Businesses of all sizes are adopting Cyn.in to enhance organizational performance and drive success in an intensely competitive, connected economy. While technology is only one part of the what makes Enterprise 2.0 useful and relevant, designing strategic practices for deploying it in the enterprises, providing guidance and training, ensuring widespread adoption and driving positive business results truly propels these technologies to success.
We have renewed the Cynapse Partner Program to help customers gain value from their investment in Cyn.in and are inviting partners to join in. The Cynapse Partners will work with customers to get them up and running on Cyn.in and assist with accelerating performance, provide guidance, training and support and cater to customer's requirements.
Adding Cyn.in to their portfolio, will help resellers and system integrators drive the benefit of SaaS and open source to their customers. ISVs and Solution providers can custom build addons to extend Cyn.in or integrate it with their applications and solutions to build a substantive offering for customers. While OEMs and product companies can combine Cynapse products as an offering with their software / hardware product to add additional value. Based on our trends for every $1 spent on software, there is a potential services revenue of $4.
I'm happy to announce that Cyn.in 3.0.5 is now available for download and installation. We've fixed over 40 stories in this update, and this includes some cool new features and some UI improvements as well. :)
Release Highlights
We've been listening to our customers, partners and the Cynapse community and one of the key points we've noted is that even though Cyn.in is conceptually designed to fit completely behind a logged-in scenario, a lot of people have mentioned that it would be nice if they could publish out content to anonymous users, anyway. If you have an open-ended community with Cyn.in for your organization, then this feature could be advantageous in increasing participation and overall awareness about your objectives.
So keeping the design principles of Cyn.in within mind, we have worked on making this possible in the default workflows that ship with Cyn.in. You'll now be able to set up your Cyn.in site such that you can selectively publish content to be visible to anonymous visitors (and search engine crawlers). Do note that we've kept the anonymous publishing flows a bit conservative, with the intent of having secure default settings. No content will automatically become published to anonymous, instead it must be initiated by user action. This action is intentionally restricted to the Site owner and Space editor roles.
New Features
Cyn.in 3.0.5 for the first time has out-of-box support for Publishing content to anonymous users. This is part of a redesigned workflow that provides Cyn.in site owners and Space Editors the option to publish interesting content for direct consumption by anonymous visitor. More details on how to set this up are available on the (now anonymously accessible) Cynapse community site at: http://www.cynapse.com/community/home/cyn.in-users/setup-cyn-in-for-anonymous-access
UI Changes: A new User menu is integrated into the top Adder bar. The toolbar now has all the key actions that you as a user of the system need to have. When being accessed anonymously, the entire top bar transforms to a single line message to login or register. The site logo now moved to the side bar, gets more prominence while users can focus on the top toolbar.
Google Chrome Frame support: For those users who'd prefer to use Google Chrome within their Internet Explorer, they now can. This is another attempt to fight the horrors created by Internet Explorer 6! For die hard IE fans, who face speed issues with Cyn.in, this should help.
Based on latest Plone: Cyn.in 3.0.5 is based on the latest stable release of Plone, 3.3.1 so all fixes of Plone are included.
Key Fixes
Due to a low-level problem between specifically the Webkit engine (that's Google Chrome, Safari, iPhone, Android and so on) and JQuery UI the browser was not rendering Cyn.in properly. Fixed.
The handling of #permalinks like the ones that show up in the Comments portlet was breaking Javascript on these URLs. Fixed.
The full list of fixed issues for 3.x series of Cyn.in can always be seen grouped by version, here .
To upgrade your Cyn.in installation to the latest version while retaining your current data, follow the instructions at Upgrade Cyn.in 3.x Community Appliance
The new Cyn.in version 3 is finally here and I am excited to announce its public availability. Cyn.in v3 brings with it great new features, tons of fixes and performance improvements and an all new user interface.
It has been an exciting year for us since the last major release of Cyn.in. I have been overjoyed with the response and adoption of Cyn.in within organizations spanning across nearly every major vertical and every continent across the world. From successfully enabling a company wide collaboration platform for businesses with over 50,000 employees to connecting together a 4 person strong startup, we have applied Cyn.in to a broad spectrum of requirements and learnt a great deal in the process.
Our key motivation while designing Cyn.in v3 came in from the needs of our customers and the community. Demanding market situations have caused businesses to push collaboration tools harder towards increasing efficiency and productivity while reducing costs. Cyn.in v3 was designed with a focus to speeden communication and facilitate rapid and seamless knowledge sharing.
