CMDBuild Newsletter n. 33

September 2012

CMDBuild is a configurable web application to model and manage a database containing assets (CMDB stands for "Configuration and Management Data Base") and handle related workflow operations.

CMDBuild is promoted by the Municipality of Udine and developed by Tecnoteca srl.

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Work in progress

After the recent release of CMDBuild 2.0, the development activities for the project go on according to the roadmap introduced during the last CMDBuild Day.

It includes:

• a first close release which manages new parameters to configure a semplified version of the CMDBuild user interface, and metadata to file in Alfresco
• a second more important release, with the introduction of the “views” to access to informations extracted from one or more related classes, as if they were normal CMDBuild classes.

Since the CMDBuild 2.0 release includes the first point in part, the remaining improvements (Alfresco metadata) will be included in one of next “minor versions” (2.0.x).

The 2.1 version, which will probably be released at the beginning of 2013, will then focus on the implementation of the "views", awaited by many users.

We will provide more options to define a “view”:

• by saving the result of a search filter
• specifying restriction criteria on rows and columns when defining permissions for every user group
• writing custom SQL queries

In the first two cases you can work on single tables and the “views” generated in this way will be accessible both for read and write, in the third case you will have only-read access.

The development of this new functionality is carried out with a contribution of Region Emilia Romagna.

CMDBuild for BIM

In the meantime the staff of Tecnoteca is developing the BIM project (Building Information Modeling) together with Professors and Researchers of the University of Udine.

At the moment we are focusing on:

• the study and analysis of possible standards to support, including in particular IFC, Cobie, CityGML, GML, gbXML
• the study of open source tools which are potentially useful for the project, including in particular the BIMserver system and the BIMsurfer viewer

Purpose of the project is the possibility of using CMDBuild as principal repository of information treated within BIM solutions, aimed at the management of estate assets.

In this field CMDBuild not only can provide its native mechanisms of "asset lifecycle management" (inventory, workflow management, report / dashboards design), but it will also interoperate with other BIM-compliant tools (design, structural analysis, energy verification, etc.) supporting the main standards for data interchange and viewing their graphical outputs.

CMDBuild in the field

According to what we said during the CMDBuild Day last May, the Interaction Group society is preparing a dedicated architecture (technical, application and service management) to make the CMDBuild application available in “cloud”.

Recipients of this initiative are firms and small Public Administrations (2 or 3 IT operators), which would solve their needs with a preconfigured CMDBuild standard version.

Certain technical activities, including CMDBuild packaging, system management and second-level helpdesk, have been assigned to Tecnoteca, which will directly take part in the project.

The service will be activated at the beginning of next year.

More than 1.000 downloads in September

In September, when the 2.0 version was released, we achieved a new record for the largest number of CMDBuild application downloads.

On the website of the project, three days before the month end, you can see 600 downloads, against about 350 of previous months.

On the specialized SourceForge repository the downloads are more then 400, against an average of 250 in the previous months.

This seems to indicate that are several firms / companies that adopted CMDBuild and that – on the occasion of the 2.0 release – have updated their installation to the latest available version.

Localizations and English manuals

Besides German and Japanese localizations, announced with the previous newsletter, CMDBuild 2.0 includes now also the Dutch localization, provided by Eric van Rheenen.

With CMDBuild 2.0 we released also the Workflow Manual in English, translated by Eric van Rheenen and Marta Romanelli (collaborator of Tecnoteca).

At the moment we are translating in English the Webservice Manual, available with CMDBuild 2.1.