Blog
Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Feb 05, 2010
The demand for migrations to Microsoft SharePoint continues to grow, as the platform rapidly becomes the standard for organizations seeking a centralized knowledge repository and collaborative workspace.
I'm happy to announce that we've integrated SharePoint in MirrorNG (the content integration product for XAOP). We will offer support for Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 in the coming months.
We are also looking at integration with CMIS.
I'm excited about the options SharePoint and CMIS will give us architecturally speaking.
Screenshot of our SharePoint MirrorNG test environment. 
Whether it will be
- migrating between SharePoint sites and Documentum repositories,
- upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010,
- reorganizing your SharePoint content,
- archiving from SharePoint sites to EMC Documentum repositories,
- synchronization of content, metadata and security between Documentum and SharePoint.
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Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Jan 28, 2010
As more and more of our clients start using SharePoint, we have been investigating how to connect to a SharePoint server using Ruby. SharePoint has a full-fledged set of SOAP services that we can address from Ruby. The SOAP client library bundled with Ruby, called soap4r (also available separately), didn't work for us on SharePoint.
First off, SharePoint usually requires NTLM authentication and soap4r does not support it. Also, soap4r has problems with some of the WSDL's out there in the wild. The errors it raises when you try to load such WSDL's can be incomprehensible to someone not familiar with the details of WSDL. As soap4r is quite complex, we weren't particularly looking forward to patching it to support NTLM and the troubling WSDL's either.
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Jan 27, 2010
Today we tested the custom XML Word patch from Microsoft.
This patch was issued as a result of the i4i patent judgment.
It seems that our templates with custom XML are not impacted by the patch in Word 2007.
We use content controls to manage XML in the templates.
More info on the impact of the i4I judgment on Word can be found here.
Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Dec 04, 2009
I just watched this Arrrrcamp video about the Timekeeper gem by Koen Van Der Auwera.
Koen explains why he created a command line tool to manage time-sheets.
This triggered me to write this blog post.
Why ?
Filling in time-sheets is a task that needs to be performed every month in most service oriented organizations to prove work. (sometimes on a weekly basis)
For years, I used to write everything down in my notebook to keep track of things.
Because the XAOP team has grown to 7 people in the last year (who are usually working in small teams of 2-3 developers), it became more and more difficult to manage the billing for the different projects.
It was time to look for a better/transparent solution to keep track of everyone's time.
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Posted by Joeri Samson on Dec 03, 2009
Strake is a tool we developed internally here at XAOP, for certain specific
tasks. Strake basically eases the development cycle in certain
use-cases
In particular we use it when we have a project that
mainly consists of transforming data from one representation to another
(e.g. when we migrate documents from a legacy Documentum system to a
newer Documentum system with a different layout). In that case it is
often necessary to gradually apply changes to the data. To do this in a
repeatable way we write Strake tasks which work very much like database
migrations in that they are ordered.
The useful feature added by
Strake is that it keeps snapshots from the state of the database before
the strake task was run. This makes it possible to restart the process
of running strake tasks from any point in time (if for example a
mistake was discovered).
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Posted by Gitte Vermeiren on Oct 21, 2009
Workflow Foundation (WF) is a great new technology added to the .Net 2.0 Framework. It enables you to construct workflows using pre-build activities. Working with WF is made easy within the Visual Studio environment, where a point and click interface can be used to construct your workflows.
In SharePoint the same workflow mechanism can be utilized to write workflows that target SharePoint sites, webs, lists, … There are also extensions available for your Visual Studio environment that add extra specific project types for SharePoint workflows and extra activity types. A great way to work with SharePoint, using a tried and tested environment … Or so we thought… This post will give an overview of some of the specific things you need to think about when writing workflows for SharePoint.
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Posted by Stijn Pint on Sep 18, 2009
Last month, I made the switch from my Ubuntu laptop to a Macbook Pro.
Thought I’d share my first impressions and give an overview of the applications that I found useful until now.
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Aug 27, 2009
This evening XAOP hosted the Belgian Ruby/Rails User Group(BRUG) meeting.
The first talk was about Typus by Marc Lainez from belighted.
Then Elise Huard presented Tokyo Cabinet.
Alain Ravet explained how we can optimize our ideas.
I think everybody enjoyed the 3 lightning talks, beer and pizza.
We're looking for speakers and topics for our future meetings, so please let the list know, if you can help out.
I talked to some nice folks from Mons, they expressed interest in helping host future meetings at their office or the university.
Posted by Gitte Vermeiren on Jun 18, 2009
Next to development on EMC Documentum, we are now also taking on projects that provide document management solutions on SharePoint Server. SharePoint gives you basically the similar set of functionalities like storing documents together with metadata, and also provides a versioning and workflow management framework.
Off course we would like to reuse our existing efforts done in Ruby on EMC Documentum on other systems as well, so also on SharePoint Server. For this we can not use standard Ruby as we would like. Instead we started looking at IronRuby, the Ruby implementation on the .Net Framework, since all SharePoint development is based on .Net. (Yes, we know, there are also quite a lot of Web services we can utilize, but let's leave those out of the question for now).
