In less than 3 months after the release of the first beta, the Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2 is available for download.

Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2 comes with new features like:

• New Portal Explorer based on ExtJS 2.2
• WebDAV support for the Sense/Net content repository (PFS)
• Import & Export form content repository
• Document Library portlet added
• Improvement is other portlets
• Content Store REST service and CMIS service prototype
• A ton of bug fixes and optimizations

Please register at our website for beta test and/or download the latest release.

Happy holidays.

The original Portal Explorer has been the administrative interface for Sense/Net 6.0 since the beginning of development - that means almost a year and half. It was well constructed but not really lightweight - neither on client side nor on server side.

We decided that it was time to radically change the workings of it and with the lead of Attila we are proud to introduce a faster and better administrative interface - Portal Explorer 2.0.

The first and most important difference that you will notice that Portal Explorer 2.0 is much faster than its ancestor when it comes to refreshing panels. This is mainly because it uses services to communicate with the server and uses client side controls instead of server side ones. We've migrated from the Ext JS 1.1 JavaScript framework to Ext JS 2.2 which also gave a performance boost. 

What you will probably admire at least as much - if not more - is new functionality added: multiple contents can be selected at once in the list pane, quick search in the grid have been introduced and some minor features tweaked to make everyday work more efficient in Portal Explorer. More...

We have developed a CMIS draft implementation in Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2, soon to be released. It is possibly the first .NET implementation, as all supporting companies except from Microsoft are JAVA based. It is surely the first open source implementation on the .Net platform.

What is CMIS? Quoting WikiPedia: “Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a proposed standard consisting of a set of Web services for sharing information among disparate content repositories that seeks to ensure interoperability for people and applications using multiple content repositories. EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, SAP and Oracle have joined forces to propose CMIS, the first Web services technical specification for exchanging content with and between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. The proposed standard has been registered for public comment with OASIS. More specifically, Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a technical specification domain model (data and services) for interacting with an ECM repository via Web Services. It provides a content management domain-specific data model, a set of generic services that act on that data model and several protocol bindings for these services, including: SOAP and Representational State Transfer (REST)/(Atom).”

Since Sense/Net 6.0 is both an Enterprise Portal and an Enterprise Content Management System, with its own Content Repository, we wanted to showcase how easy it is to use the .NET platform, WCF and Sense/Net 6.0 to implement the standard.

Our demo is a two way implementation, because our content repository has a CMIS service interface and our portal has a CMIS client Webpart (portlet). So other CMIS clients can access our contents, but our portal can aggregate content from other CMIS compliant systems, such as next generation SharePoint, Alfresco and others.

We are also building an online CMIS demo, which is accessible from our website, but is under construction, so it might not work all the time. The demo features two CMIS webparts. One is able to navigate the content repository; the other is able to aggregate content from two sources that you can enter. The screenshot above is the CMIS test webpart, showing the PFS root contents. The services can also be accessed, just copy the URI-s from the input boxes. It even works with a simple browser, showing XML. There is no authentication, so no login is required. 

The source code will be available within a few days, please stay tuned. is available for download from http://www.sensenet.hu/download 

Read more about the proposed CMIS standard at OASIS: http://xml.coverpages.org/cmis.html#biro; http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2008-09-10-a.html

Our team lead developer is a real geek, and we love him for this. He wrote a Microsoft Power Shell plugin that enables users, especially developers and command line addict sysops to access the Portal File System (PFS) from a command line interface.

As you can see from the screesnhot, the first commands install the plugin, so when you type CD TNG: you actually switch the current directory to the PFS root. A simple DIR command lists the folders from the PFS, indicating the content type, YourInternet is not a Folder, but a Site.

And now for something completely different. The crazy stuff comes now. You change to YourDocuments. DIR gives you nothing, as the folder is empty. But there is the NEW-ITEM command, which creates ECMS contents right from the command line. So why not create some cars, by which I mean Car content types. Another DIR and the cars are listed... But you can also list any of their Fields, in the next example the complex DIR gives you the make and Model fields of the cars.

Another example, when you read a reference property of a content. In this example, we navigated to the IMS folder where users and groups are store, and listed the Members of the Administrator group.

Plans for future functionality include mounting multiple PFS instances and copying contents from one to another, using the copy command. Stay tuned, you geeks.

Nice job, Gyebi.

Yeeeesssss. Portal builders, developers and end users will all love this feature. Now you can access your contents from Total Commander, Windows Explorer or Visual Studio, or anything that supports the WebDAV protocol. You can even map it as a drive. So you can hav P:\ as the root folder of your Portal File System. Check out the screenshot with the first working prototype.

This is a big boost to productivity for both builders and end users, because now you can work from your favourite tools, no need to open Portal Explorer most of the time. When you save a content, it is automatically versioned, there is permission check, etc. You can also open office documents, Word and Excel directly from Office and save it back, so there is no need to download, change and upload files one by one. Drag and drop move and copy also works.

On the screesnhot, there is a Content View open in Visual Studio, there is a Content Type Definition open in IE as XML, and you can see the PFS folders in Windows Explorer and Total Commander, in the latter the PFS root is mapped to Z:\ so the folder is Z:\System\Schema\ContentTypes\GenericContent.

Screenshot made with Windows Vista and Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2 prerelease.

Content Types are the heart and soul of Sense/Net 6.0.

A content type is a reusable set of fields you want to apply to certain contents.  Everything (every content) you see in Portal Explorer and on Sense/Net 6.0 portal pages is defined by Content Types - all the files, users, groups, webcontents, page templates, pages and even folders.

If you will be building a site the first thing you will be bumping into are Content Types. For example if you want to run a news site the first thing you will have to do before being able to start off with any kind of designing or programming is define what an article will contain - define its Content Type. Lets say you decide that an Article needs to have an author, title, abstract,  text, and related articles. You will have to create this Content Type. From then on you will be able to start creating and managing these articles in the backend of your portal via the Portal Explorer. And only after that will you will be creating specific Content Views to display these articles on your website in the layout(s) you prefer.

If you want to dig deeper into this topic read the wiki page on Content Types and Tamás's article on Content Type Definitions. If you want to move on check how you can create a Content View to display a Content Type.

I am happy to announce that we will publish Sense/Net 6.0 source code on a regular basis, weekly or daily - we haven't decided that yet. This serves multiple purposes: we publish bugfixes for issues that are brought to us, and to enable individual or modular features appear before Beta milestones. Every check in will of course include a summary of changes: new features and fixes, changes to the API, etc.

It's been a long way. It started with the Sense/Net Portal Engine 1.0 back in 1998. From this construction evolved the 2.0 and upcoming versions all the way up to the Sense/Net Portal Engine 5.5 Release 2 released in 2006. This was a truly enterprise CMS but with the source closed. Two years ago we decided to start from scratch and develop a radically new concept under an open source lincense. And today we've come to the point when all of the Sense/Net team is happy to announce that 

Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 1 has been released!

This is the end of a long road, and the beginning of an even longer one. By opening up the project and the source we want you to use, spread and help the develop a project truly unique.

Join us on this journey 

And harvest the most of SenseNet 6.0.

I am happy to announce that Sense/Net 6.0 (codenamed Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG) will be released later today under GPL. Those who registered for beta testing will receive an e-mail alert as soon as the code is available on CodePlex. This might happen quite late, but definitely today! ;-)