I had some goals:

• Keeping status of different projects up-to-date with more accuracy
• Ensuring our sales and project management knows if some project is being blocked by missing materials
• Enabling a more distributed, web working culture

We're a small company of less than 10 people, and as such most project management methods have not been very successful for us. In general they have been made for situations where same person or team keeps on working on a project for several months, whereas in our situation a person typically works on several projects every day.

I discussed this over some beers with Tero Heikkinen from Rohea, and he told me how they were implementing Scrum in their small company. While their number of different projects running at the same time is a bit smaller, their situation otherwise is quite similar: same technologies used, Ajatus for work tracking, etc.

We had a company sauna evening and I presented Tero's ideas there: we would partially implement the Scrum model, and keep tuning it to our needs. At the first phase this means:

• Every morning we have an all-hands 15-20min meeting ("the daily Scrum") where everybody goes over what they have been doing the previous day, and what they were planning to do today. If they are being blocked by something missing: a software bug, missing information or other materials, this is also brought forward
• Every project has a file in Google Docs where we keep the project status and task list (Backlog). This task list is updated based on what comes up in the morning meeting
• Work hours are reported with Ajatus. Rohea also uses it for project burn-down charts, and once their add-on for that is finished we may do the same
• Emilia, the project manager (or Scrum Master) is responsible for resolving possible impediments and maintaining the per-project status files

The approach we have taken should be quite pragmatic and low-tech. Instead of fancy project management software we use simple word processing for status data. And thanks to Google Docs the documents produced are accessible and editable from anywhere.

Similarly the actual meetings are quite easy to manage. The people who are at the office attend there, and others attend either via a Skype or mobile phone conference call, depending on network availability. We decided to have them at 10am so that everybody will be able to participate. Even if there is a Sprint or meeting scheduled for the same time, the short time needed for our all-hands meeting means it can be held over a "cigarette break".

Ajatus is the only more experimental piece of software in our puzzle. In our company, we use it for hour reporting, expense tracking and keeping meeting minutes. For these it works quite well, although more reporting tools are definitely needed. The alpha status of CouchDb, the database software powering Ajatus has bit us a few times by database corruption (caused by OSX-specific erlang bug) or simply difficult installation procedure, but these problems will hopefully improve over time.

We're now in the second week of this model, and at least the gut feel is that this has improved coordination inside the company. The next challenge then is to let the customer get involved in the process. This can mean just sharing the project status files, or even giving them access to actual meetings or the Ajatus data.

This post contains very early ideas, but we would be happy to get some feedback on them.

Basic idea

Each Midgard or Ajatus server runs a "synchronization daemon" which is connected to a XMPP server using some JID identity.

The sync daemon registers a set of pub/sub nodes corresponding to the content structure on the Midgard or Ajatus instance:

• in Midgard: Sitegroups, MgdSchema types, paths (possibly a regexp), approval state
  • /midgard_article/all, /midgard_article/approved
• in Ajatus: tags

The pub/sub nodes can be set up with some access control rules. For example, Ajatus tags would by default require "whitelist" authorization to subscribe.

When content is changed, the sync daemon gets notified about it (via D-Bus signals in Midgard, and via CouchDb external indexer API in Ajatus). The content object (and immediate children like parameters and file attachments) is serialized into the syndication format and sent onward as a XMPP "pub" leaf. If the object appears on multiple nodes (multiple Ajatus tags for instance), the "pub" leaf is sent to all of them.

XMPP server and the federated network will then handle notifying the subscribers of the nodes about the new leaf.

The subscribers will receive the leaf, and unserialize it to the Ajatus or Midgard database.

Communication between sync daemon and application

The sync daemon should exist as an entity separate from the actual user application. Communication between the sync daemon and Midgard or Ajatus should happen via the application database.

This means that XMPP pub/sub whitelists for Ajatus tags would be maintained in the ajatus_db (non-replicated) database, and the sync daemon would read them from there. The Jabber server credentials would also be stored in the same database.

Information about resources from jabber buddies

User's replication partners are stored as local contacts in the application database. In Ajatus this means "Contacts" and in Midgard "midgard_person" objects. Both storage models have optional JID field.

If JID is marked for a contact, the sync daemon should at startup (or at an interval) try to discover if the contact has pub/sub resources available.

Content transformation in replication stage

While mainly intended for Midgard-to-Midgard and Ajatus-to-Ajatus replication, the same mechanisms could work across different systems.

For this, the sync daemon on the subscribing end should support XSLT transformations before content is unserialized into the system. The XSLT transformation templates should be configurable per subscription.

Hermod / Hermóðr (Midgard replication)

• "in Norse mythology, messenger of the gods. He was a son of the principal god, Odin, and his wife, Frigg. Known as Hermod the Swift, he was called upon by the other gods when they had a task requiring speed and urgency." - Encyclopedia Britannica
• Written in Python
  • Using twisted framework or x60br XMPP library
  • using standard Midgard MgdSchema object serialize/unserialize methods
• How to proof-of-concept before D-Bus? Some watcher in MidCOM? (watcher touches spool file)

PillowTalk (Ajatus and CouchDb replication)

• Written on Erlang
• Extendable through plugins
  • Content parsers (Midgard2Ajatus, Ajatus2Midgard)
  • Security
  • CDATA JSON block or convert to XML? (Decision of the content parser?)

Technorati Tags: ajatus, midgard, jabber, replication, synchronization, xmpp

Ideas may come to you when you're sitting in a bus, boarding an airplane or visiting a hospital. For a CRM to work the data must be available and editable in any situation.

Having now dogfooded Ajatus for almost two months, I have to say this has been an important aspect. It is powerful to have all your customer and project data with you at all times, and still be able to use it via the familiar web UI.

