Have you ever made an announcement and then realize how many things you left out? Well, here is the follow up to yesterday's announcement.

Big omission:

when we released, we forgot to upgrade the demo site http://us.demo.enfoldsystems.com/ . While  Enfold Desktop worked just fine with the older demo server, the more advanced features of the 4.5 version were not available,  which meant users were not seeing all the new features.  That oversight has been corrected.

One  misconception is that Enfold Desktop works only with Plone. 

This is half-true.  Desktop 4.5 works fine as a standard Webdav explorer.  We do not support this mode (i.e. don't ask for help),   but it works just fine.  In fact, I would like to see Enfold Desktop being picked up by other Content Management Systems.    

I use Enfold Desktop with mod_dav, Zope and Plone.  You can also browse Subversion. 

Try it: https://svn.enfoldsystems.com/public 

Unfortunately something is borked.  You cannot GET/PUT from DAV/SVN.  GET/PUT *does* work on mod_dav without Subversion.  Since this is not support its at the bottom of the queue.

A feature that may not be so obvious:  Scriptable context menus.

  Did you know you can add context menu's to Enfold Desktop using CMF Actions?  That's right.  Through the Web interface (portal_actions) you can actually add context menu's to your end user's Desktop!  This functionality has been there for years.  But until our documentation overhaul it was never documented. See http://www.enfoldsystems.com/software/desktop/docs/4.0/extending.html
 

If the software is not licensed the end user will see banners.

I will give you an example of two banners we added on launch of Desktop 4.5.

 

 
  The banners revolve around the Plone community and Enfold Systems product lines.  Maybe in the future we could have "Vote for Plone at Pact Publishing in 2009?"  If enough people used Enfold Desktop - we could empower end users to Vote!

Which brings me around to final question. 

Would you like Plone to ship with Enfold Desktop?  Do you think Enfold Desktop is a differentiator to other Open Source CMS?  Do you think the introductory text for Plone should talk about Enfold Desktop?  Our numbers show only about 5% of the total people downloading Windows Plone installer know about Enfold Desktop. 

• Should we add Enfold Desktop to the Plone Windows installer?  i.e. at the end of the installation notify the user they can have a Desktop integration?
• What's your thoughts?  Please bring them up on plone-users and on your blogs.
• Do you think more people would use Plone if they knew Enfold Desktop worked out of the box with Plone?

Over at Enfold Systems we have made two releases this week: Enfold Desktop and Enfold Proxy.  The release numbers indicate a "maintenance" release,  but  in fact significant enhancements and bug fixes were made to both products.  While Enfold Proxy is 100% commercial the same is not true for Enfold Desktop.  This post focuses on Enfold Desktop and the Plone WebDAV story.

Download Enfold Desktop

What's  New about Enfold Desktop 4.5

Quite a few things that have changed.  The big ticket items are listed below.

• A summary of what's new is described at:  http://www.enfoldsystems.com/software/desktop/new-desktop
• Windows Vista is now supported.  On Windows XP/2003/Vista 64bit versions will now work with Enfold Desktop.
• When a WebDAV does a PUT on an existing resource, the item is now versioned.
• WebDAV now triggers events that can be acted upon by Content Rules.
• If you WebDAV DELETE a document which  break a  links; link integrity will generate valid XML response.  Enfold Desktop will actually  prompt you and notify you of this breakage -- you have to see this feature.. (it's awesome).

Misconceptions about Enfold Desktop 4.5

While talking to people on #plone there were  some misconceptions about Enfold Desktop that  ought to be cleared up.

• Enfold Desktop comes in two parts.  The client (Enfold Desktop) and the server components.  The client will only run on Windows.  BUT, the server components are cross platform.  If you are using WebDAV with Plone, regardless of platform you should absolutely be using Enfold Desktop server components.
• Enfold Desktop licensing.  The licensing is quite simple.  If you use Enfold Desktop client and you are not licensed there will be tasteful ads displayed at the bottom of the explorer menu.  If you do not want the ads,   simply purchase a license.  That will not only remove the ads but also entitle you to support.  If you haven't upgraded,  you will see a "New Desktop Available" badge on top of the banner ads.  Even if you are not purchasing the software, you can still help  by upgrading to the latest version of Enfold Desktop.

Getting the Software

The software comes in several flavors.  

• Enfold Desktop client.  This is the Windows Explorer shell integration (written entirely in Python) that end users install on their computers.
• Add-on Installer for Python 2.3 or Python 2.4.  These are Windows installers for Plone or Enfold Server.  Simply click to install them on the server.
  
• Add-on Archive for Python 2.3 or Python 2.4.  These are tarballs for any platform.  Simply uncompress and copy to Products folders.
• Buildout recipe.  https://svn.enfoldsystems.com/public/desktop/release/4.5/

We have gone the extra mile to make it easy for integrators to  install and use Enfold Desktop for  their Plone projects.  We hope this brings more attention to the WebDAV story on the Zope/CMF/Plone platforms.  We have also overhauled  documentation for all of our products, including  Enfold Desktop. If you want to ask usage questions, Mailing list for Enfold Desktop is also available:  http://lists.enfoldsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/community-desktop .