Spanish forum about Nuxeo

This post is just to remind you that there is a forum for technical or functional questions about Nuxeo in spanish:
Spanish Forum.

Don't forget to visit it. We'll be there to help you in everything we can to make your experience more succesful with document management tool.

Merry Christmas!

May you never miss a dream to fight on, a project to do, something to learn, a place to go and a document management system ;)


Mery Christmas and Happy 2010!

Digital Signature for Nuxeo

It is often needed in a company managing documents to assign the identity of somebody (or any computer) in a document. It has been traditionally done by signing it with a hand-written signature, but it is impossible to do it when we have the document in a digital format.

To solve this we have the digital signature. This signature can be used as a normal signature: we can identify the author and tell everybody that we have read the document and we're satisfied (or not) with it. Besides this, the digital signature has extra features: it can guarantee the integrity of the document. In other words, we can check that the document has not been modified since it was signed and that it will not be modified in the future (without invalidating the signature).

Because of the rising importance of the digital signature, Yerbabuena has included in Nuxeo the posibility of signing digitally documents in the platform. Furthermore, the user can add a barcode to the document to find it quickly in Nuxeo.



Update (9th Feb 2010) Here you can download this feature packaged with a vanilla instance of Nuxeo 5.3.0. Have fun !

Civilians for one day

Last Thursday we were more civilians than ever. The sun had not risen yet, and the only lights were the traffic from Madrid. We crossed the highway from the train station to the military base of El Goloso.





This base is where the Brigada de Infantería Acorazada "Guadarrama" XII is located. And among military frenetic pace, we were, to help them make their work easier by implementing our document management services.

We had breakfast in the canteen of the base, a pleasant enough place in which, as the title says, we were beginning to feel civilians :-) Through a door you could see how soldiers were getting in shape at about 7:30 am, some jogging, others with a pack on his back to the mountains and receive instruction in the Leopard 2 A4.



When the Commander arrived he gave us a pleasant welcome and showed us the whole base explaining each of the recesses of the organization of the brigade, my eyes have never been more open :-).

Throughout the morning we analyzed the processes and needs were document management can help. Collaborative processes for the development of documents, web publishing processes, semantic web technology, agendas, etc.. Indeed, we find that the Yerbabuena team can contribute much to further modernize this part of our Army.

By the way, for the battle tanks enthusiasts, at El Goloso they have a Museum you shouldn't miss.

This post was originally pubished by Jose Luis de la Rosa at our blog in spanish.

One CMIS interface to rule them all

The Point Of The Content Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard

View more presentations from Laurence Hart.

It's not the first time we talk about CMIS as one of the most interesting features of Nuxeo about interoperability with other ECMs. For you to meet specific use cases where this feature may be of interest as important for an organization, here you leave a very enlightening presentation that Laurence Hart left on her blog some time ago.

I transcribe for use cases to have it even clearer. What follows is a literal translation of use cases that appear on Laurence's blog:

Repository to Repository (R2R): This occurs when content repositories need to talk directly with each other.

• Managing records in other repositories that are stored centrally. This is called Federated Records Management, although it is different from the Land Use Case, to be discussed later.

• Publication of contents of a repository to another. A common scenario is the publication of content from a collaborative systema / ECM directly to a WCM system for publishing on an Intranet / Extranet.

Application to Repository (A2R): This occurs when an application that uses content is attached to a content repository to manage all content-related services.

* Sharepoint as a front-end. If implemented, Sharepoint can become a front-end and any other repository can be used as back-end. In this way problems could be solved Sharepoint scalability without the user being affected.
* Collaborative systems. All Systems Enterprise 2.0, and current collaborative applications could use a robust backend to provide features such as the uniqueness of content and records management. This is the same as the previous example, but widespread.
* Business Software Applications. It could be a process manager (BPM), a manager of customer relations (CRM), or any type of application used by an organization, the content is fast becoming a large part of these systems. It is becoming critical to have a centralized place to manage the content and apply consistent rules.
* Vertical Applications that use Content (CEVASA). As discussed before, CMIS can make life easier for manufacturers of CEVA. Let the experts in each domain to build an application to the relevant industry and allow them to associate with a system to manage content. This frees the manufacturer from CEVA have to worry about the content or keep as many different interfaces. That means more money to invest in R & D in real functionality.
* Productivity applications. Why not link to Word, Excel, Open Office or any other type of application to a repository using CMIS? Seems like a good way to make a portable integration, similar to what was attempted with ODMA (provided by @ billtrippe via twitter on 8/17/09)

Federated Repositories: This occurs when an application needs to talk to many different repositories using a single user interface.

