Ephox

From the Creating Passionate Users blog:

Do you know what the “comma-stupid” phrase is for your product or service? In other words, do you know what is most meaningful for your users? Because whatever that word or phrase is (i.e. the part that comes before the “, stupid!”), it should be driving everything from product development to documentation to support and marketing.

I’ve been on holidays for the past four weeks (life is tough sometimes) and away from internet connectivity so I’ve been blissfully unaware of what’s been happening in the tech world. Catching up with the RSS feeds this morning though, I’ve discovered many wonderful things:

• Robert Dawson has started with Ephox. I’d forgotten he was starting while I was away.
• Someone in the engineering team managed to work out how to add Robert to Planet Ephox. I left instructions on the various systems I’d set up before I left but this is the first time someone else has had to try to follow them.
• Our integration with the open source Alfresco CMS has been released on LiveWorks! There are two great things about this, first that it’s out and second that it’s another system that someone else has successfully picked up.
• New releases of some of our products have gone out and the change logs have been posted to the Ephox Releases blog!
  • Downside, for some reason the major update to our IWWCM Integration didn’t get a mention on the releases blog, could someone fix that ASAP please?
• The main Ephox website now has a link to LiveWorks! Yay! Now we just need to add a link to the releases blog.

The best part though, is that I still have another two weeks holidays. I’ll be back in the Ephox office on the 5th of February.

It’s taken quite an effort to get everything up and ready to go, but just in time for Christmas we’re ready to announce the availability of Ephox LiveWorks! The grand plan is to give our clients and the public in general better insight into what’s going on in the Ephox labs and give them the ability to shape the company’s direction.

Ephox took a couple of leaps forward today in terms of being more open and accessible to our clients. Firstly the planet instance that I’ve had running as a proof of concept for a while has been moved over to an actual Ephox server and is now at http://planet.ephox.com/ If you’re subscribed to the old feed your client should automatically switch to the new domain now but please do check it as test.symphonious.net will probably go away at some point.

So Doug is excited about how we took our first steps in a new product and how well it went. Personally, I’m impressed with the way that we presented all the usual engineering setup tasks to the client in a client focussed manner. We could have done it better by not discussing up front all the engineering tasks we were hiding behind the suggested first story, but that’s okay. The first story was that we wanted to ship a distribution of the new product. It’s really quite backwards to think of things that way – normally you build the product then work out how to package and distribute it, but it’s impossible to ship anytime if you don’t build the distribution mechanism at the start.

Robert Scoble:

I’d love to know what you think? Does any of the Office 2.0 vendors have a chance to edge in on Microsoft’s market?

Edge in – sure, it’s been happening for at least the past 5 years or more. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve sold EditLive! to companies who were replacing Word to make life more pleasant for users. Notably though, these aren’t situations in Word’s core target market – creating documents destined for print. Word has picked up a lot of market share in all kinds of weird and wonderful content creation scenarios that it wasn’t designed for and it’s picked up features to make it work quite well there. Despite that, these fringe areas are ripe for competitors to specialize in and provide solutions that fit better with the user’s intentions.

While a couple of people got ahead of things and announced the engineering release of EditLive! 6.0 – the marketing team completed deployment of the web site updates today and so EditLive! 6.0 final is officially available to everyone.

Now we just need to get better at updating the official Ephox Weblog instead of just our own blogs…

I spent some time yesterday playing around with Venus to aggregate the various Ephox related blogs. The result is current at test.symphonious.net but will either disappear or move somewhere more official depending on how we like it. I’m keen to see what people think of it. Hopefully we can encourage a few more Ephox people to make the leap into blogging.

Ephox is looking for a software engineer in our San Mateo office.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Provision of advanced technical support to prospects and clients via phone and email;
• Development of solutions to both internally and externally reported bugs including the development of automated regression tests;
• Provision of professional services including custom development and product enhancements;
• Provide quality feedback to the rest of the business for the most common use cases for our products, potential new areas and feature requests and the most common problems and problem areas clients are encountering;

Other work includes

James Robertson mentions the importance of a good authoring environment in CMS solutions.

Considering that the primary purpose of a web content management system is to help staff to write and publish content, the editor has to be front-and-foremost when it comes to selecting a product. And yet, many organisations specify little more than “the CMS must provide a web-based WYSIWYG editor”.

I’m in the middle of doing platform testing for EditLive! 6.0 which involves setting up and testing a huge array of OS, browser and JVM combinations to run through and manually verify that everything is working as it should be. Normally this is hard enough to do, but at the moment it seems every tech company has either just released a new version or is about to. We’ve got FireFox 2.0, IE 7, Windows Vista beta, OS X Leopard beta, Java 6 beta, OS X Java 6 beta, Office 2007 beta and who knows what Linux and Solaris is going to do to me.

The back button has been a great challenge for a lot of modern web applications and WYSIWYG editors are certainly no exception. Way back before I can remember, someone had the fantastic idea of preserving content entered into text fields and restoring it if the user hit the back button to return to the page. Unfortunately, with the advent of WYSIWYG editors, this was generally lost because the browser reruns the JavaScript in the page again, providing no indication that the user was returning to the page. I could be wrong, and I’d love to hear of other examples, but I don’t believe there is a WYSIWYG editors available today that preserves content when the user hits the back button. I find it somewhat interesting that despite the huge amount of user angst this causes1, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in solving the problem.