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Some of the suggestions above says that you should just chuck everything haphazardly into a big pile and then use search engines to trawl the whole mess. I don't buy that. Instead, (like some others) I'd suggest a proper content management system such as the ones from http://www.alfresco.com/, http://www.interwoven.com/ or http://www.hummingbird.com/.

The reason for this suggestion is that I know that these systems are being used by organisations which handle, as OP said, hundreds of thousands of documents and which have satellite offices (e.g. large multinational lawfirms). They provide several benefits such as the possibility to structure projects, have both project related documents and e-mails saved and indexed in the project folders, allows for searching and proper document version chains (meaning that you can revert to older versions of documents if some klutz breaks a newer version).

Of course, this means quite an investment, a learning curve for everyone at your company and, most likely, the hiring of an individual with experience of the chosen system.

Why not just run "xdm" or other XDMCP compatible display manager on the box? Then you can log in remotely via Exceed , Cygwin/X (on Windows) or similar tools with built-in XDMCP browser. (See also: Linux XDMCP How-To) -- With XDMCP, you can have full access to a Linux (or other Unix) desktop.

Docs Open. Sure, it's Windows based, but if you are a real company playing in the real world, you are already Windows based by now.

Really... your data is worth too much to trust to some FOSSie app supported by an unemployed hippy living in his mom's basement and his 15 year old boy-toy. And if it's not... well, you won't have much use for a document storage solution anyway. Also, "free software" just means you get your head chopped off one centimeter at a time by the armada of consultants it's going to take to support it. Better to just pay da man up front and enjoy the free support your IT staff gets for the life of the product. FOSS never, ever, wins in the TCO battle.

Apache can't even figure out how to get their app to install properly across all Lunix versions, and you honestly expect people to trust them with a data storage solution? Puh Leeze. Yeah, I'll be modded down, but the truth always is around here.

The parent is right, Hummingbird 's Exceed is definitely what you want. CygwinX is a joke IMHO for professional work, it crashes endlessly and the performance is horrible. Exceed has got good performance (even though it is Java, hehe), and a very thorough implementation of the X11 standard. It even has the GL extensions! It's expensive, but probably easier to requisition than a non-windows desktop.

For the whole package, you can kill explorer.exe in Windows, and set Exceed up to route "root mouse actions to X" and you can even fire up your favorite window manager. I used to run Fluxbox full screen over SSH from our development server all the time. So, in a way, I just made the dev server my Unix workstation.

Keep in mind that people in large companies would usually rather do things by the book than cater to the exception. Unless you are buddies with the CTO, it's not likely you're going to convince anyone to brush aside any long-standing policies.

We are a huge government department and our group supports an enterprise system based on Hummingbird DM http://www.hummingbird.com/. We started using the product for all documentation, revision requests, specs, etc. Works well for us as its API allows us to integrate it with pretty much anything out there (including MS office suite and more). Probably overkill for a small workgroup. This product is also very popular with law firms.

From what I gather, twiki is ubercool but you have to work within it. Hummingbird DM adapts Windows and standard OA tools to work with it (i.e. practically no learning curve).

There is also MyDMS http://dms.markuswestphal.de/about.html which is purely web based but open-source.

http://www.hummingbird.com/products/enterprise/dm/ index.html?cks=y

Works great, far from open source but we are using it for about 100 thousand documents with about 2500 users.

We don't need another Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox issue.

Exactly the same here - we use SharpOwl for timesheets, and that has a load of dodgy scripting that does nothing in Firefox, although it doesn't use and ActiveX which is a relief!

We also use perhaps the worlds worst document management system called DocMan - this has a retarded web interface called CyberDocs. CyberDocs uses a combination of ActiveX and Java to implement it's web interface, and the funny thing is that the code is so broken, that the Java only runs properly in the MS JVM, throwing exceptions and stopping if the Sun JVM is used instead. In short, it's completely non-standard, and the functionality isn't great either.

It's just a shame that out dumb-ass IT department pick these packages for us, even though they aren't the ones to end up using them :(

Try here as a starting point.

Enjoy!

I've found at work and at home that Windows (since late NT4) can be quite stable ~if~ you don't install tons of junk software.
[...]
My machine doesn't lock up and it doesn't crash and neither does hers.

Huh. When I had an NT4 box sitting on my desk at work, it crashed so often, I kept a record of its crashes. It had a median uptime of 96 hours. That's 4 days. It was horrible.

