Then we added a few CGI apps like a serial generator for Sound Studio Pro and some other legacy products. Then pictures from the company parties, outings, - when an employee passed a driving test we’d go out for a company curry - stuff like that.

Going to other small/medium companies you’d see similar intranet systems. Then for larger institutions like Trinity Laban, you see things like a huge Sharepoint system to deal with. Students and Staff still communicate via email. Things like sharing photos from parties and even of performances are limited to the realms of Facebook and email.

Where/how Social Networking can fit

By no means the only way. Social Networking can solve many more problems than described here. Here are some things social networking can help.

Enhanced communication

Sure, if you want to get in touch with someone, the phone seems the quickest way, email for detailed instructions etc. But for a log of opinions and sharing information in the work place, to me social networking can really help here. (I seem to remember tons of talks about flattening organisational structures which social networking can help with from classes gone by)

Common places

It helps because there’s a simple place where I can go back and find a nugget of information. Ever tried to find that elusive email that you accidentally deleted? Good social networking products also provide a level of hierarchy to the information, just like intranet apps.

Ease of use

Always a tricky one. Ease of use is entirely a subjective experience.

I like to take a general view on this, the whole web 2 world is finding it’s conventions, gradually people become used to those conventions from the web 1 days: forums, blogs, photo galleries and albums, to the web 2 terms, walls, pokes, waves etc. and not forgetting messaging, events, audio and video. Most Joe knows how to use IM programs like MSN and Skype too - in the same way these apps use similar conventions, so do the good social networking sites.

Good social networking sites make these conventional ideas familiar to their users (should they choose to use them). And users who are familiar with these web things/widgets/paradigms should find that they are interchangeable between products.

It is for that rambling reason that I think social networking would make intranets easier to use because before, users had to know publishing tools and maybe a little HTML, now, all they need to know is how to use a social network, if they’ve learned one, those skills are pretty much interchangeable.

Challenges

For those companies wanting to brave developing a social networking product for intranets, I think there are a few things to bare in mind.

Choose battles wisely

Unless you’re working on some monolithic Master Uber System. Don’t assume your product will manage every aspect of a company’s intranet.

When I went around Documation UK expo last year (a very dull experience, believe me). I was astounded by how many companies were trying to be all things to all people. This lead to terrible interfaces, ugly complex systems which would make anyone who just wants to enter a contact into an address book just scream. Having to type loads of pointless metadata into documents just to make it searchable and look nice in a query isn’t anyone’s idea of fun.

Do what you’re good at and do it well. And integrate….

Integration

I think this is going to be a key deciding factor for most businesses. Because we’re not trying to be everything to everyone, the challenge isn’t providing every feature under the blue moon but providing modular integration with those technologies that are widespread. (And those which are awesome)

No business likes to spend money and time integrating their existing corporate infrastructure with any product, so we should focus on doing a lot of this ourselves. I can think of some right now which are probably very obvious from a web 2/social networking app’s perspective:

Active Directory - remote and local sync of passwords/details etc. And if someone could come out with an OpenID <> Active Directory provider sync service too, please contact me, I’d love to use it. I guess it could be fairly easy to do, maybe hook IIS with Windows authentication to an open id page, must research this.

XYZ Instant Messenger - particularly if the company’s got a distributed workforce, good im integration, using technologies like Jabber is useful.

Calendar integration

Other office productivity tool integration.

Other web 2 integration - this part needs particular attention. After all, we’re trying to bring the benefits of current/next gen web technologies to intranets inside the firewall.

Search integration - I’m not talking here about making a search engine, but instead, about making a product indexable by internal spiders.

Benefits

As described in where/how social networking can fit, plus, folks tend to be happier if there’s a place they can communicate about issues, be they social or professional or both. Intranet based social networking keeps this communication private, away from others but at the same time, opens up management and levels the playing field with employees.

Information is valuable, no matter where it’s stored. This blog post aside, think about the potential information you can find out from colleagues about an idea or product suggestion from a simple wall comment or photo.

misc

It’s been a ramble, but there’s a point in this post somewhere. These are initial thoughts, though I hope you’ll agree with most of them, naturally.