* Federated search. This basically means what you can see in the demo iECM. Someone could do a search in multiple repositories.
* Federation rather than migration. An application can interact with multiple repositories. Rather than migrate all content from an old repository immediately, you might have to interface with the old repository interaactuando until completely migrated or completely outdated. The application can store the new content in the new default repository.

As can be seen, the use cases are spectacular. In most cases we may find some need of the kind described in one or another point in the lifecycle of a document management platform.

Interoperability is made possible. Although much remains to be done. Soon we will give more news about the Java implementation of this specification, Apache Chemistry, as well as other existing implementations.
This post was previously posted by Daniel Téllez in our blog in spanish.

Yerbabuena Special Mention II Socially Responsible Business Award

On the first day of the Second Meeting of the Provincial Forum for the local field, Yerbabuena Software has received special mention as Young Socially Responsible Company "for the commitment expressed and justified in the responsible management of a young and technology-based" as stated by the jury headed by Vice President third of the Diputación, Paloma Alonso, and Vice President of CEM, Javier González de Lara.



In this edition, the Diputación de Málaga, with the cooperation of the Confederation of Employers of Málaga (CEM), has awarded the Second Prize "Socially Responsible Company" for AERTEC Engineering and Development, SLU, which together with our partner Jose Luis de la Rosa, has received the award in the auditorium of the provincial headquarters of the institution by the president of the Provincial Salvador Pendón and executive vice president of the Confederation of Employers of Malaga.

The award "Socially Responsible Company" is the result of work carried out from the Provincial Office for Corporate Social Responsibility, led by the Diputación de Málaga and CEM, which promotes a new corporate culture based on respect for the environment and accountability to the people .

In this regard, a total of 17 companies have chosen this time to receive this award, whose goal is to distinguish the company from the province that has most successfully implemented the values and principles of Corporate Social Responsibility as a comprehensive management assuming responsibility for improving their social, economic and environmental impact of their environ

Yerbabuena Software Report

A few days ago the Young Entrepreneurs Association of Malaga (AJE) made a "report" about our company and we have to say the result is priceless.

I hope you enjoy it as much as us ;)

RETA Company of the Year

Yerbabuena Software, has won the I Premio Empresa RETA del año, (1st RETA company of the Year) given by the Red de Espacios Tecnológicos de Andalucía.

The price was given during the closing ceremony of the IV Congreso RETA, by the University, Technology and Investigation General Secretary of the Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Francisco Triguero and the RETA president, Felipe Romera.




We want to thank RETA for the price and the support over these years.

Yerbabuena Software is focused on document management solutions, using latest technologies and open source software.

SCRUM as a value chain union methodology

In Yerbabuena Software, as in 99% of companies, we have very different business activities within the production or development. We have had some times that these activities have acted too independently. Sometimes, the account managers did not know what difficulties exist in the development of new products or production managers failed to meet the real needs of customers.

Today, these difficulties do not exist or have been greatly alleviated thanks to the agile methodology that we follow in our company, as some already know, is none other than SCRUM.

Why is it so? In this specific case, the most affecting is that of product demos, which are done as said in SCRUM at the end of each iteration, force developers to showcase products with a degree of completion and, as far as possible with a high degree of user focus.

These meetings include de account managers: they ask questions, approach to the guts of the products, know what technical difficulties are encountered in the way. At the end of the demonstration, the developers are listening to the account managers: how solutions fit to the problems of customers, what new problems are on the street or what are the perceived concerns of users.

The demos are becoming more nutritious. Both departments are fully convinced of its usefulness, and look forward to scheduling a new demo, to reach both customers and the community built the new solutions collaboratively with a clear orientation to the final customer.

When is the new demo of semantics? When is the new demo of our mobile client to access the documentation? When is the new character recognition demo from our document manager? Soon, soon ;-) The iterations are very short: between 2 and 4 weeks! Does anybody want to come? ;-D

Original post in our blog in spanish by Daniel Téllez.

Semantics For Document Management (NTI) - Fourth demo implemented

Yerbabuena has published the fourth NTI version (Nuxeo Thinks Itself) of the Semantics For Nuxeo Proyect 2010.

