View Larger Map

Östersund is described as ‘the number one winter city’ and it was certainly picturesque – covered in snow and fairly chilly outside. Yesterday was a beautiful crisp and sunny day so we got to see it at its best (although my taxi-based iPhone image might not convince).

We were guests of Kristen Snyder who was fantastically enthusiastic, knowledgeable and a very welcoming host. Along with her colleagues and Magnus Berger from Avedas they showed us their implementation of Converis - which you can see in action on Kristen’s profile page.

Kristen had also kindly arranged for an early evening meal so that we had time to catch our plane back to Stockholm. It was a good chance to sample the local cuisine so I went for the reindeer – which I can heartily recommend.

From an enterprise level, Sett Gottleib celebrates Finally, Drupal Gets Deployment. His post points to Greg Dunlap’s work on a Deploy module. Sett also references the Drush module which can handle filesystem level deployment. 

At the university we have a similar set of requirements and have been developing our own mechansim (with support from a friendly local development company). I’ll provide links to our efforts as and when they’re available.

From a major player perspective, Dries Buytaert tells us Obama is using Drupal.

I didn’t know that Obama was also a web developer, but it is a great vote in favour of Drupal.

Have you got permission to wear a hat like that?

They’re promoting a site called Web 2 Rights which has various toolkits which may be of some  interest.

• IP toolkit
• IPR diagnostic tool
• IPR Flowchart (PDF)

It doesn’t seem to like taking a picture of itself so the thumbnail top right is taken using Pearl Crescent’s dandy Page Server extension in Firefox. However, here’s this blog as seen by the system:

Don’t you just love those rounded corners?

The SimpleAPI thumbnail generator only seems to be able do 5 thumbnails on a page – which is probably a good limit for their bandwidth and servers. The site’s Japanese so I apologise but I have not read the manual!

The fields are fairly obvious… it should:

• Record who the colleague is
• Ask who the owner of the content is – full details
• Ask who the intended audience is. Any restrictions?
• Ask where it should go – URLs please!
• Link to policies where appropriate (if they want content on the homepage, does it fit?)
• Ensure that a start date and a finish date are recorded
• Ask for priority? (even though no one would say not urgent).
• Allow Word docs (and other files) to be added to the request
• Convert those Word docs automatically into HTML!! (in an ideal world).
• Ask whether the content needs to be referred to from other places or highlighted in some way
• Store all requests in a tracking database, and alert the team or the person on duty that a new task has arrived.