Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree Customer

and Partner Support Team Leader

Hello readers!

Today is a new interview day !

Remember Readers! The subjects I focused on for these interviews are

1. To introduce men and women playing a role in ECM environment
2. To discover the ECM community
3. To explore ECM Solutions
4. To learn more about technologies and content management practices.

Today, I am proud to interview Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree Customer and Partner

Support Team Leader

Hello Philip !

First of all, many thanks for the time you are spending to answer this interview.

So Philip, can you tell us more about your position? What's your role and what are you doing
day after day?

I am the Product Owner for KnowledgeTree and form the operational part of our product
management team. KnowledgeTree is developed using SCRUM (an agile development
methodology) and I am responsible for conveying the views of the product management and
marketing teams, in this process.

My mornings usually begin with several SCRUM sessions, where I have a chance to discuss
various tasked projects with each of the engineering teams. The rest of my day consists of
planning, designing and discussing future functionality for our products. I am also responsible
for the customer and pre-sales support team and spend a significant amount of time chatting to
customers and partners about requirements and ideas for future functionality.

Knowledge Tree time : Could you present this solution? I could understand simplicity
was the keyword?

Yeah, that's exactly it. I would say that it's a powerful, web-based document management
system, that's quick to install and easy to use. It shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes to
set up and start uploading content, and you don't have to be a system administrator to do it.

In marketing speak - KnowledgeTree is an easy to use, commercial open source, turn-key

document management solution, aimed at the SMB (small and medium-size businesses)
market and departments within larger enterprises.

http://www.opensourceecm.fr
http://www.open-source-ecm.com
 Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree Customer
and Partner Support Team Leader

What's the architecture and what's technology component embedded in

KnowledgeTree?

KnowledgeTree is PHP-based and designed to run on an *AMP Stack (Windows\Linux,

Apache, MySQL and PHP). We make use of a large number of 3rd party open source
libraries, including Pear, PHPMailer, Smarty Template Engine, JSCalendar, Mochikit,
Moxiecode Systems, Yahoo Developer Network, ExtJS and others (see KnowledgeTree's
about page for the full list). We've also recently refactored our search and indexing engine and
are now using Apache Lucene and Tika for search, indexing and text extraction.

What's the difference between your Community Edition and your Commercial Edition
and why 2 licenses?

Our Community Edition is released under GPLv3 and our Commercial Editions under a
proprietary license [http://www.knowledgetree.com/about/legal ]. This model allows us to
release a strong, core KnowledgeTree product to our community, while at the same time
providing additional value to our customers.

The KnowledgeTree Community Edition is a solid product and provides most of the features
you would expect to see in an enterprise grade document management system. The
Commercial Edition is based on the Community Edition and includes a few extra features,
which make it easier to use and able to integrate into your existing work environment. Major
additions include the Microsoft Office Addin and a client side document browser for
Windows. Our Commercial Subscriptions also include access to priority support, an important
part of any enterprise solution.

For more information, there's a product comparison matrix

[http://www.knowledgetree.com/products/knowledgetree_editions_feature_matrix ] on our
website.

People often think that php-based ECM solution are not ready for Enterprise
Architecture. Is it right? Is this opinions founded?

I believe this may have been the perception in the past but is really not the case any longer.
There are already a large number of successful enterprise scale PHP-based applications and
many new ones are launching every day. PHP itself is evolving very quickly, with version 6
likely to release sometime next year. Zend are also doing great job of supporting PHP by
providing enterprise resources and services.

http://www.opensourceecm.fr
http://www.open-source-ecm.com
 Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree Customer
and Partner Support Team Leader

When do you plan the release of your next stable version and what are the new features?

The next major release of KnowledgeTree is version 3.5.5. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. KnowledgeTree ID insertion for Office formats, allowing us to recognize documents

and automatically store and categorize them.
2. A new "Document Processing Engine": a single library for managing document text
extraction, indexing, ID insertion and thumbnailing.
3. A revamp of the core KnowledgeTree API, including new documentation and far
greater coverage of KnowledgeTree functionality.
4. The first beta of our brand new Office Addin
[http://www.knowledgetree.com/blog/Demonstration-of-Office-Add-in-technologies ]

What do you think about the recent announcement of the CMIS specification (Content
Management Interoperability Services)? Do you plan to integrate it in your next
release?

Yes, we're excited about the specification and are watching developments closely. Quite a few
of our existing customers are larger organizations, who already use a number of other content
management solutions across departments. Being able to communicate with what's already
there makes a lot of sense to us and provides additional value to our customers.

We have already taken a look at the specification and it appears to be close fit to our existing
architecture/API. I would say that it's quite likely that we will release a CMIS compliant API
at some stage.

Now let's continue with the KnowledgeTree community. Do you have any statistics
(Members, customers, partners...)?

We've had over half a million downloads from SourceForge.net so far. Our forums have
around 6000 subscribed users, and are very active. We also have a community
plugin/customization repository, with close to 100 registered projects, including translation
packs for over 20 languages.

http://www.opensourceecm.fr
http://www.open-source-ecm.com
 Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree Customer
and Partner Support Team Leader

If, as a developer, I want to contribute to Knowledge Tree, what should I do? Where is
information (community blog, community documentation?)

The KnowledgeTree Wiki [http://wiki.knowledgetree.com ] is our central repository for

developer documentation. If you would like to contribute to the core product, take a look at
our contribution how to
[http://wiki.knowledgetree.com/How_to_contribute_to_KnowledgeTree ]. Alternatively, if
you would like to develop your own customizations or plugins, there is a large amount of
documentation available in the integration section
[http://wiki.knowledgetree.com/Integration] on our Wiki. We would like to encourage
community members to contribute modifications to either the core KnowledgeTree product or
to the KnowledgeTree Community Forge [http://forge.knowledgetree.com ].

The KnowledgeTree Team Blog [http://www.knowledgetree.com/blog ] is also a great source

of information and often includes posts from our core engineering team.

Finally, can you recommend us weblinks or blogs about ECM or IT in general?

The 451 group's blog on information management

http://blogs.the451group.com/information_management

Matt Asay's blog

http://asay.blogspot.com

The Enterprise Open Source Directory

http://www.eosdirectory.com

Joel on Software
http://www.joelonsoftware.com

Misc ECM
http://www.cmswire.com http://www.cmswatch.com http://www.kmworld.com

http://www.opensourceecm.fr
http://www.open-source-ecm.com
 Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree Customer
and Partner Support Team Leader

What would you say to conclude this interview?

I believe that 2009 is going to be a great year for open source ECM. Given the current
economic environment we're expecting a significant "buy-down" trend, with customers
seeking more cost-effective, open source solutions. We're also expecting an increase in push
toward corporate standards compliance in the content management space, with open source
ECM's in a good position to benefit from this trend.

I would also urge your readers to watch this space, as we have an ambitious roadmap for the
year ahead. Expect to see a more mature KnowledgeTree product range with an even greater
focus on ease of use and integration.

Thanks for the interview and great job your blog! I'll be sure to keep following it.

Many thanks, Philip, for this interview. We wish you a nice and exciting journey on
Open Source ECM Road!

To find out more about knowledgetree : http://www.knowledgetree.com/:

http://www.opensourceecm.fr
http://www.open-source-ecm.com