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The newly-renamed project is being expanded with workflow capabilities that Novell hopes will expand business usage. The Kablink project is Novell's effort to grow the market for open source collaboration solutions, and chip away at the hold that Microsoft's Sharepoint commands among small business users.

"We have a system inside of Kablink that allows developers to create business objects and these business objects model data," McConnell explained. "Then with the model of the data you can pass it views for forms and displaying the business model. So you can model a business object and then add collaboration items for that object." With the Kablink release, workflow capability is being added to the ICEcore collaboration features. A business user can now create a business workflow for a process -- be it approval, development or otherwise and attach that workflow to the business objects.

"We think our offering is unique; there are point solutions that have workflow embedded in them but the kind of social networking collaboration that we do, I don't know anyone that has a workflow component that can do the things that we can," McConnell claimed. "There are customers that have designed ISO 9000 processes with this, so it's a nifty thing to have, especially in an open source project."

The single biggest distributor of Drupal just might be Microsoft. As I discovered from Dries Buytaert's blog on Wednesday, Microsoft's Web Application Installer comes with out-of-the-box support for Drupal, OScommerce, and other popular open-source Web applications. The Web Application Installer Beta is designed to help get you up and running with the most widely used Web applications freely available for your Windows Server. Web AI provides support for popular ASP.net and PHP Web applications, including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce, and more. With just a few simple clicks, Web AI will check your machine for the necessary prerequisites, download these applications from their source location in the community, walk you through basic configuration items, and then install them on your computer.