To get a view of the possibilities we did an extensive test of IronRuby's possibilities on some SharePoint sites and we can now say these tests were quite successfull. The full story of how we accomplished this and how you yourself can try out some dynamic coding on SharePoint Server, can be found in our labs section.
Posted by Stijn Pint on May 20, 2009
For one of our Rails projects, I needed a simple solution to run some background tasks on demand of the user (various calculations or data imports which can take several minutes to complete).
There are several solutions out there, like Starling, Workling, backgrounDRB ,… but I really wanted something without too much complexity. Another catch: our project is running on a Windows production server… yeah, I know…
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on May 05, 2009
We got some questions about the use of Documentum 6.5 and Ruby with ActiveDCTM.
My article at EMC Developer site explains the use of Ruby on Documentum 5.3.
One of our clients is moving to Documentum 6.5 so we are now testing ActiveDCTM on a CENTOS Linux Oracle environment with Documentum 6.5 sp1.
In Documentum 6 the C/C++ DMCL API has been replaced with the Java‑based DFC API.
These core changes, while extremely significant, are largely transparent to the DFC user.
C/C++ applications (like DCTMRuby and ActiveDCTM) that interact directly with the DMCL continue to work as a copy of DMCL continues to be provided.
New Documentum 6 features are not available through DMCL, however.
Here is a simple example on how to create a document from the IRB customized command line.
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Posted by Gitte Vermeiren on Feb 26, 2009
Using dynamic languages, like Ruby, in conversion with static language frameworks, like .Net, is one of the hot topics in town. No wonder .Net developers are putting a lot of effort in the development of the DLR, the Dynamic Language Runtime, which will run on top of their CLR, the Common Language Runtime. This will give us the capability to enrich the vast framework capabilities of .Net with the dynamic features provided by Ruby.
At XAOP we recently did tests with both the DLR and IronRuby (an Open Source implementation of the Ruby programming language for .NET), to get both Ruby and .Net united in a single application. This gives us tons of new possibilities, since the .Net class library is already so extensive for creating both Windows based and Web based applications (just to name a few).
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Posted by Tim Brys on Feb 06, 2009
If you have ever used god, you know it's a wonderful application to monitor your processes and to keep them going.
The sole inconvenience of god is the way it's controlled while running. You often have to log in to your server and write some commands on the command line to simply restart a task or check the logs. "User friendly" isn't the first thing that comes to mind. We can do better.
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Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Jan 23, 2009
Just like last year, the Belgian Ruby User Group is organizing a Ruby and Rails developer’s room at Fosdem 2009 on Sunday 8 February. Fosdem, or the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting, is a non-commercial event organized by the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community, for this community, and is devoted to bringing developers together and inspire the synergy that binds them. Fosdem has been attended in the past years by around 2000 FOSS enthusiasts and this year they can choose from a whopping 263 talks. And to top it off, Fosdem is absolutely free.
This year we have ten presentations scheduled for our devroom compared to last year’s four, and we are very excited about the program. The rooms are still too small and this year we were asked explicitly not to let the room become overcrowded. This blog post features a photo of last year’s Ruby and Rails devroom, but we still had lots of people turning back because they were simply unable to enter the room. Good news is that we have a room with a capacity of 74 seats compared to 48 last year, but you had better make sure you get a seat in time!
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Posted by Julien France on Dec 23, 2008
Rexcel is a rails plugin made to create custom and stylish excel files from your applications.
It is inspired by Brian P. Hogan's excel plugin that provides a quick an easy way to export your object collections to an excel workbook.
It worked fine but it didn't have enough functionality for my taste. I was using it in a project when I asked myself: “Ok, but what if I want to merge or collapse some excel cells? What if I want to put some text in color, add a border, change the font-size...?”. This excel plugin just exports your data to an excel sheet in a very basic format. I then decided to make a more advanced plugin that will support most of your requirements in terms of formatting.
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Oct 22, 2008
Today we published a quickstart video of Streamtails (our web 2.0 proxy server project).
In 4 minutes, we walk through the major features of Streamtails: the topics include how to annotate a section of a webpage via tails and how to track your conversations with rss feeds.
Wath the video
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Oct 16, 2008
Today, I published my article on the Ruby ActiveDCTM gem on the EMC Developer Network site.
My article was originally the outline of a demo that I presented last week at a client.
During that demo I used a customized web based irb shell (like the hands-on tutorial Try Ruby)
to explain a few Documentum server concepts through Ruby.
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Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Oct 10, 2008
Belgium is known all over the world for its beer, its chocolate and its rain. You gotta love the beer and the chocolate, but the rain just plain sucks. Looks like we are heading for a wet autumn though, and that's why, for one week in November, we of XaoP are fleeing off to Orlando in sunny Florida.
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