None of us could ever prove it, but we suspected the problem was Exceed.

This was my long term experience with NT4. My machine at home dual boots between Debian unstable and Win98. I don't really use winXP machines for any long term. I can't comment on the state of the world now, but my experience with NT4 was a suckfest.

You should check out Hummingbird hardware software solution. An applied usage is to map locations with pictures. Based on the camera GPS location and measured settings of the focal settings and length of the lens. Items in a picture can be mapped also. This would allow sychronous pictures to be taken and soon we will have the exact coordinates of most addresses. Pretty cool stuff!! Turbo-Mapquest here we come!! http://www.hummingbird.com/solutions/gis.html
Over-n-out
SWAT-LEAD

I think you're wrong about this. Exceed was brought to market by Hummingbird, who is still in business, to this day. See their ad on page 43 of August's "Linux Magazine".

My 0.02's worth...

I find using an integrated file management system (such as Hummingbird's Docs Open) at work simplifies searching for documents immensly. (Our database scans c.200,000 files so Windows find would be a joke!) Like any filing system however, it does require the users to think a little about where they store their files, by matter number and client number, and how they are named. After a couple of anguished searches for labouriously produced documents, most colleagues get the knack, but there's always the odd one or two who don't.

The drawback of this system is that it is not effective for searches of content however (just too slow). Perhaps Google could provide a plug-in, now that would be neat.

Yeah, they work for Corel, Alias, Hummingbird, MKS, Cognos, Zero Knowledge, Blackberry, Nothern Telecom ...

I don't know if you were joking or not but our company is switching document management software to Hummmingbird DM with integration into Outlook as our primary user interface. IMHO, we are sliding deeper and deeper into the into the MS lockin trap.

I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.

The same goes for OpenSSL and a bunch of other tools that would be great to have but that I cannot count on being there.

On the other front, having Gnome as a gui readily available is definitely deserving of kudos. If only I had more than ssh access to most of the boxes I work with, I could actually use it. We have Hummingbird Exceed, but it's such a HUGE pain to set up. Neither myself, a reasonably good programmer, nor any of the sysadmins at the very large bank where I work know how to set it up.

Alas.

-- Kevin J. Rice

If you notice, the X Server in use is actually Cygwin/XFree86 rather than something built in to this system. The actual system runs in console mode only, and thanks to the flexibility of X, allows apps run in the console to connect back to any X server running on the machine.

The point is, if you can find a rootless X server for MS Windows, you can do so. The only one I'm aware of is eXceed (although I don't keep up with them because I have no need for them). It's commercial, but is usually cheaper or free through a university or college.

And seems like cheap options have long been available DOS/Windows NFS clients for a long time. In 1994, this summary mentions XFS (shareware NFS client from Germany, not the SGI filesystem) TSoft and Sun's PC-NFS.

Nowdays you also have at least these option, and you are right, many are not cheap.

• HummingBird $300 My past impressions were always of good quality and features.
• Reflection $88 I know this name.
• ProNFS $40 (shareware?)
• DiskAccess $179
• SuperNFS $160 Found with google.

Yes, and yes. I know... IHBT.

Exceed is not free. Multiple desktops on XP are free though, it's a powertoy thingamajig, and nvidia cards come with their own, slightly better working multi-desktop utility as well.

a document management system, such as those by Hummingbird

a portal, such as Sharepoint

We use both of these. Sharepoint (yeah, it's Microsoft -- deal with it) is great; it'll allow a lot of customization, looks snazzy, etc., etc. Hummingbird's products -- I hesitate to bring them up, because they're so problematic (and their technical support is atrocious), but when they work, they're rather fabulous. They also have a KM product which can crawl the DM (document management) repository, web sites, databases, file servers, and more, and present all the results in a collated view.

have you ever heard of documentum, livelink, imanage, hummingbird? these are all big players in the ENTERPRISE content management game. i would really like to see you walk into a 3000 user enterprise and say "oh ok, sure, just store all of your documents in CVS. its really great and its free."

i think that this book looks like a fantastic piece of work. we run our entire knowledge management system on livelink and since it moved from a user base of 30 to 150 people, things have gotten a little out of control. our taxonomies are badly defined, we are duplicating content all over the place rather than re-use. so after reading the overview and the free chapter, i think this book would be HIGHLY beneficial for large organisations that do use really solid, profressional content mangement systems.

so, the bottom line is, i think your comment is bollocks! :P

nope

he is looking to export the display of a windoze box. XWin32 does the contrary: it allows you to open apps running on a unix machine on your windows machine--another one of those is exceed, which can be used with the PuTTY ssh client for example.