Here’s screenshots taken from the emulator (not a DTV):

Discreet/’Nofitication’ Mode with a mesage popping up saying your new notification is called ‘Welcome’:

And here’s some code in MHEG+. This particular code gets the contents of the notification/’Article’ and displays the body, which could theoretically even be an email message or even a message from your favourite social networking app:

{:Scene "/article.mhg"
:Items (
{:Link 1
:EventSource 0
:EventType IsRunning
:LinkEffect
(
// app#txtRed.run()
// app#txtYellow.run()
app#txtGreen.run()
app#txtGreen.SetData('Inbox')
app#txtBlue.run()
app#txtBlue.SetData('Notify Me')
// load a text file into a text object...
waitOnContent.activate()
app#castToContent.call ( app#rpBool
:IndirectRef app#articleURL
:IndirectRef app#webRef
)
app#rc_txtLoaderObject.SetData( :NewRefContent
(
:IndirectRef app#webRef
)
)
)
}
{:Link waitOnContent
:InitiallyActive false
:EventSource app#rc_txtLoaderObject
:EventType ContentAvailable
:LinkEffect (
:Deactivate (waitOnContent)
app#rc_lnkInitSearch.activate()
readData.activate()
)
}
{:Link readData
:InitiallyActive false
:EventSource readData
:EventType isRunning
:LinkEffect (
readData.deactivate()
app#rc_strTag.setVariable('h')
app#rc_lnkLookUpTag.activate()
txtHeader.setData(:IndirectRef app#rc_strValue)
app#rc_strTag.setVariable('content')
app#rc_lnkLookUpTag.activate()
txtContent.setData(:IndirectRef app#rc_strValue)
app#rc_strTag.setVariable('graphic')
app#rc_lnkLookUpTag.activate()
app#castToContent.call ( app#rpBool
:IndirectRef app#rc_strValue
:indirectRef articleGraphic
)
imgGraphic.setData(:NewRefContent (:IndirectRef articleGraphic))
//imgGraphic.scaleBitmap( 200 200 )
)
}
{:Text txtHeader
:CHook 10
:OrigContent "Header"
:OrigBoxSize 500 50
:OrigPosition 58 68
}
{:Text txtContent
:CHook 10
:OrigContent "Lots and lots of content."
:OrigBoxSize 500 390
:OrigPosition 58 130
:TextWrapping true
}
{:ContentRefVar articleGraphic
:OrigValue :ContentRef ''
}
{:Link lnkKeyBlue
:EventSource 0
:EventType UserInput
:EventData KeyBlue
:LinkEffect
(
:TransitionTo ("/b.mhg")
)
}
{:Link lnkKeyText
:EventSource 0
:EventType UserInput
:EventData KeyText
:LinkEffect
(
:Quit ()
)
}
{:Bitmap imgGraphic //must be PNG
:CHook pngCHook
:OrigContent :ContentRef ('')
:OrigBoxSize 200 200
:OrigPosition 50 260
}

)
:InputEventReg 4
:SceneCS 720 576
}

I’ll explain a bit more about it when I have time and when I can be bothered. But bringing the internet to the TV is just as much of a noble as bringing TV to the internet.

On this site, you may hear us mentioning a product called flow. This product is our core platform, which powers website we develop on.

The code behind flow could be described as an MVC-like structure but some things we do are different.

Before I go further into this. There are 2 quite different stable versions of this platform: version 1 runs on Westminster Abbey’s website and version 2 which runs on Wireworks and Material Heaven. Version 3 is the new one which we like to talk about quite a bit. Though we’ll try and backport worthy features to our other customers, copyright law providing.

Modular file storage - dull stuff at the mo

Flow is a completely modular system - even the document management systems at the back-end can be swapped around and altered.

Flow 1

For example, Westminster Abbey uses a highly flexible XML format system for content. This system uses 4 XML formats:

1. Metadata

Our flow-specific meta format. This is the heart of any file stored on flow. It contains information for building indexes, labels, authors, start/expiry dates, version numbers, title. With the exception of the title, no actual content is stored in these files.

2. CXML - Concise XML

CXML is our article workhorse, it essentially borrows most of XHMTL, like p, b, i (please see further posts about why we don’t use strong and em). But has some other useful characteristics. For example if you include an image article (e.g. <article source=”654321″/>) that related article can be imported directly in. Should you want to be more specific about what you’re including, like a reference to an article, you can put this in the appendix tag. (e.g. <appendix><article source=”654321″/><article source=”543210″/></appendix>)

Then depending of these are images or other CXML files, your viewers can use the information in different ways. This article includes both -note how if it’s text we display the title in a ‘See also’ part, but if it’s an image we display them with an ‘image view’ picker viewer (what a mouthful).

I’ll talk further about CXML another time since we’re working on more in depth documentation with examples of how to develop decent viewers with the format.