Offline is useful. You can write your notes in every meeting, update them in train, report expenses as they incur. And most importantly, as long as your computer is running, the application is never down. And still, though replication your data will be safe with your peers or the corporate server.

This is aspect even more important when you start running the app on ultra-portable devices, or go outside the industrialized world.

Technorati Tags: ajatus, offline, web, replication

• Feb 15th - 17th: Midgard developer meeting in Linköping, Sweden. Lots of hacking and talking about Midgard 2 and MidCOM 3
• Feb 22nd - 24th: FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. I'm going for Open Business Organisations of Europe (OBOOE) meeting on behalf of COSS and Jerry will give a lighting talk on Ajatus
• Apr 11th - 12th: Helsinki Media Conference in Helsinki, Finland. I will be talking about attention profiling.
• Apr 17th - 19th: FISL 9.0 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I will be talking about GeoClue
• Jun 3rd: ServOSS seminar in Helsinki, Finland. I will be talking about interaction between a company and a free software community

Looking forward to meeting many of you in these events! The July conferences of GUADEC in Istanbul and State of the Map in Limerick sound interesting as well.

It is possible to follow my movements through Dopplr:

Technorati Tags: ajatus, geoclue, obooe

At this point it seems the presentation will be on Sunday 24 at 15:40.

I'll be introducing Ajatus itself and little bit about the pieces it is built on (CouchDB, jQuery).
Mostly I try to concentrate the presentation for developers interested either in offline AJAX development or even Ajatus itself.
I will be showing and explaining some of the layers inside Ajatus, different ways to expand it with plugins, etc and give sneak peak to the future of the app.
Some basic replication scenarios will be covered also.

At the same weekend Bergie and I will be attending the XMPP Devcon to collect and present our ideas of the automated XMPP based CouchDB replication currently going under name PillowTalk. 

Go check it out at http://www.ajatus.info/download/ajatus_0-6-0/  

• Erlang
• ICU
  
• CouchDB
• Ajatus
  

They are far from perfect yet but I'm sure it'll get better little by little.
Currently I'm

• preparing the packages for releasing them through maemo extras repository.
• trying to compile the latest erlang R12.b.0 (now the package is R11.b.1)
• adding dependencies to couchdb package
• packaging Ajatus also

After first releases there are some possible tweaking to do... I still get some Segfaults at some points while using couchdb.

If someone would like to give this a try the hard way:
All the current packages can be found here http://protoblogr.net/downloads/erlang/

1. Download and install erlang-base_11.b.1-1_armel.deb to the device (after download: dpkg -i  erlang-base_11.b.1-1_armel.deb)
2. Download and install libicu36_3.6-2_armel.deb
3. Download and install couchdb_0.7.2-1_armel.deb
4. Get the latest release of Ajatus and follow it's installation instructions

There might be some dependencies which have to be manually installed. (Will be fixed later)
Currently the CouchDb installs itself to /usr and the databases are located at /usr/var/lib/couchdb.
I changed the DB path in /usr/etc/couchdb/couch.ini to point to my other memorycard (/media/mmc2/couchdb_db) which had some more space left.

Hopefully I get to release these as soon as possible for easier use.

Great thanks to the folks at #couchdb channel (nslater, jan,...)
And to Piotras

First set (N800/N810) can be downloaded here: http://protoblogr.net/downloads/erlang/

I'll upload rest of the deps as I get to the office. Also I'm currently buildin ICU which is also needed by CouchDB. Hopefully today I have working native Ajatus on my N800. 

UPDATE: 

Just uploaded rest of the package files. Also there is packages for ICU.
I'm currently trying to get CouchDB to work, but still have some minor problems with it.

For basic usage of erlang one could only install the erlang-base and erlang-nox packages...

Anyhow we aren't that far of getting CouchDB and Ajatus to work natively on Nokia n800/n810...

CouchBrowser is cross platform CouchDB administrating utility which runs as standalone app. User interface is built with flex for sleek looks. Backend is written with haXe and ActionScript.
So currently I'm building CouchDb library for haXe similar to my other project jqCouch.
Planned features for the CouchBrowser are atleast the same functionality as the couch's own browser based utility plus some export/import features.

I'll put up some project site for this as it matures a bit and I get more time to work with it.

Here is a screenshot of the app (v0.0.1)

By wick3d 40 minutes ago.

By wick3d 8 hours, 53 minutes ago.

By wick3d 8 hours, 53 minutes ago.

By wick3d 8 hours, 54 minutes ago.

The means to that is CouchDb's integrated replication feature. With it you can easily share your Ajatus data with anybody in the network, or just keep your laptop and desktop system in sync.

At the moment we only support full replication over HTTP, but the plan is to support replicating only data with specific tags (for example, only data related to a specific project), and to do it over XMPP.

As things are, here is how you set up Ajatus replication on a Mac OS X system:

First allow CouchDb to talk to the outside world (note: it is a good idea to keep the firewall up when not replicating!):

Then access the CouchDb management console in http://localhost:5984/_utils/ and go to "Replication". Set up the replication paths there. The database you're interested in is "ajatus_db_content" (by default, see advanced setup):

Once you have entered the paths just click "Replicate" and wait a sec. Replication is one way, so remember to also replicate back from the other server!

When replication is done your Ajatus system should have data entered on multiple systems:

My company is now dogfooding Ajatus. At the moment we use it in full peer-to-peer mode, but there are some plans to install a central server for security and backup purposes. I will post some notes on our experiences later this month.

In related news: CouchDb lead developer Damien Katz has been hired by IBM to work full-time on the database. This is great news for both CouchDb and Ajatus. Congratulations!

Technorati Tags: ajatus, couchdb, replication