In this fourth sprint have been implemented these new functionalities:

• Possibility to add annotations about localizations through Google Maps API.

• DBPedia and OpenCalais integration as additional semantic annotations engines over the documents.

• Progressive learning in identifying the types of documents.

• Automatic start of actions depending on the type of documents.

• Automatic and preiodic background reasoning work.

First of all, Nuxeo has been integrated with Google Maps API so that locations can be added as annotations directly from the map view.

Furthermore, we have expanded the semantic annotation engine, allowing automatic annotation of documents. Such annotations are made through OpenCalais and DBpedia. Once you create a document, its content is sent by a thread, in background, to the OpenCalais and DBPedia services, returning a series of tags that are added as annotations to the document. Nuxeo is also integrated with the Google API translator, as both DBpedia and OpenCalais offer better services if the text is written in English. Once the thread has finished, it displays a message informing the user and throws an event that is picked up by Nuxeo and added to the history tab.

Learning the types of documents allows Nuxeo can automatically identify and classify all documents, for which it must have been trained previously. This way you can "teach" the semantic service to be able to identify any type of document.

Furthermore, we have developed an extension point that allows automatic startup of actions depending on the type of document. These actions could be a workflow or any other type of action runnable in Nuxeo. Defining and setting up the parameters for this action is done via an XML which is then parsed at deployment time.

Finally, we have implemented an additional thread within the semantic service that handles the task of reasoning automatically, periodically and in background, transparently to the user.

Documadrid 2009 Slides

This wednesday the Documadrid 2009 event was held in the center of Madrid (Spain).
Yerbabuena was honoured to give the first presentation.

The audience was thrilled, many questions and comments. It seems they enjoyed the moment as much as we did, and fully embrace our values and goals.

Here are the slides:

Documadrid 2009

View more documents from Yerbabuena Software.

We focused on Semantic Technology applied to ECM and the fact that acquiring an Open Source Document Management platform is way cheaper and does not lock you in as a customer.

Enjoy!

Document Management NTI demo available

Yerbabuena has published the last Docuement Management NTI version (third iteration demo) in its demo server (user: demo pass: demo) with these new features:

1. New flex interface with a new “list-mode” relationships view.

2. Better Organization and Tax Code detection during the reading of documents (contracts).

3. Organizations and Tax Code detection after editing a document with LiveEdit.

4. Anntations update through an “intelligent” popup window which search queries will only return results for the corresponding domaing/range of the annotated property.

5. Automatically detection of Organization - Tax Code relationship, so that if a new document detects a Tax Code which is already stored in database, will take the corresponding stored Organization name for that Tax Code, ignoring the new Organization name.

6. Tax Code validation when introducing its value in a “has Tax Code” annotation.

7. Translation of all new labels (spanish and english).

8. Improvement of the Semantic Annotation tab interface. The reasoning button dissappears during reasoning work, displaying an informative text (“reasoning...”). After all reasoning work, the button will appear disabled until new information must be reasoned.

9. Confirmation popup after clicking for deleting an annotation.

10. Improvement of the flex interface: When the user filters the relations by one or several properties, it automatically disables the “All Relations” option.

Semantics For Nuxeo (NTI) - Third demo implemented

Yerbabuena has published the third version of the Semantics For Nuxeo NTI (Nuxeo Thinks Itself) project.

In this third sprint, we have implemented the following features:

• A semantic service into Nuxeo core
• Automatically adding annotations to documents of specific types.
• Classification of documents according to keywords.
• Improving the Flex interface by adding new functionality

First, we decided to implement a service that integrates all the semantic functionality into Nuxeo core. This service follows the pattern that exposes Nuxeo. With this new implementation, all the semantic functionallity might be accessed both from inside Nuxeo core and by an external service

On the other hand, we have developed a recognizer of document keywords by which the application is able to recognize different types of documents depending on the totality of those keywords. In addition, we have implemented an automatic annotator that is able to extract information from the document, such as the relationship between CIF and businesses.

Finally, the Flex interface has been improved by adding new functionality. The visual appearance and user interaction have been improved. In addition, we have included the possibility to access documents from the interface and also the possibility to filter the relationships you want to display.

New video: Updating a document and new annotations automatically added...

Open Source Software at your Reach!