3. SXML - Services XML
4. OTML - Opening Times XML

Both SXML and OTML are Abbey specific formats, one controls the semantics of service data, like <piece><composer/><title/></piece> and the other: opening times, like <opening-times><date/><item><location/><open/><close/><notes/></opening-times>.

At the time of writing the Abbey site is storing about 5700 files and the number goes up every day as information is added.

Flow 2

Material Heaven’s and Wireworks’ sites work very differently. We didn’t need to think about large stores of content with these sites, since they are much smaller (though the system behind them is just as flexible).

I overlooked the whole Fuse and SSHFS situation. So now we can to connect to the server in a decent way (not using some dumb SFTP program) try:

Mac OSX. Go to This Google code site, download and install all 3 programs there. Then you can either use their gui to connect to an SSH server or this command:

/Applications/sshfs.app/Contents/Resources/sshfs-static gobisoft@snow.gobisoft.net:/virtual/samba ~/tmp -ovolname=gobisoft

Feel free to modify this are you see fit. If you’re on OSX Tiger / above and you’ve installed MacFuse, feel free to make an Automator script which you can run on startup.

The Linux commands should be similar. Try looking here.

On windows you’ll need to download and install and eventually pay for a program called SFTP Drive. Which does the same thing.

The reason why we use SFTP drive on Windows is because it’s easier and faster than using the Windows networking options I’ve discussed in previous posts.

Business:
We should think about developing free product that provides the same integration to Windows as SFTP Drive. For this we should be looking at creating either a Windows NT IFS driver, or possibly doing some trickery with an SFTP program and the old subst command from the DOS days that’s still in Windows. The other alternative would be working out how network filesystems a la UNC Network shares work in Windows, just like the people the folks did on SFTP drive.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms977158.aspx

Now this solution is great for a corporate shared system without the hassle of setting up a VPN that runs at decent speeds over ADSL, but the Virtual Machine SMB way of doing things can also lead to a product which could enable you to run other Windows domain services (like Domain logon over the net) without using a traditional VPN.

At gobisoft, we’re constantly on the road and several of our employees work away from the office, so keeping a semi-centralised (the ’semi’ bit I’ll talk about in another post) location for our data is important.

We started by having folders on our own desktops and a ‘project’ directory on one of our webservers for common documents which we would access over SFTP. But this means we needed to use SCP/SFTP clients like WinSCP and Transmit.

Doing this became a pain in the neck because when you’re in Excel or Quickbooks and you’ve created a document, you have to save it to your computer, copy it to the server, then open it on the server to continue editing. Using simple Windows / SMB networking means that your first save can be onto the server.

So we went about researching how to use Windows networking over the internet. And we started with Virtual Private Networking (VPN) and a freeware product called ‘Hamachi‘. But we didn’t like the way it made you use the 5.x.x.x ip address range on our network, and we didn’t like the speed performance. It’s a great product but we didn’t want to run SMB over TCP/IP over PPTP over TCP/IP. With running over SSH, you’re cutting out a step, SMB over SSH over TCP/IP, thus it ‘felt’ faster (try it your self and see what you think).

Once we rules VPN out, we looked at SSH. We had done SSH tunneling before but never at the windows networking level, mostly just tunneling HTTP.

Our findings on how you can connect to a Samba server over SSH are applicable to Mac OSX:
Connecting to the gobisoft File Server (Mac)

and Windows XP:
Connecting to the gobisoft File Server (Windows XP SP2)

We’re pretty sure that with a bit of tinkering you could do the same in Windows 2000 and Linux.

Far from perfect

If you read the documents, you’ll immediately notice the difficiency in both articles and that is that you need to turn off Windows File Sharing on both your Windows XP box and your Mac. For us at the moment, this isn’t too much of a problem since we use our own personal computers which weren’t bought by our company but in the future, when we expand, this will be a issue since we’ll want to access Windows Shares on all the computers that are connected to the LAN as well as our WAN server.

Enter Flow-sync

We’re currently working on a solution using virtual machine based technology which enables employees to connect to each other over their LAN and to our server at the same time.

If you’re away from the internet or you’re over a really slow DSL connection, programs like Word and Excel freeze when they’re saving, affecting your computer stability, so our second benefit of using virtual machine technology is that your computer can save to the virtual machine, which runs Flow-sync (our in-development product). Flow-sync will then update the saved changes to the server when it’d needed. For all files including Photoshop files, Flow-sync will only transfer what’s changed, making saves a lot quicker.

