Coolest KnowNow Apps - Whiteboard

A long time ago (crica 2003/4) there was an app created to allow an energy broker to trade futures. This app presented on single page with the various futures that were traded in a grid format. The brokers could place bid/asks on behalf of their clients and close deals.

I actually saw this same page on a huge whiteboard at the energy brokers company.

What was awesome about this? That we have an AJAX application at that time and it was a business application used every day!

GoDaddy Windows + Wordpress won't work

This was a painful lesson.

1. Talked to GoDaddy and they say you can use WordPress w/ Windows account
2. Download was easy, setup was easy, and I could write new posts to the blog and create new pages.
3. Tried to change the configuration and that's where it fell apart.

I used K2, Tarski and the default Kubrick themes to test out if I could change options and none of them seemed to work. A few days of debugging showed that some of the options were not created in MySQL! Some more research showed just a slew of weird behavior :-(

Called GoDaddy again and they said "we don't support WordPress on Windows accounts!" Well, I sure wish they had told me that before I debugged PHP and the various themes!

So, DotNetNuke that will support the non-profit organization's web site. It actually downloaded easily and I was able to quickly create a site leveraging several different modules!

Yeah, I know - most of you are saying GoDaddy? Windows? Why didn't you use the LAMP stack that you know so well. I said non-profit organization, right? And, we have a custom ASP app that locked us into Windows.

KnowNow's secret sauce

I was contemplating what was so special about KnowNow and I came up w/ two features that encapsulate it all:

Dynamic creation of topics while enforcing permissions

The event router allowed you to create any topic and posts messages to them. And, anyone with the permissions could consume those messages. For e.g. let's say you run a web site and want to allow users on the web site to chat w/ each other - gmail supports this! How do you allow two users , say Fred & George, to start chatting with each other?

• Your back end systems need to create a secure channel where just the two of them can communicate and others cannot snoop, or even know of this conversation. How would you do this in JMS?
• What if Fred wants invite Harry into the conversation? Now, Fred needs to give permission to Harry to be able to read and write from that channel.

Imagine hundreds of such conversations and you run into problems with database storage, and near real time delivery. How does the server 'push' the information out?

Real time delivery to the browser

OK, so RIA is prevalent now. Well, it wasn't 7 years ago, I guess I would say it wasn't 4 years ago. Rohit & Adam's vision did come to reality!

Point is that with Comet and Ajax we now have browser apps that come close to rivaling fat applications on the desktop. Google docs is a great example! But, KnowNow could have given you that ability back in 2002! For your own applications on your web site!

I wonder if others out there (ex-KN, customers, or partners) think that some other features were unique???

It was a blast while it lasted!

KnowNow - Gone Now

The patent that was pending for years was finally issued on May 27th, 2008. How ironic!