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Showing posts from July, 2015

Plone - the open source Content Management System - a review

One of my clients, a non-profit, has a lot of files on it's clients. They need a way to digitally store these files, securely and with availability for certain people. They also need these files to expire and be deleted after a given length of time - usually about 7 years. These were the parameters I was given to search for a Document Management System (DMS) or more commonly a Content Management System (CMS). There are quite a lot of them, but most are designed for front facing information delivery - that is, to write something, put it up for review, have it reviewed and then published. We do not want this data published ever - and some CMS's make that a bit tricky to manage. So at the end of the day, I looked into several CMS systems that looked like they could be useful. The first one to be reviewed was OpenKM ( www.openkm.com ). It looked OK, was open source which is preferable and seemed to have solid security and publishing options. Backing up the database and upgradin

Windows 10 - Upgrading Experiences and general first impressions

I've taken the plunge and upgraded my beloved Pavilion dv7 to Windows 10 from 7. I watched with baited breath yesterday to see if anything would happen, after all, I had signed up to get the upgrade and was prepped for it to happen. Nothing happened. I experienced sadness and then I watched my download widget in Rainmeter jump up to 1.5MB/s - our full download speed here. It stayed there for some time and then trailed off. OMG! I thought exultantly that my laptop would then upgrade magically and instantly.... but alas no. Nothing happened again. Anti-climactic was the theme for Windows 10 day. After several hours where I pointedly ignored my laptop and hammered away on the desktop, I patiently waited for something to happen. Around 4pm it did - a new windows popped up and said it was ready. Just a few things to do over 10 seconds, then the install would start. I click on the Go button and waited. It turns out that 10 seconds lasted 14 hours - I went home, slept, came back and the

Windows 10 trial impressions

As all the world (not literally) knows, the newest version of the Windows Desktop operating system Windows 10 (X?) arrives at the end of the month. I've been playing with it since it's early days and throughout the updates and newer iterations of it my feelings haven't changed much. I think the overall vision for the UI is missing internal design cohesion. My initial feeling was that they've tried to take elements of the Windows 8 menus, and blend them into the Windows 7 (and previous) familiar menu style. I don't like it. It's gaudy and unpleasant and for straight business work it doesn't speed things up at all. My other gripe with it has been that under a VMware Player install, it only starts up once every 3 or 4 times. That concerns me. What also concerns me is the dumbing down of the control panel. Accessing the stuff in there isn't for everyone, but the people who do want to get into it need access to the internals of the machine. I can't he