Quoddy is an Open Source Enterprise Social Network, which shares a common "look and feel", and substantial functionality, with consumer facing Social Networks like Facebook or Google+ as well as proprietary Enterprise Social Network products like the products from Jive Software and Yammer among others. Quoddy makes up one component of the Fogcutter Suite and is based on Groovy & Grails. Quoddy could be termed "Facebook for the Enterprise" but that would be oversimplifying a bit. Quoddy is intended mainly for organizational use and therefore has capabilities which make it uniquely suited to provide the social fabric to support organizational knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer, collaboration and decision support.

Relative to consumer Social Networks and other Enterprise Social Networking products, Quoddy adds features like:

• Calendar Feed Subscriptions - Quoddy supports subscriptions to any calendaring server which provides an iCal feed, so you can see your upcoming events rendered in your feed alongside other important events. Future releases will support CalDAV and interactive editing of Calendar Events from right in the stream.
• RSS/Atom Feed Subscriptions - Quoddy supports subscriptions to any arbitrary RSS feed, so you can find crucial information in your feed. Subscribe to internal blog servers, document management systems, wikis, and any other repository which provides RSS, or subscribe to your favorite blogs, Google Alerts, and other external information sources.
• Business Events Subscriptions - using the Hatteras Business Events Subscription engine, Quoddy allows users to define subscriptions to business events right off of the enterprise SOA/ESB backbone. Find out exactly what is going on in your enterprise, in real-time with Quoddy and Hatteras.
• BPM Integration - Quoddy supports subscribing to User Tasks from BPM / Workflow engines. We currently only support Activiti, the leading Open Source BPM offering, but support for other workflow products will be coming in future releases.
• Fine-grained User Stream definitions. Quoddy provides robust support for creating different "user stream" definitions, which filter content by type, source, group, or other criteria, and makes it trivially easy to quickly change the current Stream. For example, you may tke a quick peek at an enterprise-wide view of all the activity from every user, and then quickly switch back to a personalized view which includes only your BPM User Tasks. Quoddy emphasizes putting you in control of the content which is rendered in your stream, helping avoid information overload.
• ActivityStrea.ms protocol support using REST. Quoddy exposes a HTTP interface for external systems to post ActivityStrea.ms messages. This allows our integration with Neddick as well as other 3rd party products.

Technology Preview Release 1 (TPR1) is the first Quoddy release and provides a solid foundation for our future roadmap and the forthcoming fully certified and supported Quoddy Enterprise from Fogbeam Labs

To learn more about Quoddy visit the Project Homepage at http://code.google.com/p/quoddy

Known issues

• The only supported database is PostgreSQL at the moment. Support for others (MySQL, Oracle, DB/2, etc.) will be in future releases. Future versions will feature an installer that allows admins to select the database type to install against.
• JMS messaging assumes a specific version of JBoss MQ and the app bundles the required client jar files for that version only. Future versions will feature an installer that allows admins to select the messaging serever to install against.
• Quoddy currently assumes that the database connection is to a database named "quoddy" using a user named "postgres" and with no password required. Editing these details requires editing a Groovy file and rebuilding the war from source.

Installation

A pre-built war file is part of this release, which simplifies setting up a basic Quoddy server.

1. download the attached quoddy.war and the .zip or .tgz of the Quoddy source
2. download the attached messaging_server.zip file
3. download and install the latest Apache Tomcat 7.x release
4. create a postgres database named "quoddy"
5. extract the quoddy source into a convenient directory
6. from the quoddy source directory, cd into the "sql" directory and run the following command: > psql -U $dbuser -d quoddy -f quartz_sql.sql and then > psql -U $dbuser -d quoddy -f quartz_sql_new.sql substitute your database user (probably "postgres" by default) for $dbuser in the above command
7. Note that if you make the "quoddy" database owned by user "postgres" and turn on "trust" authentication for local ip connections from localhost, you can start the Quoddy instance without making any changes to the datasources configuration.
8. copy the quoddy.war file into the "webapps" directory under Tomcat
9. extract the files from messaging_server.zip into a directory. This is just a trimmed down version of JBoss with only the MQ functionality turned on, and all the destinations for Quoddy already configured.
10. Launch the mesaging server by running run.sh/run.bat from the bin directory.
11. Start Tomcat
12. If your "quoddy" database uses a different username than "postgres" and/or requires a password, you will need to build a new quoddy.war from source, after editing DataSource.groovy to reflect your connection credentials. After running grails clean; grails war to create the war file, copy target/quoddy-0.0.1.war into $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/quoddy.war and then start Tomcat.

For help, post to our Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/fogcutter-discuss, or visit us on IRC at irc://irc.freenode.net/fogcutter