SharedBook: On Demand

Following Up ...... the Good, the Not So Bad, and the Ugly

Building on Ben's post from last week on the OpenOffice.Org conference in Spain, I thought it appropriate to share some of our recent trials and tribulations with some other Open Source initiatives.

We've been taking a hard look at the Ubuntu 7.10 Beta, and with some very promising results. The Compix GNOME desktop is fantastic, as are the bundled Open Office 2.3 components, the Mozilla Thunderbird mail reader and the Synaptic Package Manager. The only serious deficiency we've come across is the included Evolution mail client, which based on the doc showed plenty of promise. Evolution, an Open Source product developed by Novell, is the Swiss Army of mail readers. It offers connectivity not only to POP3 and IMAP but also MS Exchange via WEBDAV. This last point is important as you not only get e-mail from your Exchange environment, but also synchronized contacts and calendar entries. For those of us with mobile devices that sync up to the Exchange backend, this provides a seamless user experience. That said, I regret to inform you that we have yet to get the Evolution 2.12 Exchange connector working -- its just down right flaky. If anyone knows how to get the Evolution 2.12 client up and running with Exchange, please let me know.

On a positive note, we upgraded our management platform to the Zenoss 2.1 (2.091) Beta release and it performs flawlessly. The drill down integration of device locations with Google Maps on the Zenoss dashboard is a nice touch. The Flash-based network topology maps are well done, as are the overall UI improvements in the Web interface. We've already used the new Zenpacks facility for keeping track of and sharing local Zenoss customizations, specifically for our custom stats collection for our NetApp storage cluster. We're currently doing a thorough walk through on the JMX monitoring facility in 2.1 -- we're looking forward to having some additional visibility into our Java environment. The folks at Zenoss also have some extra added goodies you get when you sign up for paid support. The Zenoss Exchange Zenpack (which gives you in-depth monitoring of your MS Exchange infrastructure) is one of them. I know this is bait to get customers interested in signing up for support, but it rubs me the wrong way. If you're going to need support, then you're going to pay for support ... give the goodies away too guys. In the spirit of Open Source, we're sharing our Zenpacks, customizations and contributing to the overall betterment of the Zenoss Core product. Why hold back anything ?

Open Source is not necessarily the right choice for every situation. But when used wisely after proper evaluation, there are definitely financial rewards and many strategic advantages!

Lessons from OpenOffice.org Conference 2007

Startups today are leveraging open source software to reduce their operating costs and provide more efficient workflows for their employees. No Web company would consider building their flagship application on a server other than Apache, or a platform other than Linux and probably the entire LAMP stack.

But that's not news! Cutting edge users today are implementing FOSS on the desktop and replacing discreet document workflows with wikis and open source enterprise CMS tools like Alfresco.

Last week, I was in Barcelona, Spain, at the annual OpenOffice.org Conference, learning how OOo can be the bridge between document-centric workflows and page-centric, online workflows. In fact, one developer has built an OpenOffice.org Extension tying it to Alfresco with this precise purpose in mind.

Internet-based products are a new paradigm, requiring customers to shift the way they think about interacting with media, purchasing products, and communicating with friends and family. In the same way, the producers of these new products create them in different ways -- less tangible but faster and more flexible -- than those that have been used before.

SharedBook's internal work processes move ever closer to this online ideal. We use TWiki as our intranet collaboration tool to manage internal communications, software specifications, and business processes. We have numerous Mac and desktop Linux users among our design and tech people, and we are heavily  dependent on open source desktop applications including Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Aptana, GIMP, Pidgin and many others. In short, SharedBook relies on open source software to operate. Without the innovative new workflow opportunities FOSS has given us, we couldn't operate as quickly or as nimbly in the highly competitive marketplace in which we compete. It's a fact of life that, in the tech world, you need to leverage open source to keep up with your competitors that already do.

Notes from Abroad

I spent this past week visiting our R&D department in Herzlia, Israel. This represented several firsts for me both personal (first time in the Middle East) and professional (meeting the other half of our small company).

I can report back one of the most positive experiences one could hope for. The hospitality was first rate. Everyone spent considerable effort seeing to it that I was made to feel at home.  I was well fed (perhaps too well) and delivered back to my hotel each night.

But of course, the purpose of the trip was to discuss our Product Development. And discuss we did - from the moment we arrived in the morning to around 8:00 each night.

What struck me was the enormous enthusiasm. Not only did everyone participate in lively discussions on all of the scheduled topics, but everyone wanted more. Several times each day there was a request that I stop by this person's desk or meet that person at the coffee machine to discuss a new idea or view a working prototype proof-of-concept. This, for a Product Manager, is the equivalent of a trip to Willy Wonka's factory!

I can tell you that the R&D department of SharedBook has been very busy working on some exciting new features.  And by year-end many will be available to our ever expanding client list.

Thanks and well done!

We received a nice e-mail from Mark Hinkle, the Zenoss VP of Community, for my post last week on Enterprise System Management. I’m happy to give Mark some public recognition for not only reaching out, but for delivering a great product and continuing to grow an organic movement around it. This is what the Internet is all about: unconstrained delivery, reach and participation. More companies should take advantage of the medium in this way. Well done Mark!

BTW, I’m still on the edge of my seat waiting for Zenoss 2.0. It should be coming soon.

Enterprise Systems Management

Enterprise system management wares from BMC, CA, HP and IBM are expensive, overly complex, difficult to both deploy and maintain, and rarely yield all the promised benefits even after years of use. This message has been reverberating for years now throughout their commercial consumer base.

SharedBook recently reviewed a number of mid-tier commercial and open source products from a range of vendors with some rather unexpected results.

In short, Zenoss, an open source management product from the company of the same name, floated quickly to the top of our list.

Erik Dahl started development of Zenoss in 2002 after becoming frustrated with the bloat-ware from the aforementioned companies.  A seasoned management team and venture funding enabled the formation of Zenoss in 2005 which in turn led to the open source launch in mid-2006.

Zenoss is free to install and use, and there are very active user and development forums for support. If you need more support than what’s available in the forums, Zenoss offers several tiers of paid support that give you direct access to Erik and company.

What we like:

Zenoss is built entirely on open source products: Zope , AJAX, MySQL, RRDtool, and a collection of control services written in Python. A low-end server for a monitoring station with some flavor of Linux is all you need to get started monitoring your heterogeneous infrastructure.

This product covers all the bases:

·         Automated modeling and device discovery

·         Process and service monitoring

·         Event collection from Syslog, WMI, SNMP traps, and XML RPC events

·         Performance monitoring via SNMP, XML RPC collection, custom command execution and host based agents (Nagios agents are supported as well)

·         Lastly there’s a customizable alerting mechanism to advise you in real-time of any problems that might creep up in your environment.

We’ve been running V1.1 on Debian Linux for about 5 weeks now and love it. As I said before this product is in active development, patch release V1.2 just came out last week and V2.0 (with some significant enhancements) just entered alpha.

If you’re in the market for a tool that will turn your shop from reactive to proactive this is certainly one to consider.