Confluence versus HALVR: An overview!

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Sep 16, 2009 at 2:30 PM by Stephen Danelutti - Tags: NetocietyUK comparison confluence halvr social software - Comments (0)

I attended a Confluence User Group last night which was hosted by the guys at Headshift and a grand old afternoon and evening it was - thanks to all involved and particularly Jon Mell the MC :)

The new features in the latest release of Confluence (3.0) was the main topic of discussion, at least in the tracks I was involved in (tech). Some really excellent work on this new version by the guys from Atlassian. It got me thinking and this also came out in the discussions I had with some of the attendees in the drinks session - so what's the difference between HALVR and Confluence? I thought I'd plot my thoughts in a pro and con table. Feedback welcome :)

Confluence Cons	HALVR Pros
Features are very generic and need to be specifically configured or developed for each client installation	HALVR has generic features but they have already been configured/extended in bundles to meet specific industry needs (Business Services, Health Care, etc.) or specific operational needs (idea management, project management, etc.)
Costs are relatively high	Costs are lower
Confluence is becoming a heavyweight platform and sometimes difficult to extend or manage	HALVR is extremely lightweight and very easy to extend
Some of the many features it offers are very often complex for non-technical users and in lots of cases not used.	HALVR was designed to be simple and intuitive for non-technical users to use - so no wiki markup and simple ability to add widgets (and functionality) through rich text editor (a widget library is easily accesable)
Form/field creation for structured data gathering and mining is only possible through plugins and not tied to page creation!	HALVR is fundamentally about form/field creation (see explanation here) and this is tied into the page creation process. This allows for the creation of structured content and page functions: task, project, idea, etc.
Confluence Pros	HALVR Cons
Established, trusted platform with large developer and user community	New to market with no established developer community and small but growing user community
Can be supported by Atlassian or large partner/developer community	Can only currently be supported by Netociety
Many standard features are available with additional features available through large plugin library	Limited features thus far
Confluence has what is now a large company with substantial resources behind it (Atlassian) with established processes	HALVR has Netociety which is definitely smaller with less resources and processes in place

I thought that considering we sell, implement and support both solutions this would be a useful exercise for our clients and/or prospective clients. One major distinction I wanted to draw in addition is specifically related to who is targeted with each solution, at least in Netociety's view. The conclusion we are increasingly arriving at is that HALVR is better for small to medium size companies (SME's) and that Confluence is probably better off for larger, more risk averse companies.

CAPTCHA and Alternative Spam Protection

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Jun 9, 2009 at 10:14 AM by Markus Tripp - Tags: NetocietyUK Halvr - Comments (0)

Last Thursday (June 4th, 2009) we decided to actively promote our web sites and add them to SEO (search engine optimization) tools. Already on the next day we identified a lot of spam activity on our pages.

Initially we thought we don't really need significant spam protection. Only registrations needed to be manually approved by an administrator in the beginning.

But because of the spam attacks we had to react quickly. Even we are not a big fan of CAPTCHA it is a quick solution to protect most of our open actions like

• blog comments
  
• register
• forgotten password

Implementing reCAPTCHA in Halvr was pretty simple. Now you can configure CAPTCHA validation on pretty every HTML form in Halvr.

We are absolutely no fan of CAPTCHA solutions, because the text is often quite difficult to guess and it slows down filling out forms significantely. Alternatively we will offer a solution where

• Registration of Halvr users can only be done by an administrator
• Authentication is required for all user actions
• Offer authentication options via RPX

RPX is a pretty cool feature as it allows you to log in with your following accounts:

• Facebook
• Google
  
• MySpace
• Windows Live
• Yahoo
• OpenID
• Twitter
• AOL
• Verisign
• myOpenID
• Blogger

Most of the users who want to add a comment have at least an account at one of the above listed services and for many actions like adding comments it is sufficient that users authenticate with some account. Sometimes this is the more elegant then offering CAPTCHA.

Launch of Open Source Service Framework Ylvi

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Jun 3, 2009 at 0:05 PM by Markus Tripp - Tags: NetocietyUK Halvr Ylvi - Comments (0)

We at Netociety are proud to officially launch Ylvi.

Ylvi is a simple framework for developing services in Java using dependency injection. No configuration, no learning required.

The story of Ylvi started several years ago when Kristinn Danielsson and Markus Tripp worked together on an international project where they had to manage and organize a distributed software development team. We were very impressed by the ideas and API definition from the Apache Avalon project. But we were not fully satisfied with the available implementations, therefore we decided to go for a standard J2EE/EJB architecture.

But the idea of a service framework was still in our heads, and in the meantime we analyzed PicoContainer, Spring, Google Guice, and some own implementations. Most of them were too complex to learn, use and configure for 95% of our tasks.

In November 2008 Kristinn and Markus decided to create it from scratch. The result was a 24 KB JAR containing all ideas from the last years.

If you would like to get started with Ylvi go to the home page ylvi.org. Watch the 4 minutes quick start video on the start page, or watch the 25 minutes tutorial. The 25 minutes tutorial shows you:

• How to work with Ylvi in Eclipse
• Create 2 Ylvi services, one depending on the other (EmployeeService uses a PersistenceService)
  
• Configure Eclipse to create a Web application using Stripes and Ylvi

Ylvi is hosted at Google Code.

Shiny new sites

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May 20, 2009 at 7:39 PM by Stephen Danelutti - Tags: NetocietyUK announcement halvr confluence - Comments (0)

Phew, a humongous effort that is still not complete has at least taken this new site live and predominantly complete. Great effort from all of the team! Just in case you were wondering, our old site with all its content you may have been familiar with and which was built on Confluence is still live on this URL: www.confluence.netociety.com

This new site is built on halvr our own shiny new platform. And that has its own site which still has some work to be done on it as well as some of of our other properties which you can read about on our own products page. Then there is the halvr demo site which just needs some help documentation to support users but in principle this is a sandbox that can be played with and tested to your hearts content.

Finally, we will be opening up more and more of this and other sites so that you can raise support tickets, we can use them to manage projects with clients, etc.

So please bear with us while we iron out some of the very rough edges. This blog will also bring in some of the archived posts from our old site so will change too.

Thanks for your patience and if you have any queries/problems please contact us in the traditional way until we enable our online support system.