Ephox

Our support team live and die by the logs we get from clients.  It’s simply the only way you can work out what happened and get complete and reliable information on the environment and usage of our products in the moments before a problem occurred.

I always knew EditLive! was quite verbose in debug mode – deliberately so, but I was a little surprised that in 30 minutes of usage we output 45362 lines of debug output, totalling 5.2MB. Mostly, that’s because I was running up a lot of instances of EditLive! rather than just using a single instance for a long time so in more normal usage that would be a lot less.

Pangle on Twitter:

Ephox EditLive Editor will change the world. Well maybe not the world, but it will make WCM content easier to format. I couldn’t agree more. This is of course in response to the news coming out of Lotusphere that IBM has licensed EditLive! as a standard part of their WCM offering. Ephox has been an IBM business partner for quite a few years now and has built up a lot of relationships with their technical and sales teams as well as selling EditLive! as a third party add-on to a lot of WCM clients. It’s very exciting to see this go up a step and have EditLive! as a standard part of the offering. I don’t have an exact ship date for the OEM version yet, but my understanding is that it will come as an update to Portal 6.1.

With LiveWorks! turning two it’s gone through a major stage of growing up and now sports the official Ephox website look rather than it’s more youthful green tinge.  The different look was originally put in place because LiveWorks! was designed to hold a bunch of unofficial, unsupported, experimental stuff – most of which is still there but has gradually become more supported and much less scary to use in actual production systems. In the mean time, we’ve added a ton of new, really useful, very much supported (i.e. used as answers to support questions) content which we want users to find and use.

While reviewing some screen mockups for EditLive! today, it occurred to me just how limited an environment we’re forced to work in. It turns out that the default, and thus most common, size of a rich text area in IBM WCM is 740×450 (note to Ephoxians, I mistakenly quoted this as 740×360 earlier so we have slightly more vertical space than I thought).  Even in my blog’s editing interface, the editor is 718×600.

The Ephox bloggers have been way too quiet lately (myself included) so I thought I’d start an Ephox meme. What’s your 5 favorite features of any of Ephox’s products?  They might be built in or plugins that we’ve developed, maybe even features of our internal systems that make your life easier, but preferably something that our clients could get hold of (teasing people just isn’t nice).

I was going to write a post around accessibility and WCAG 2.0 but got annoyed once again about the EditLive! toolbar taking up two lines instead of one.  I’d already removed a whole bunch of stuff from it but it was still wrapping around by a few buttons.

It occurred to me that there are a range of functions that I had on the toolbar because I use them frequently, but that aren’t actually required because I always use the keyboard shortcut. In particular, I have no need for cut, copy, paste, undo or redo because without exception I use keyboard shortcuts. I could probably apply the same logic to strong, em and insert hyperlink as well but my toolbar fits on one line with them so they may as well stay.

Ephox provides a bunch of different sites with feeds to help people keep up to date about what’s happening with our software and the company.  For example, LiveWorks! helps you learn more about our products and get the most out of them, the releases blog keeps you up to date with the latest stuff and the official Ephox blog has all the company news. Then of course there’s a range of blogs by Ephox employees like this one and they’re all gathered up at People@Ephox. So guess which feed is the most popular by far?

Kevin Gamble:

I know I must sound like a broken record on this point, but the message just isn’t sinking in. What’s it going to take for people to “get” this? A million dollars or 10 million dollars. It doesn’t matter. The people are not coming. You have to go to them. It’s pretty simple actually. The thing is, corporate thinking is all about owning stuff. So the natural tendency is to want a community that you “own” and thus you have to build a new community and get people to come. It’s nice to see some studies highlighting how rarely that actually works though.

I had two of our keen young developers (Dylan and Suneth) email me overnight to ask my CTO-ish opinion of trends in the mobile space and how they might apply to Ephox. It’s a very good question – with the advent of BlackBerrys first and now even more so with the iPhone, mobile internet is finally moving from “the future” to “the now”, even if it’s not evenly distributed yet. Of course, Ephox is squarely placed in the enterprise content creation business so no matter how popular the mobile world becomes we’re very unlikely to bring out a mobile phone game or a tip calculator. So here’s my take one where the mobile world is with regard to enterprise content creation.

From Brett, our engineering manager extraordinaire:

With Ephox’s recent sales growth we are expanding the R&D team and are currently looking for two outstanding Java developers to join the team in our Brisbane office.

We develop in both Swing and J2EE using agile techniques and have a set of values based on the XP values. We have a fun workplace and are looking for the right people to join us.

This is a great opportunity for someone who wants a fulfilling and rewarding position that takes their careers to the next level.

If you are interested, the job has been released on Seek.com, so check it out and apply.

Doug’s discovered a way to improve the effectiveness of simian to avoid adding more duplication to a code base:

The solution is very simple. The simian-report is a an xml file, so I wrote a SAX2 DefaultHandler that was able to parse the number of duplications at the different threshold levels. Putting this into a trivial ant task then gave us a task to help make things no worse even at levels below what the simian-check was doing! Within the first week, the new legacy-check was breaking the build (where the simian-check would never have) and focusing the teams attention on how to make things better. The solution is simple and really cool. I have no doubt that it will have a big impact on the amount of duplication and the overall quality of our code. The trouble is, Simian’s normal reporting is really, really lousy and Doug’s extra check highlights just how useless Simian is at telling you where the duplication is instead of just detecting that there is duplication.

CMSWire: Vendor Criticism of CMS Watch

In an industry whereby most of the “independent analysts” are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be “independent” of, it’s unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats — if something is truly terrible we will tell you.