The next part of Flow-sync

Also important is that the solution needs to take account of people editing the same file at the same time. We achieve this through simple file locking techniques, however there is an option for certain users to unlock the file, and do a differential comparison between files to see what’s really changed.

The final part of Flow-sync

Flow-sync is part of our wider distributed working strategy, and only a small part of Flow, our document management system. Flow-sync introduces the ability to synchronise files across your (and our) Flow servers which gives us our backup redundancy. Naturally Flow (already does) and Flow-sync will export to tar archives and compressed file dumps so you can burn your backups to DVD.

Installing on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Server AMD 64-Bit edition.
aptitude install ia32-libs xinetd


Install your Linux kernel headers, in our case just to be safe it’s:

aptitude install linux-headers-2.6.20-15-server linux-headers-2.6.20-15-generic

Untar the vmware server tarball:
tar -zxvf vmware-server-blah.tar.gz

First we have to edit some C code to stop a 64-bit quirk.
go into the vmware-server-distrib directory, then:

cd lib/modules/source
cp vmmon.tar vmmon.tar.old
tar -xvf vmmon.tar
cd vmmon-only
vim include/compat_kernel.h

REM out this line like so:

/* static inline _syscall1(int, compat_exit, int, exit_code); */


touch /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.key
touch /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.crt
chmod +s /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx


This isn’t a perfect solution because it means you’re going to have to remove File and Printer sharing for your PC. If you want a solution where you don’t need to do this, do your own research.

For this, you’ll need your Windows XP CD and PuTTY.

First up, make sure your computer is a member of the GOBISOFT workgroup by going to Control Panel-> System-> Computer Name and clicking ‘Change’.
After you illustrious reboot the fun begins, goto Control Panel and choose ‘Add Hardware’, choose ‘Yes, I have already connected the hardware’ and click ‘Next’.

Then choose ‘Add a new hardware device’ (usually at the bottom of the list) and click ‘Next’.

Choose ‘Install the hardware that I manually select from the list (Advanced)’ and ‘Next’.

Then choose ‘Network adapters’, and click ‘Next’.

Select ‘Microsoft’ from the manufacturers list, followed by ‘Microsoft Loopback Adapter’ from the Network Adapters list. Click ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’.

Now goto your ‘Network Connections’ folder (not my network places), right click on the Microsoft Loopback Adapter (usually Local Area Connection 2 or 3) and go to ‘Properties’.

First, you’ve got to select ‘File and Printer sharing’ and Uninstall it.

After you’ve done that, select TCP/IP and click ‘Properties’.

Set an IP address of: 10.0.0.1 and a Subnet mask of: 255.255.255.0
Set your Preferred DNS server as: 62.149.34.10

Now click ‘Advanced…’.

Uncheck ‘Automatic metric’ and set the Interface metric to: 9999

Now go to the WINS tab. Make sure ‘Enable LMHOSTS lookup’ is ticked but choose ‘Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP’.

Click OK, OK and OK.
For safety reboot your box.

Now goto PuTTY.

For Host Name, type: gsft.net and type ‘tunnel’ for in the ‘Saved Sessions’ field. Now click ‘Save’. Do not click Open

On the LH ‘Category’ part of PuTTY, click ‘+’ on Connection and ‘+’ on SSH and click ‘Tunnels’.

Tick the ‘Local ports accept connections from other hosts’ checkbox.

In ‘Source port’ type: 10.0.0.1:139
Set your ‘Destination’ to: 127.0.0.1:139
Now click ‘Add‘.

Go back to the ‘Session’ category in PuTTY and click ‘Save‘.

Now click ‘Open‘ and type your gobisoft username and password.

In an explorer windows, type: \\10.0.0.1 if you see the ‘gobisoft’ folder and there’s stuff in there, then you’re all set.

Remember to leave the PuTTY window open otherwise you will lose the connection.

If you’re a Mac user, you must go to System Preferences -> Sharing. In the Services tab, make sure that Windows Sharing is switched off.

Then use can use the following connection on the Terminal:

sudo ssh -L 139:gobisoft.org:139 username@gobisoft.org

You will first be prompted for you Mac admin’s password, then your gobisoft password (on snow).

Then in the Finder, type Command-K (or click Go -> Connect to server) and then type smb://localhost

You’ll then be prompted to choose the ‘gobisoft’ share. Click Ok.

Then type your gobisoft username and password. Make sure you choose the gobisoft workgroup too.