The contrary is much trickier, and usually involves the use of windows terminal server, as outlined in posts above.

Or if you need to server, NFS Maestro Server. No, it isn't free. But if you have to buy one - take a look at NFS Maestro By Hummingbird.
These are the same people that make Exceed. - Though instead of Exceed, I bought Xmanager by NetSarang (lot less $ and did SSH tunnel, etc)

Good luck on your search.

Uh-huh

Its a hell of lot easier to display those remote windows to UNIX platforms than M$ platform

Bzzzt! Exceed

Next!

A while back, our company was looking into getting some content management software as well. This stuff (Hummingbird) looked really cool, but our small (less than 50 people) company couldn't validate the tens of thousands of dollars we'd have to spend to get it, not to mention the several thousand per year fee to continue using it.
You really have to ask yourself what you want. These software packages are REALLY expensive--sometimes more expensive than the annual salary for a new-grad CompSci major. Do you need all the features of a full-blown content management system, or do need something that someone at your company could dedicate some time to and write?

First lets talk physical removal from any machine. Even if you can't carry it around with you, you need not have it hard wired to the box. These boxes from are nice additions to keep you away from things like fan noise. And/Or you might opt for an older, all in one machine, that has an OS and can access the application server(s), like this one that you can find at.

There are a ton of web based email servers that host their own web client. Post.Office by is the best of breed, with other playing in the field for less money. If your local "viewer" is a windows hosted boxen, you can use Exceed from and you will find you can run x11 apps like they lived on your box.

You can find information about mirroring at, and more about load balancing at

You can employee all of these to secure your "server" machine, and sleep shoundly that if you have a hardware failure, you can still be running on your way. However I must inform you that the absolute best way to remove problems from your machine is deinstall windows of any kind.

I work for a small economic consulting firm as a systems administrator. Our company receives all types of documentation everyday from all of our clients, and we create many, many reports ourselves. What I did was write a small application that lets you check scanned documents into a MySQL database, and then runs through newly scanned documents using some OCR software (I can't remember what the name of it is...I did it a while back) to create an index of keywords that you can (slowly) search on. I did this because there is software called Hummingbird that works really well, but costs an ASSLOAD of money (in the tens-of-thousands range). It took me about three weeks on and off to write, but you could probably hire some intern to do what I did for a summer project for pretty cheap. Our server that we put together for the document repository has an 80gig hard drive, a 1.4 GH AMD processor, and has worked just fine for us so far.

Toronto:

ATI (the chip company)
IBM labs (lot of Java work)
Hummingbird (X on Windows)

A link for this is at http://www.hummingbird.com/products/nc/exceed/inde x.html

Let's see... Besides http://www.hummingbird.com/products/nc/exceed/inde x.html, there's X-Win32, WinaXe, and MI/X"

If you run VNC over SSH compression I find it to be a decent soultion. I usually use the viewer with the -bgr233 (xvncviewer) or restrict pixels to 8-bot (for windows).

Someone on the rdesktop mailing list mentioned creating a RDP server for UNIX, similar to the VNC server. How well it works, if it works with MS RDP clients, and where to find more information I do not know.

Lastly, Citrix has created versions of MetaFrame for Solaris 2.6, 7, and 8 on SPARC and 7 and 8 on x86, AIX 4.3.3, and HP-UX 11.0. Too bad they don't do Linux.

Check out the products available from Hummingbird, Documentum, and Eastman. A long list of document management vendors lives here.
---

you're probably thinking of hummingbird's inetd...Hummingbird Communication Limited...completely separate to microsoft

When working as a consultant, I came across a company which was using a product called 'Fulcrum KnowledgeServer', made by Hummingbird. I can't go into too many details because of an NDI, but let's just say they had what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of documents in PDF all over their file servers.

It looked like they were publishing everything in their company in PDF, and avoiding other office document formats entirely. In any case, Fulcrum apparently supports just about everything you asked for.