A meeting will be held on September 17th (Open Source Day) at the PTA of Málaga, in which Software Companies and Associations throughout southern Spain will get together.

The objective is to get close to Society and to promote collaboration between different companies of the Open Source Software IT sector.

More info in spanish at our blog:
http://blog.yerbabuena.es/2009/09/software-libre-tu-alcance.html

P.S: EU report on economic impact of software in EU: OSS market value, 2008, 3.4B€, 57.7% growth.

57.7% growth in one year!! And not precisely a great year for our global economy...

There are no carrots nor sticks in Yerbabuena

A friend sent me today this video Re-thinking the ideology of carrots and sticks because he said I'd liked it. And he wasn't wrong, because that's exactly our ideology in Yerbabuena Software.

In this presentation Daniel Pink identifies three elements that comprise a new way of thinking about management:

Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery: The desire to get better at something that matters.
Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

This three elements, are really new for us but they are just another perspective of what we do at Yerbabuena where our colleagues, for example, can choose their own schedule and can work from home, from beach or from jungle if that's inpiring for them.

We mainly say, "Do whatever, wherever, whenever, to solve the problem, only find the best solution" ;-)

Semantics For Nuxeo (NTI) : Second demo released

Yerbabuena has published the second NTI version (Nuxeo Thinks Itself) of the Semantics For Nuxeo Proyect.

In this second sprint have been implemented these new functionalities:

• Integrating Nuxeo Relations with Semantic Relations.

• Possibility to add semantic annotations to File documents. Several of these annotations, like creator of the document, and also the relations among documents added at their creation or at Nuxeo Tab, are automatically added.

• Possibility to navigate through icons in the Flex UI.
  
  

First of all, document semantic relations have been integrated with Nuxeo relations, so that they are diplayed as another Nuxeo relation more.

On the other hand, a new Tab has been created which allow user to add semantic annotations to a File document. As discussed above, certain relations are added automatically. However, the user may manually add any other annotations. This new Tab also includes a reasoning button, which will be enabled every time new semantic information is added, and disabled when all information is reasoned. The tab interface has two text fields (one for subject and one for object), and a menu with all semantic predicates. The text fields are implemented as suggestion boxes, so that posible values (already reasoned and stored) are suggested, according to selected predicate domain (for subject) and range (for object). Finally, a warning icon is displayed to notice which annotations are not reasoned yet.

As for the Flex interface, information has been added to the nodes of the relationships graph. This information includes the number of relationships that contains that node. Moreover, as mentioned above, it has been implemented the ability to navigate between the different nodes, both the current graph and the list of visited nodes displayed. It has also been developed the possibility of restricting the relations to show in the graph. Finally, it has been improved the visual appearance.

Nuxeo Thinks itself: Semantics for Nuxeo

Note: This post was previously published here, on our blog in spanish, by Jose González.

Yerbabuena has published the NTI (Nuxeo Thinks Itself) version for the project Semantics For Nuxeo.

We have developed a plug-in, based on OSGi model, which integrates a persistent reasoner over a relational DataBase with Nuxeo platform and with a friendly User Interface made with Flex tool.

Following functionalities have been implemented in this first version:

• Integrate Nuxeo with a persistent reasoner for OWL implemented over a relational DataBase.

• Chance to add relations among File Documents while creating them.

• Flex UI and Nuxeo integration.
  
  

The persistent reasoner is an OWL Parser which is able to store any ontology into a relational DataBase. Previously, it connects with an extern reasoner (Pellet in this case) to get the Tbox ontology part reasoning. Our persistent reasoner has reasoning algorithms over Abox part, so that the ontology is reasoned on both Tbox and Abox parts, and remains persistent inside the relational DataBase. This implies that the query results time over the reasoned ontology will be lower than in most reasoners implemented nowadays, as these do all work over RAM memory.

On the other hand, we have changed the Nuxeo File Document schema and views to allow adding Documents (File) relations to the one being created.

Finally, we have implemented a friendly Flex UI, integrated with Nuxeo through Restlets, which allows to show semantic relations generated by the reasoner.

First post in our new blog !

Hi all !! We are pleased to announce the official inauguration of the new Yerbabuena Blog. Our idea is to give it an international approach, so we will write all the posts in English, and we will post here all the notes of interests about our R&D projects and about our day by day ;-) I hope this will be interesting for you !