Thursday, January 31, 2008

Reuters get it!

I spotted this very interesting article on the Intranet Journal:

“Global information company Reuters has taken a step that it hopes will leave a big footprint on the development of the semantic web.”

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Imbedded Confluence spreadsheet nirvana


Fantastic news: Atlassian have introduced an embedded wiki spreadsheet for the Confluence product called EditGrid. It has been implemented as a Confluence plug-in and finally brings real-time spreadsheet collaboration to the enterprise wiki world.

When the wiki page is saved the spreadsheet is stored as an Excel like attachment to the page. Normal wiki change tracking / versioning is extended to the spreadsheet's contents!

When the page is viewed the sheet's contents is rendered in HTML right on the page – no clicking of links or examining the page for attachments! The viewing user is even able to perform sorting and auto filtering.

When the page is placed into edit, a special sheet editor is provided.

Uncharacteristically for Atlassian, the plug-in has been provided first for hosted users (both Hosted and the newer Enterprise Hosted schemes) but in-house users will have to wait until "later in 2008 Q1".

I feel that this feature opens up the Confluence tool to even more possibilities regarding emergent applications/user organized applications and is possibly another nail in the coffin of the traditional CMS style intranet.

Well done Atlassian and thanks!

More info here.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Fire in Moorgate

Sorry folks, This post has nothing to do with intranets or social computing, rather I document a bit of local excitement visible from my workplace:


A fire broke out around 11:00 today in the old practice fire tower, part of the Milton Court development London EC2.

The sound of gas canisters exploding could be heard even through the triple glazed glass of our tower (CityPoint) The fire service arrived after about 20 minutes and after a period of apparent inactivity they rapidly brought the blaze under control.
My guess is that the blaze was started accidentally by workmen using acetylene cutters on or near the top floor of the structure.