It comes with a desktop app which everyone was previously using to perform the searches. All documents were categorized by metadata such as date, creator, maintainer, and a whole tree of categories.

My job in this case was to integrate the search capabilities into their intranet site, a task which was surprisingly simple once I was able to track down the documentation and libraries (of the correct version, mind) I needed. Seemed to be a pretty powerful product, if managed well. I have absolutely no idea how much it cost or exactly how it worked, I just interfaced with it. However, the documents were available at the file level by network shares, so it sounds like it'll do what you ask.

There's an application suite called "Exceed" that is an X Server for windows, and it can serve apps so that Windows is the native window manager, putting an entry on the taskbar and everything. It requires Exceed to be running as an app, but I'm sure that if enough people wanted it they might be willing to write another version to be a service...

It's made by Hummingbird Software and is expensive, but my school (Arizona State University) provides a license for students to use it for student use.

One of the things that's always been amazing about Alexa, and I think that people are increasingly realizing the power, is not just that you're able to see all this information about traffic patterns but that information slightly processed is being fed back to the users.

Enterprise portal suite [which] is the industry's first, fully integrated, scaleable, end-to-end portal system

Francois
Schiettecatte
FS Consulting
Internet: francois@wais.com (now here)
435 Highland Avenue
Rochester, NY 14620
Phone : (716) 256-2850
Fax : (716) 473-9695

At work I currently use the application Exceed. It is an excellent client package with a huge number of options. It has the cool feature of allowing you to emulate the X environment of whatever machine you are connecting to or to just have X-style windows pop up in your normal windows environment. I have not really messed with it very much, as now that I've gotten it working I just run it and pretend that I have my own Sun workstation, but I assure you it is an amazing program with tons of tweakable features. It is produced by Hummingbird Communications. Exceed Product Link

Most of my clients use LDAP for authentication too, and I have yet to find a Contivity-like server on Linux that will support a LDAP-aware Windows client for tunnelling all protocols.

The most that I have been able to find is Socks and the server can run on Linux, and it also supports Kerberos. The Socks Windose client can be setup to tunnel all TCP and UDP ports to the Socks server.

Now, if someone could make Vtun LDAP-aware and make a windows client....
Jehreg

Try Hummingbird SOCKS for transparent access to servers outside a firewall. More info

Greetings!

We evaluated Tarantella a while back as an interesting way to make a single, cohesive environment out of a variety of application environments (shell apps, X apps, Windows apps). Then we woke up and realized that it was overhead and that user training was the most critical function necessary - not hiding the applications behind a web browser.

If you're interested in having business users that don't understand X use a Linux app in a browser, then you'll also be interested in products like GraphOn, Exceed Web, and the X11R6.3 X browser plugin (also known as Broadway or LBX). Sun/Netscape/iPlanet/AOL/Time Warner/Great Satan also has a competitive product they acquired from a startup that if I recall properly gave them the "iPlanet" name. This can be found at http://www.iplanet.com/products/infrastructure/rem ote_access/s_web_entprs/index.html .

Actually, there's a few of them. Exceed (from Hummingbird), Excursion, XLink, MI/X from Micro Images. I also read in a slashdot discussion a while ago a mention of a free X server for Windows, but I don't remember anything about it.

Well, err, uhm... *cough* Thin-X *cough* (That's the closest link I can find. I guess their PR department hasn't been saying much.)

I think SCO has something like this too.

Humminbird software I was testing 2 years ago, simulated a printer driver that was automaticaly converting a printed document to the DigitalPaper format.

Can Hummingbird make similar software that enables (Windows) users to print to the "virtual" printer that automaticaly:

convert printed document to XML or PDF

post/upload it to a specified location on a selected Internet/Intranet server?

Here at my office the Unix guys that have been forced into reading Excel documents and Visio drafts have found that the package 'Exceed' meets their demands quite well. It is made by Hummingbird software and allows for a virtual desktop as well as X connectivity. It's a commercial package, but one that (IMHO) is worth getting. It *may* support ssh as well, but I'm not sure.

I've used Exceed with success under both Windows and OS/2. It's got a few (mostly forgivable) quirks, but otherwise works fine with all X apps I tried to use it with.

It costs real-live money, but free evaluation copies are available. It's much faster than vnc on my 100mbit half-duplex lan, and integrates X stuffs nearly seamlessly with Windows once set up.

Versions have also existed for Win16 and DOS, iirc.