Knowledge Notebook http://www.unc.edu/~count0 Greg Jansen on the Job Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:19:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.1.2 en Big Blue Joins OpenOffice http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=57 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=57#comments Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:17:47 +0000 Greg Jansen http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=57 IBM has joined the OpenOffice community and intends to contribute accessibility and other enhancements. This may be predictable to those following IBM’s commitment to the open source movement, but to governments and large organizations this support will make adopting the open document standard a more viable option.
M$ has been trying to squeeze more time out of its office suite through tightly integrated collaboration tools, but now IBM can effectively counter with a Lotus suite based around the ODF standard.

Anyone who has unzipped an ODF spreadsheet, run an XSL transform and then packed it back up knows the power of open formats. Makes it so easy to do exactly what you want with your data. I can’t wait for the day that I can send an ODF without hearing, “Sorry, I can only open Word format.”

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=57 44 Blackboard Patents Under Review http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=56 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=56#comments Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:05:15 +0000 Greg Jansen http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=56 If you work in higher education, Blackboard is the 800 pound gorilla. Now open source advocates are challenging 44 of their patents. In an effort to gather evidence of previous work they created a fascinating Wikipedia article on the subject. See History of Virtual Learning Environments. I think Douglas Engelbart is one of the more forward thinking people in this history. Invented hypertext, the mouse and early user interfaces. There is a video I’ve seen of him running a hypertext demo back in the late sixties. If you watch it, wait for the title cards to pass and you will be rewarded.
Anyway, I found the Blackboard news refreshing.

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=56 Public Calendars and Classification: First Problem http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=55 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=55#comments Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:10:53 +0000 Greg Jansen http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=55 Some folks already know that I’ve been researching institutional calendar software throughout teh intarnets. I’ve found a few decent tools, probably four candidates with one strong open source tool and one strong vendor solution. I know a lot more about the open source tool now, since all their product information is in the open. The vendor still hasn’t called me, despite my email. (While their site lists all the important features we need, there are no screenshots or demos to play with and a general lack of detail.)
Meanwhile I’ve got the open source Bedework up and running with a “quickstart” release, piece of cake. I had my doubts about it at first, the end-users docs are pretty thin and don’t explain the basic organization of the calendar suite very well. I had my doubts that it could fit our needs, despite it being designed from the ground up for educational institutions. Then I found the developer wiki. Surprise, the wiki covers the basics so much better than the PDFs written for administrators.
So, coming around to the point, I found this nugget of truthiness, which gets at what I see as a large information sharing problem here at UNC. The high-level objective for the calendar is to create more multidisciplinary participation in events, see the Chancellor’s report on intellectual climate. In order to get there you have to classify events on the public calendar by topic, not department. We just tried to address similar issues on the ITS site, focusing on recognizable topics instead of organizational divisions in our service categories. I think the tension between organizational and topical categories can be found in many campus information systems. The problem this creates is especially obvious when you consider new arrivals to campus or prospective students/faculty. They don’t know whether to look at the cashiers office, the registrar or admissions for relevant information.

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=55 Document Imagineering http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=54 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=54#comments Wed, 02 Aug 2006 15:52:03 +0000 Greg Jansen http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=54 This post from The Content Wrangler looks at the future role of documents in the workplace and who will be called in to analyze and improve the situation. It reviews a book that might be a good add for our KM wishlist.

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=54 Theme with an annoying layout issue http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=53 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=53#comments Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:10:46 +0000 Greg Jansen http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=53 I really like the hemingway theme that I’ve put on my work blog. It’s very clean and professional looking, but has one quirk that I don’t have the CSS chops to fix. At least I tried for a bit today and gave up. I’ll probably have to dig in to figure it out and that a project for another day, but let me know if you have suggestions.
The problem is the search div covers up the link in the blog title, making it hard to return to the front page from my story pages. I’m guessing a z-index would fix it, or maybe getting the positioning right somehow w/o going 100% of the “live-search” div.

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=53 WTC movie review http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=52 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=52#comments Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:48:13 +0000 Greg Jansen http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=52 This advance review of Oliver Stone’s WTC reveals the details in the film that do not line up with the official 911 report. Good reading.

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=52 found: Web Writing that Works http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=37 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=37#comments Tue, 11 Apr 2006 01:04:13 +0000 Greg Jansen http://trng-count0.its.unc.edu/?p=37 This site is terrific. I went out googling for help on our “service overview” document prototype and found this site, which happens to have a number of other useful patterns. Also read the superb conceptual overview of genre in general. I highly recommend that specific piece to my own group.
all the patterns
how to write within a genre

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=37 KM Network of NC http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=38 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=38#comments Wed, 05 Apr 2006 23:33:02 +0000 Greg Jansen http://trng-count0.its.unc.edu/?p=38 Just heard about this through another blog and went ahead and joined up. Interesting choice of group service, does this point to any particular KM philosophy? (just kidding)
link

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=38 Feeds from the Feds http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=39 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=39#comments Mon, 03 Apr 2006 19:56:52 +0000 Greg Jansen http://trng-count0.its.unc.edu/?p=39

Dagoba Organic Chocolate Recalls Eclipse 87%, Los Rios 68%, and Prima Matera 100% Dark Chocolate Products Because of High Lead Levels. link

The federal government has a page of feeds for various audiences. This page might make an interesting inclusion for the ITS document about news feeds/readers. Now you can find out about any consumer product recall as it happens. I think most of these feeds consist of press releases from the various agencies, but they seem to be aggregated under citizen-friendly topics.

]]> http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?feed=rss2&p=39 Bob DuCharme on Documenting your Software http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=40 http://www.unc.edu/~count0/?p=40#comments Thu, 23 Mar 2006 17:21:54 +0000 Greg Jansen http://trng-count0.its.unc.edu/?p=40 I think this post is a good summary of where to start documenting new software:
http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/2006/02/writing_about_software_what_do.html

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