Can we trust our leaders?

Sometimes as I read U C Berkeley discussion lists (Micronet et al.) I get this Dilbert feeling that IST management is replacing older, often home-grown hand-rolled apps with corporate-style proprietary (often), cumbersome, clunky apps that create more problems (at least from the users' point of view) than they solve.

Case in point is the retirement of WebFiles. The planned replacements are "Calshare" (IST's offering of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) and bSpace, UC Berkeley's implementation of Sakai.

WebFiles costs users nothing and is platform neutral (true?). Calshare/Office SharePoint costs money and of course requires that users have Microsoft Office.

There are some things about Sakai/bSpace that are scary, and some that (I think) should have been deal-breakers when evaluating it:

File uploads are either via web form (singly, right?) or via WebDAV. But

On Apr 18, 2008, at 4:15 PM, Tom Holub wrote:

The WebDAV FAQ hasn't been updated since October 2000. The web site and mailing list archives appear to document a moribund project.

and,

On Apr 17, 2008, at 2:52 PM, Greg Small wrote (edited by steve stanley):

OK, after much testing,

It would appear that bSpace is not presently an adequate replacement
for WebFiles, although it somewhat depends on how customers are using
WebFiles.

The issues are:

1) Because of the problem creating directories with bSpace WebDav,
migration will be very tedious and time consuming. Also subsequent
use will be difficult until the problem is fixed.

2) Because bSpace WebDav only works with XP (or Vista?), Windows 2000
customers will be left out. How may WebFiles customers are using
Windows 2000 to access their files?


Here is my experience for migration of files from WebFiles to bSpace
using Windows XP SP2 with all current updates:

1) WebDav access to bSpace only works for Windows XP, not Windows
2000. I don't understand this because WebFiles seems to use WebDav
and works fine with Windows 2000.

2) Files cannot be copied directly from a WebFiles connection to a
bSpace connection.

3) Because bSpace cannot create directories with WebDav, each
directory must be created individually using the bSpace web forms
(can you count the click, scrolling, and typing actions to create a
directory tree?).

4) Once copied and made Public, bSpace seems to be an adequate
personal web server (however the effort to migrate and maintain is
much, much greater).

5) On XP with WebDav to bSpace, I am able to rename and delete files
and directories, but renaming a directory leaves an empty directory
with the old name so that the directory cannot be renamed back to its
original name. Also deleting a directory that is not empty only
partially deletes it. Type F5 to refresh and it is still there.
Renaming or deleting empty directories works.

6) On XP with WebDav to bSpace, when attempting to create a new
folder, Windows says "A folder named New Folder already exists". If
you drag and drop a folder, it says that folder exists but if you
click Yes to copy anyway it appears to create it but then reports
errors on the file copies and the directory vanishes when you refresh
the file display (F5).

7) When I copy files to a directory, Windows says that the files
exist (with 0 size) but the copy completes OK if I click "Yes" for
each file or "Yes to All".

8) The items above suggests that bSpace creates the file or folder
before copying or renaming, but fails to take this into account for
completing the operation (perhaps the WebDav operation is not atomic).

9) In bSpace, if a directory is marked Public, all files and
directories below are Public. In WebFiles, each directory or file may
be individually locked.

I guess there are always critics, but this isn't the only big technology acquisition that has that Dilbert feel to it...

-my own opinions, not those of my employer, UC Berkeley or the UC Regents...