent for the machine you want to track. This tutorial uses the Windows agent to track a Win XP machine.
   
3. Run the OcsAgentSetup file to go through the wizard and install the agent on your Windows instance. You’ll need to specify the IP address of your running JumpBox for GLPI.
   
4. Verify that the OCS service is running on your Windows instance.
   
   It will update periodically at a default interval of roughly 10 hours. To invoke it manually double-click the OCSInventory Application that it installed in the OCS Program Files directory. There are other command line arguments that can be sent as well for special behavior.
5. If it doesn’t run after invoking it manually, you may have this issue and need to manually change the MISCELLANEOUS line in the service.ini file. So after editing mine looks like this:
   
   and successfully transmitted inventory info to the OCS application once I restarted the service:
6. And now I’m able to check in OCS and verify that info about my WinXP machine is in fact there.
   
   And drilling down gives the ability to get detailed stats about the hardware and software of that machine (click on the easter-colored icons to bring up info about the hard drive, memory, cpu, software, network cards, peripherals, etc):
   
7. And now the final steps are to go back into GLPI under Tools > OCSNG
   
   and tell it to import new computers.
   
   You’ll get a full progress bar if it worked.
   
   And your machine will now appear under Inventory > Computers:
   
8. Lastly, go under “Settings > OCSNG Mode” and verify that it is in sync with the OCS database:
   

There are helpful tutorials for installing the OCS agents across a variety of environments including a batch install across many machines on a Windows network their wiki. Oh, and this works to track virtual machines as well as physical machines. Happy inventory tracking!

Note: To stay truly up to date you can find out about new releases as they happen by following us on Twitter.

	The Application	What’s Changed
	Magento 1.1.5 Magento is an open source eCommerce application that allows merchants to build, create, and manage online storefronts. Magento’s customizable solution features tools for site management, marketing promotions, search engine optimization, and catalog management. Winner of ‘08 awards from Infoworld magazine and SourceForge.net, Magento’s open source eCommerce platform is the most flexible ecommerce solution available today.	-Magento has been updated to 1.2.1.2 -This is a minor update that fixes several small bugs, and adds support for UPS negotiated rates. View release notes
	SugarCRM5 1.1.10 SugarCRM is a market leading customer relationship management (CRM) application. SugarCRM’s open source architecture easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications.	-SugarCRM has been updated to version 5.2.0a. There is a special process to upgrade from earlier versions of the JumpBox for SugarCRM 5: -The JumpBox for SugarCRM 5 now uses the root URL, as opposed to /sugarcrm5. -This release addresses over 150 reported issues across all areas of the application including Internationalization, Email, Studio and Module Builder. View release notes

Useful FAQ’s and tutorials

Here’s a quick index of some of the great information available via our site that will allow you to handle a variety of scenarios:

Lastly, the good folks at Amazon recently wrote a post about us. If you’d like to be able to run JumpBoxes on their EC2 Cloud Computing system consider purchasing a subscription. As always, thanks for your interest in JumpBox and feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

-Team JumpBox

We’ve got a new addition to JumpBox Open today: please welcome the JumpBox for Dimdim Web Conferencing. Similar to services like WebEx, Goto Meeting and Acrobat Connect, this application allows you to conduct virtual meetings online where you can:

• Share your computer screen with up to twenty people
• Collaboratively annotate documents with a team in real-time
• Browse the web as a group with participants in remote locations
• Use audio, video and text chat for maximum presence

Dimdim provides a solid Open Source alternative to the popular online meeting services. And with the JumpBox for Dimdim it’s easy to deploy your own private instance on your network or in the cloud.

Ramp Up Video

To make it even easier to get productive with Dimdim we’ve put out a screencast to introduce you to the basics of using it to host an online meeting. Find a full time-coded table of contents to that video on the post. The other videos include intros to SnapLogic, GLPI and KnowledgeTree for data integration, asset tracking and document management respectively. Let us know if you find these videos useful and which other applications you’d like to see summarized in this way.

Application Updates

It wouldn’t be a Wednesday without some updates! The following apps have new releases available:

	The Application	What’s Changed
	Silverstripe 1.1.4 Silverstripe is a standards-compliant content management system that allows the user to manage a dynamic content site. Silverstripe utilizes MVC architecture and has a desktop feel with its use of AJAX-based controls.	Upgraded to version 2.3.0. Security improvements, compatability with Internet Explorer 7 and Safari, and fixes a number of Javascript errors. View Release Notes
	Movable Type 1.1.7 Movable Type is Six Apart’s flagship blog software product, launched in 2001. Today, this robust social publishing platform powers the websites and blogs of many of the world’s largest media companies, Fortune 100 businesses, small and medium sized businesses, and power bloggers.	Upgraded to version 4.24. This release contains a security fex and an improved password recovery feature. View Release Notes
	Bugzilla 1.1.4 Bugzilla is a web-based bug tracking system that allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product. Bugzilla competes with many commercial bug tracking systems and has many features its expensive counterparts lack.	Upgraded to version 3.2.2 This is a major new release of Bugzilla. Important improvements include a new default skin, a much improve bug editing form, new field types and improved multilingual support. View Release Notes
	Drupal 5.x 1.1.11 Drupal is an open source, web content management (WCM) system. It provides a simple, intuitive interface that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website without programming skills.	Upgraded to version 5.1.6. View Release Notes
	Drupal 6.x 1.1.9 Drupal 6.x is a content management system that allows you to publish, manage and organize a wide variety of website content. Create and manage community web portals, discussion sites, corporate websites, personal sites, intranet sites, even sites for social networking.	Upgraded to version 6.10. View Release Notes
	Redmine 1.1.5 Redmine is a project management and issue tracking system for software developers. Redmine provides many of the features in Trac plus support for multiple projects, role based access control, time tracking functionality, Gantt charts, a calendar view and user self-registration support.	A bug that broke the subversion repositories of restores that contained subprojects has been resolved. The Redmine application did not change.

It’s a great time to be a customer of JumpBox Open. If you’re paying for an online meeting service now, the JumpBox for Dimdim alone could save you enough money to pay for an entire year’s subscription in a single month alone. Check the pricing matrix to find the plan that’s right for you.

As always, thanks for your interest and feel free to contact us.

-Team JumpBox

The JumpBox for Dimdim is the newest addition to our library and gives you the ability to conduct online virtual meetings with your own private instance. Use this JumpBox to:

1. Share your computer screen with up to twenty remote participants
2. Work on a digital whiteboard simultaneously with others
3. Co-browse the web using a shared web browser
4. Annotate Powerpoints and PDF’s in real-time with colleagues and clients
5. Launch the instance only when you need it and save costly monthly membership fees

In this tutorial we’ll run through the basics of using Dimdim to host an effective online meeting. Also included in the video is a bonus scene at the end that shows you how to launch an instance on EC2. This particular app (because you only need it to run intermittently) provides a great use case for when EC2 hosting makes a lot of sense. Simply bring up the instance dynamically as needed and retire it when you’re not using it to conserve on your hosting costs.

Below is the video, a time-coded table of contents and the widget to launch a test instance. Leave a comment below if you have questions about the tutorial or any of the JumpBox components. And for in-depth Dimdim questions check out the comprehensive documentation on their site or search their forums.

*Make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the video to full-screen and watch the screencast in hi-def.

Robin Harris from ZDnet stopped by our office a while back and just posted some thoughts on the experience. He came away with some interesting ideas.