Welcome to Our New Blog

We support various software and technology platforms and we hope to share our thoughts, struggles, and successes!

Our new blog will cover items in our area of expertise.  This may include post related to Epicor’s software products, Microsoft development languages and platforms, web development and content management systems, iAutomate events and activities, and much more.

Hopefully you will find these posts informative and helpful.

We look forward to your comments,

AlAiN
President and Owner of iAutomate Inc.
www.iautomate.ca

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Open Atrium – WYSIWYG Editors – Important!

In our installations of FCKEditor or the latest CKEditor in Open Atrium (in response to our customer’s desire to have WYSIWYG capabilities for content creation), it is important to note that in Open Atrium:

If you allow image/media uploads for content using a WYSIWYG editor, it is not Group aware!  As a result, anyone can view the images/media uploaded by others from other groups even if they do not have access to that group while creating their own content.  All uploads are found in the same area for the site and not separated by groups.

This is a security concern for groups who may be posting charts and graphs that are confidential.  Private groups need to remain private which includes all its’ content.

It is our suggestion to disable the upload capability of any WYSIWYG editor you might be installing. 

Anyone what to make CKEditor uploads Group friendly :)

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Cooking with Drupal & Open Atrium

Here is an older post from my partner Brent that I have been meaning to link to for some time.

Social Media Tools: Cooking Up a Collaboration Web Site with Drupal & Open Atrium

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Open Atrium – Installation and WYSIWYG Editor Demonstration

At iAutomate we decided to use Development Seed’s Open Atrium solution as a base for our support web site. See our previous blog post for more information on Open Atrium. It is built on the Drupal platform and provide great flexibility to expand to our needs.

While reviewing the Open Atrium issue tracking site on github many users (including myself) have/had issues getting a WYSIWYG editor working.  For me, the first time I tried to install FCKEditor, I could not get it to work.   I then realized that I may have forgotten a step.  When I retried I got it to work.  Since then, I have had it work on various test installation without any issues.

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“no connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”

While working with an Epicor customer in installing a custom Cost Reporting solution developed by iAutomate using BackOffice, Explorer, SQL 2008, SQL Reporting Services (SSRS), and SQL Integration Service (SSIS), and SharePoint Server, and a custom C# application, we ran into an issue that cost us a couple days.

The issue came when we tried to launch our custom reports from SharePoint (SSRS was installed as SharePoint Integration mode).  We would get the following system error:

rserror1“no connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 443″

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Open Atrium – Choice for Support Site

We had been looking for an Open Source solution to help us collaborate with our customers on the various projects we undertake. We knew that we could build something using Drupal or Joomla!, but it would have taken some time to either build custom modules and/or a mash up of many of the available modules contributed by others.

The news of Open Atrium first beta release came just as we needed to get something up and running. We were quick to download and install. It was a very clean and an easy process to install and with a couple days we were up and running with one customer for our own beta testing.

Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features – a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all. This solution is build using Drupal and is easily extended and customizable.

What we liked about the Open Atrium solution was the ability to have groups with their own respective members.  This allows use to create a group for each customer project and allow our managers to add customer members.  Also, our managers can be assigned to multiple groups and get an over view of the activity of their groups on one dashboard.

There are so many other features and options that we like.  Read the rest of this entry to see a demonstration.

We plan on posting again on our implementation of Open Atrium about our successes, challenges, enhancements, and more.

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Epicor Perspective 2009

Caesars Palace Las Vegas here we come!

I’m very excited about the opportunity to attend Perspectives 2009, Epicor’s Global User Conference, scheduled for November 8-10, 2009. There will be multiple days of hands-on education, networking with industry peers, and over 500 sessions to choose from. The conference offers content directly applicable to my work on the (insert: project(s) or initiatives you are working on) and will allow me to network with a number of Epicor product experts and over 2000 Epicor users. Many of the technical presentations cover how to reduce costs, increase ROI and deal with compliance issues.

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Click here to learn more and hope to see you there.

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