A great new user experience:
Cyn.in evolves and changes the way knowledge workers communicate with each other, and in some cases, especially in very large organizations, this change could curb widespread adoption. The all new user experience has been redesigned from ground up to eliminate the learning curve and accelerate value discovery.
Discussion boards:
One of the most asked for features has been discussions independent of the contextual discussions as comments. The new discussions application in Cyn.in is the perfect tool to initiate conversations and fluid knowledge exchange.
Video / Audio streaming:
You can now share video and audio content with your team using Cyn.in. Its like having a secure internal Youtube for your organization. Uploaded media can be further embedded into other Cyn.in applications like wikis and blogs.
The Quick Adder bar:
The "Add New" interface in v2.1was simple but wasn't ALWAYS available. With v3, you can add spaces or content from anywhere, with a click. The Quick Adder bar is always available at the top of every Cyn.in screen enabling you to create new content in a space of your choice. If you are looking at starting a conversation or just asking a question, use the discussion text box to post it without navigating away from the page.
Faceted search and filtering:
Knowledge workers spend the likes of one day per week searching for people or information - connecting to people through people while looking for answers. V3 introduces faceted search and navigation to speed up information retrieval and allow users to filter down quickly to the answers they need. Faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs.
Customizable applications in a space:
Customers told us they wanted more flexibility in the Spaces - freedom to select application types in a space. Now you can turn on/off any application in a Space and even define the default view of the Space. That means in a Space you can enable discussions and files or disable wikis. Or, you can turn off the dashboard and choose any application to be the default view of that Space.
Crowd rating / voting:
Encourage conversations and capture innovative ideas by getting peers to rate / vote for content in the site. Top rated items bubble up to the top and by applying the "wisdom of crowds" concept, top rated items can complement decision-making processes resulting in better decisions.
Cyn.in - On Demand now exclusively hosted on Amazon EC2
Get your own dedicated virtual servers in the cloud hosted exclusively with Amazon Web Services. We will not be offering shared instances of Cyn.in from this release. Each Cyn.in On Demand package with now provide a dedicated server instance in the cloud. This makes Cyn.in On Demand a true 'Appliance in the Cloud' offering and provides much stronger control and security to our customers. We will continue to provide the shared instance offering to our existing customers for the next one year.
Lots more - These are just some of the interesting features introduced in Cyn.in v3. Check out the list of Cyn.in v3 features here. Along with new features, we have worked hard towards improving speed and stability of Cyn.in and squashed hundreds of bugs in the process
A select set of customers have been using v3 actively in the production environment for a while now, and their response has been encouraging to say the least. We look forward to hearing your feedback.
Presenting the brand new Cynapse.com and the Cynapse Community!
Customer feedback and the open source community are the top innovation drivers at Cynapse and have been instrumental in the success of Cyn.in. We intend to take this interaction to a whole new level with the brand new Cynapse.com with a unified community built using Cyn.in integrated with the versatile Drupal CMS.
In the true spirit of open source, we invite Cyn.in users, enthusiasts and developers from across the world to come and share your ideas, provide feedback about Cyn.in, discuss and ask questions in our Cyn.in powered Community.
Plone, the Open Source Content Management System that is the fundament of Cyn.in, has been compared with Microsoft Sharepoint multiple times. An interesting comparison has been published recently by Franscesco Ciriaci, owner at Reflab and a Plone Evangelist, based on the compatibility of Plone and Sharepoint with different platforms and browsers.
This makes Cyn.in is leaps and bounds ahead of Sharepoint in terms of enterprise collaboration, because Cyn.in starts where Plone stops. While Plone is a generic web application platform, Cyn.in delivers an integrated, out-of-the-box collaboration suite for the Enterprises that has all the benefits of Plone and enables free form communication and collaboration with a strong focus on enterprise information security needs.
Video Notes: HiDef (1280x720), switch to full screen for best effect. Low bandwidth users should probably switch HD off by clicking the button which appears when you play it.
We've been working on improving the cyn.in buildout for the upcoming version. One of the things we've added is the collective.omelette recipe. Leaving the funny name aside, (it's a pun intended on the fact that pretty much whatever you do in a buildout is based upon pre-defined "recipe"s and that this one is really special in that it mashes up all the code in all available products, projects and everything that's there in your buildout together into a single linked folder chain. And if you didn't get the pun, ignore it, it'd not important for the rest of the stuff here.)
