Authenticated SMTP.

We're currently adding to ProjectForum the ability to use SMTP servers that require authentication; the plan is to support the common "LOGIN" and "PLAIN" methods. If you have an SMTP server requiring authentication and would like to help us test our changes, please get in touch.

Patriot Act haunts Google service

This Globe and Mail article discusses another aspect related to the privacy of vendor-hosted services. In this case, the attempted widespread usage of Google services by two Canadian institutions, Lakehead University and the world-renowned SickKids Hospital, generated severe (and legally driven) backlash.

Given the overarching powers of the USA Patriot Act, the USA government can effectively have complete and arbitrary access to any information stored on USA servers, such as those run by Google; the article covers some of the potential implications of that. While the particular service here was Google's SaaS tools, it's obviously far more general than that. Similar issues arose a while back when some Canadian banks were outsourcing some services and hence financial records to US companies. Again, the potential for conflict with Canadian privacy laws was large. This sort of thing should be a concern for organizations in any country outside the USA, not just Canada.

Hosting Choices Document.

For convenience, we've combined into a single web page the recent blog series on hosting choices, which discusses the tradeoffs between vendor-hosted and self-hosted web 2.0 workgroup productivity applications.

Q: Can I add META tags to the page?

At present, there is no 'hook' to allow adding additional material to the HEAD area of the HTML pages, where directives such as META tags would normally be placed. Adding material to other parts of the page can be done via the content includes within themes.

Q: Can I change the time zone in my group?

Normally, CourseForum and ProjectForum will use the time zone of the server machine running the software. On most platforms (Windows being the current exception), the site administrator can be change the time zone used, via the Site Administration pages. This change affects all forums across the entire site. At present, there is no way to change the time zone for just an individual group.

Google Sites.

An interesting follow-up to some of the discussions about hosting, particularly what happens if your hosted product vendor has a "change of direction" or "business interruption".

Many of you may remember a fairly sophisticated hosted wiki+app builder called JotSpot, which Google purchased a couple of years ago. The newly released Google Sites is what appears to remain of the technology.

Many former JotSpot users had high hopes with the Google purchases (more resources to improve things, cool!), but what they got was a pale shadow of what they had in the past, stripping out what most people liked. For probably a representative opinion, check out this call to bring back JotSpot from collaboration guru David Coleman.

Patch Version 6.0.4.

We've made some more changes to CourseForum and ProjectForum version 6, and have updated our download site and hosting servers to version 6.0.4.

This patch version addresses problems with forum permissions, RSS feeds, and intra-forum links. Full details can be found in our changelog.