Can’t convince the boss to shell out some bucks for Sharepoint server? Oh what’s that…He doesn’t trust Google with company resources? Ok well, you still need to figure how to set up a collaborative website/cms/wiki whatever you want to call it. In this case we will use the term “wiki” because that is the solution to your problem.  Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor shows us how to set up MediaWiki to make you totally forget about Microsoft, Google and your cheap ass boss!

“The free MediaWiki software is best known for powering Wikipedia, but you don’t have to be writing an encyclopedia to put it to good use. Extend, skin, and customize MediaWiki to create any kind of easy-to-update, collaborative web site.

MediaWiki is arguably the most advanced, install-it-yourself, free wiki package available. A wiki is an editable web site; you can change each page's content without having to log into a content management system like WordPress or access the server via FTP or other means—you just hit the edit button. While MediaWiki is built for public web sites that anyone can update, like Wikipedia, you can customize it to limit access to certain users.

Like WordPress and Firefox, MediaWiki is extendable via plug-ins that add functionality. MediaWiki is also skinnable, which means your wiki can sport a custom theme so it doesn’t look just like Wikipedia.”

Read More via Customize MediaWiki into Your Ultimate Collaborative Web Site – Wikipedia – Lifehacker.

Pulse 2 helps organizations ranging from dozens to 100 000+ heterogeneous computers to inventory, maintain, update and take full control on their IT assets. It has been designed to handle 100 000+ computers spread on many sites.  It supports heterogeneous platforms such as MS Windows, GNU/Linux (Mandriva, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu., etc.), Mac OSX, HP-UX, IBM AIX and Solaris systems.

In this latest release Mandriva went beyond the traditional maintenance fixes, the aim of this release is to push away the limits of the system, under heavy load and/or on potentially unreliable networks. In this context, this release introduces several enhancements :

• Package-server side : for MS/Windows XP and later, a new reactor to able the server to handle up to ten times the usual amount of parallel requests, as well as a better user feedback in case of errors (pserver down, unreachable, etc …)
• Scheduler side : some mechanisms are now available to ensure a better behavior in hard environments : broken commands can be automatically neutralized, and an optional lock system can be activated for systems under heavy load.

Amongst other things of interest, starting with this version we are GLPI 0.72 compliant.

As usual, installation instructions and packages are available in the Download section, and up-to-date documentations may be found in the Documentation section. Upgrade instructions are available on the upgrade procedures page. The Pulse 2 demo image has also been updated, amongst its evaluation guide.

Previous announces can be found here

via Pulse 2.

Google Chrome OS is an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web built around the core tenets of speed, simplicity and security… Blah Blah Blah here is the video:

Leena Rao over at TechCrunch reports that:

Google Sites, which launched a little under two years ago, have given businesses and consumers a way to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required, making it relatively easy for anyone without a technical background to build a simple website. Now, Google is making it infinitely easier for anyone to create sleek, attractive websites with new feature Templates.

Though templates isn’t a monumental additions to Google Sites, it is a complimentary, easy-to-use and free feature that’s included in Google Apps. The tie-in between the two only reinforces the strategy Google has of continuing to make Google Apps more appealing to businesses to perhaps take a significant bite out of Microsoft’s market share.

In a nut shell, it is Google VS Microsoft. Google (Ryu) wants to share fight for that Billion Dollar CMS market which Microsoft (Ken) now leads (in dollars).

via Google Sites Become Prettier With Templates | TechCrunch

Racktables is a nifty and robust solution for datacenter and server room asset management. It helps document hardware assets, network addresses, space in racks, networks configuration, etc.

Lots of system and network administrators come to the point where they have to maintain quite complex documentation of the racks, devices, links and network resources they have in control. Most of them end up with putting all that information in some kind of spreadsheet and update that spreadsheet every time they do changes. That may work more or less acceptable until more than one person is doing the job. After that it turns into a nightmare and most of the people find it extremely irritating.

This project aims to provide a complete solution to that problem. We — the authors of this project — are system and network administrators who once had to run a system of hundreds of servers, about 50 racks, thousands of IP addresses, lots of network equipment and other useful stuff lying around in the datacenters and offices of the company we worked for. And as everyone else we were trying to maintain various documentation in spreadsheets and eventually failed to maintain it well. Then we started thinking of a solution.

With RackTables you can:

• Have a list of all devices you’ve got
• Have a list of all racks and enclosures
• Mount the devices into the racks
• Maintain physical ports of the devices and links between them
• Manage IP addresses, assign them to the devices and group them into networks
• Document your firewall and NAT rules
• Describe your loadbalancing policy and store loadbalancing configuration
• Attach files to various objects in the system
• Create users, assign permissions and allow or deny any actions they can do
• Label everything and even everyone with flexible tagging system
• And, of course, you can access all that from anywhere in the world. All you need is a browser and internet connection.

via RackTables.

For almost all of its existence, Mozilla Messaging has been known for Thunderbird e-mail software with the traditional view that a person’s PC is the center of their computing existence.

Now, though, the Mozilla Foundation subsidiary’s scope is expanding beyond the confines of the computer under your desk or on your lap. In the near term, the new Thunderbird 3 is becoming more integrated with the Web. And in the longer term, the Raindrop project has the potential to lift your inbox all the way to the cloud.

“For us it’s really important to have Thunderbird. It’s also important to not stay in the blinders of that scenario,” Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher said in an interview at the company’s headquarters here. With Raindrop, “We’re focusing on best experience for messaging in a Web application.”

The change reflects the changing nature of computing. Where Thunderbird’s chief competition once was now software such as Microsoft’s Outlook, it’s now also got to reckon with Google’s Web-based Gmail service and its ilk, Ascher said.

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

via Mozilla’s e-mail group looks toward the cloud | Deep Tech – CNET News.

Google Apps users can expect to see significant improvements in the suite’s voice- and video-chat capabilities, as the company builds on Gmail’s current features in that area.

Gmail’s voice and video chats are now limited to one-to-one communications, but Google wants to broaden that capability to more than two participants and make it more robust all around for Apps.

“This [current Gmail capability] is the first step in a much broader set of features we hope to roll out over the next six to 12 months around video [and voice] chat capabilities,” said Rishi Chandra, a Google Apps product manager. “It’s a great opportunity for us to push that space along.”

via Google Apps will get stronger video chat capabilities | ITworld.