Let's start with the usual alert:
Warning !
Warning! Danger, Will Robinson! Geek Developer alert!
This video and blog post is for the software developer audience. And probably only of interest to people who think that building out cyn.in from source is pretty cool, and would appreciate another productivity tip that would greatly enhance their way of working with cyn.in. Everybody else will probably not make much sense of this, but is of course welcome to try, and fit in. ;)
Ok. So here's my list of assumptions:
You got cyn.in working from buildout
You're surprised at the complexity of the codebase - all of cyn.in stuff exists in the src folder, but when you go into parts, and eggs, there's just too much stuff there to really comprehend and figuring out which code goes where, is really painful. This recipe is for you.
You're getting a hang of things. You understand that most of the plone codebase is concentrated around the CMFPlone product, and then you look for plone's kss and you can't find it, for example. This recipe is for you!
You'd actually like to use a GUI IDE tool to work with, rather than just using Notepad++, gedit, vi, or whatever else it is that you do use for that sort of thing. Something that will give you intellisense for autofilling function names, showing you function arguments, and doing reference lookup jumps into outside code files, when the need arises. This recipe is for you, also.
In this video, I show how one can add the plone collective recipe called Omelette to your buildout. And then how it can be used for fulfilling the above.
In this example, I show how the Komodo IDE product from ActiveState can be set up to work with cyn.in. This will give you the above intellisense, and yes, that's a major improvement over what you do currently. You could alternatively set up Wingware's Wing IDE for the same effect, in the same way, (and then some - in that you can actually hit debug breakpoints, and inspect variable values, but I use Komodo IDE to show this off because it's a bit simpler to set up and to use as well). And then there's some other IDE projects out there, but I'm unsure of their maturity.
The first step is to get a normal running buildout.
Then you just add a new "part" to your buildout and then configure it to the way you want it to be. In the setup I show, (which is the way it's going to be present in the upcoming code-base in cyn.in), we're setting up all source code in a predictably named "allsrc" folder, which is a sibling to the currently existing src folder that you're possibly already comfortable with.
Once you build the buildout after you add the new part to it, you'll notice the folder getting created, and then when you go into the folder and have a look, you'll see that all source code that you need is neatly arranged in non-nesting folders. This is the linux "ln" command at it's finest, your code is not actually copied, it's just linked to. And yes, this recipe only works on linux, for now. All of zope, plone, cyn.in and all constituent products will be available in the allsrc folder after you run it, all linked up to go to their original locations, but still usable directly as it is available in the allsrc folder.
Cool?
Did you really get that?
Let me restate. The code files you're staring at in the allsrc folder are not actually present, there. They're still at the original places they were at. This is a convenience recipe to "virtually" aggregate all the source code into a single root folder. Do not be confused when you're using your version control system (svn,git,mercurial whatever) with this.
That said, editing the source in the allsrc folder is perfectly fine, and in fact that's the whole idea in the first place! Your code, your edits will all be done in this conveniently rooted folder, from your IDE. Just be careful that you're editing your own code and not going modifying plone itself, or any other external (non-development) egg directly. If you do this, your code will actually work on your instance, but will not go to other developers when you commit it, and worse, when you re-buildout, your changes will be overwritten - editing base stuff is still to be done in the normal way, by overriding and subclassing, and so on, in your own products.
The video shows how convenient navigation becomes. Note the simplified folder chaining, there's no need anymore to have src/ubify.xmlrpc/ubify/xmlrpc and then, the code for it. xmlrpc is directly available at allsrc/ubify/xmlrpc, with the other parts lining up right beside it.
Once you've looked at the refined code structuring that the Omelette recipe does for you, then it's time to move on to the next phase, actual editing. The video shows how easy it is to configure your Komodo IDE project to point source code lookups to the allsrc folder, and then goes on to show how the in-code lookups for functions, arguments and Ctrl+Click jumping to actual resource works.
Try it out, it really aids in understanding the code flow.
Discussion boards:
The Quick Adder bar:
Faceted search and filtering:
Crowd rating / voting:
Get your own dedicated virtual servers in the cloud hosted exclusively with Amazon Web Services. We will not be offering shared instances of Cyn.in from this release. Each Cyn.in On Demand package with now provide a dedicated server instance in the cloud. This makes Cyn.in On Demand a true 'Appliance in the Cloud' offering and provides much stronger control and security to our customers. We will continue to provide the shared instance offering to our existing customers for the next one year.