Quoddy

NOTE: work is underway to upgrade Quoddy (and the other Fogcutter projects) to the latest versions of Grails, Groovy, JDK, and so on. Look for those changes to become available sometime in Q2 of 2023.

Quoddy - an Open Source Enterprise Social Network - is part of the Fogcutter suite of tools for building intelligent applications.

Why "Quoddy?"

We like lighthouses, so Quoddy is named after the famous West Quoddy Head Lighthouse.

Ok, but what does it do?

Quoddy is an Open Source Enterprise Social Network, based on Groovy & Grails, and making up one component of the Fogcutter Suite. Quoddy shares a common "look and feel", and substantial functionality, with consumer facing Social Networks like Facebook or the former Google+ - as well as proprietary Enterprise Social Network products like the offerings from Jive Software and Yammer among others.

You could call Quoddy "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.

How does it work?

Quoddy stores information about users, relationships between those users (eg, "friend", "follower," etc), groups, relationships between users and "things" that are of interest to the user, and provides for management of those relationships, as well as using those relationships to show a user updates regarding activity within their network (of friends, followers and other "things).

Quoddy can also be combined with Neddick and Heceta to provide a rich, tightly integrated platform for knowledge discovery, navigation and management.

Where's the issue tracker?

Fogbeam projects use Bugzilla for tracking issues. You can find the Bugzilla instance at http://bugzilla.dev.fogbeam.org/

To browse Quoddy issues by component, click here: http://bugzilla.dev.fogbeam.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Quoddy

For a list of all open Quoddy bugs, click here: https://bugzilla.dev.fogbeam.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance%20desc&no_redirect=1&bug_status=__open__&product=Quoddy&content=

What about OpenSocial?

Work is currently underway to add OpenSocial container support, using Apache Shindig. When finished, this work will allow a Quoddy instance to host any valid OpenSocial application.

How to build & run Quoddy?

This has all recently changed, after the upgrade from Grails 2.2.3 to Grails 3.3.6. New detailed instructions will be coming soon, but the quick version for development mode is as follows:

1. clone this repo on the machine / vm where you want to run Quoddy. We recommend you use a Linux OS. Any modern mainstream distribution should work, but "Red Hat flavored" distributions like RHEL, Fedora, or CentOS are the most tested and best supported options.

2. create a Postgresql database named "quoddy_dev" on the machine where you cloned the repo. Make sure the postgres user can connect via tcp. If you have a password set, edit the application.yml file and set the password before starting Quoddy.

3. Create a directory for Quoddy to store configuration files, search indexes, etc. Something like /opt/fogcutter/quoddy would work well.

4. Edit runquoddy.sh and set the quoddy.home property to match the directory you just created. You can also change the server port and a few other settings here.

5. Create an application-development.properties file in your quoddy.home dir and override any properties that need to be customized.

6. run ./runquoddy.sh

The Bootstrap will create a few test users that you can use to login and experiment with the system. To login using local password mode, select 'useLocal' from the dropdown menu on the login page. The other option is to use CAS, but that requires installing and configuring a CAS server, which is more work. Local mode is fine for development use, but the current password hash function is not suitable for production use.

For help, see the fogcutter-dev Google Group, or check #fogcutter on Freenode.net IRC.

Commercial Support

Commercial support is available from Fogbeam Labs. For more information on Quoddy Enterprise, please visit http://www.fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html.