Appearance

Q. Do the "add" "edit" stack of buttons appear on every page?  What about the pages that I don't want to have visitors editing?

The list of Actions that appear on every page (each View of an Item) are mainly controlled by whether those Actions are authorized for the current user. In the case of anonymous users there are usually very few actions available - for example look at the Actions folder which is a part of Perspective that no user has the ability to Edit or Comment on.

An example of a page that everyone can see and comment on, but that only one user can edit (apart from the Admin user) is here.

Q. Could you possibly set up a self-contained, "this is what {Perspective} could look like on your site" segment as a demo?

This is an excellent idea - I will add this to the list of things that I will include in the documentation.

Licensing

Q. How is Perspective V3 Licensed

A. Unlike Perspective 0.9X, Perspective V3 is not open source. An important reason for this is that V3 uses commercial components licensed from 3rd parties who have licensing terms that are incompatible with a fully open source project. The Beta release of Perspective comes with a license that allows up to 100 editors to be registered with the system. The Beta license is valid for 6 months.

Note that one free editor license is built into the Perspective release - single user use of Perspective is therefore completely free.

Q. Is Perspective Currently On Sale

No. Perspective V3 is currently being beta tested - the full version will be available in Q2 2009.

Q. What is the pricing likely to be?

Licenses will be available in packs, with each pack being a separate license file enabling a specific number of editors:

Number Editors	Discount	Per Editor Cost	Pack Cost
1	0%	40	40
5	10%	36	180
10	20%	32	320
25	30%	28	700
50	40%	24	1200
100	60%	16	1600
250	80%	8	2000

All prices in US Dollars ($).

At this stage these prices are for information purposes only.

Q. Are Free Licenses Available

A single free editor license is included with each instance of Perspective.

In addition, if you have provided direct feedback on any previous version of Perspective (including V0.9X and V3 Betas) and I have a record of this then free licenses for Perspective V3 will be provided.

Technical Details

Q. Where does Perspective V3 store data?

A. The primary data storage mechanism is in a SQL database. To allow for efficient searching Perspective also stores search indices separately - these are based on data that is stored in the database and can be rebuilt if they are damaged or corrupted.

Q. What databases are supported?

A. Perspective V3 ships with a fully featured embedded SQL database (the excellent VistaDB - http://www.vistadb.net/). However, external database servers will be supported - initially Microsoft SQL Server 2005 & 2008. The data model is fairly simple so support for other database systems should be fairly easy to add.

Note that support for external database servers will be available in Perspective 3.1.

Q. What version of .Net is required?

A. .Net 2.0

Q. What languages is Perspective developed in?

A. Perspective is largely written in C# with a number of ASP.Net pages and XSLT transforms. There is also complex client-side Javascript.

Q. Does Perspective V3 use XHTML and CSS?

A. Generally, yes, almost all of the layout in V3 is done using CSS applied to XHTML pages.

Q. What browsers are supported?

The main browsers supported are:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0
  
• Mozilla Firefox 2
• Mozilla Firefox 3
• Apple Safari
• Google Chrome

WYSWIYG editing is not supported in Opera.

Q. What document formats can be searched in Perspective?

Perspective uses the Microsoft IFilter mechanism for handling the indexing of documents - this means that almost all standard document formats can be indexed. However, in some cases this does require a 3rd party component to be installed (e.g. for PDFs).

Q. How do I get updates to Perspective?

An automatic update feature is built into the Perspective Admin application - each time this application is started it checks for updates. User approval is required for updates to be downloaded and installed.

Customizing Perspective

Q. Can I change the appearance of my Perspective wiki?

A. Yes - the main mechanism for this being the Perspective Admin (Admin/PerspectiveAdmin.exe) this allows the following items to be easily set:

• The icon used for the Wiki (displayed at the top left of every page)
  
• The name of the system - displayed under the icon
• The background colors used for: header, footer, left & right panels
• Text colors and sizes

There is also an option to return all of the style changes to default values.

Q. Will I lose style changes when a new version of Perspective is released?

A. No. All style changes are made to a local Custom.css stylesheet that will not be replaced by updates.

Importing and Exporting Data

Q. Can I import data from Perspective v0.9X?

A. Yes. The Perspective Admin application has a feature to directly import data from older versions of Perspective into V3.

Q. Can I export and import data?

A. Yes. The Perspective Admin application also has a feature to export and import data to a folder hierarchy containing XML and file attachments.

Q. Will it be possible to migrate data created with the beta version to the "production" version?

A. The data model underlying Perspective V3 (which you can actually read a bit about here) has been stable for a number of months. This means that you can start working with a Beta release and you can apply automatic updates and it will become the "production" version without your data having to be modified.

How Do I ...?

Q. How do I redirect access to a folder to another Item?

Create a new Alias Item in the folder with the name Index - in the contents of this new Item add a wiki link to the item you want to redirect users to.

This uses two features of Perspective V3:

• If a Folder contains an called Index then when the Folder is shown then the user is shown this Item (strictly speaking the user is redirected to be shown the Index item).
• When an Alias Item is shown it takes the first wiki link in its Contents and redirects the user to show them the Item pointed to by this link.
  

Q. How do I create Items from comments on this Item?

This Item is in a folder (V3.0 Documentation) has its Security Mode set to 'Normal' which means that only specified users can create and edit content.

If you want to try editing or creating content - try here.

Q. How do I let users create and edit content?

Do these steps as the Admin user.

Firstly, to be able to create and edit content a user has to be an Editor - that is their User Item has to be linked to  by /System/Configuration/Editors (e.g. see Editors). If you are using Windows Integrated Authentication then User Items are created automatically when a user accesses the wiki - otherwise they need to be created manually.

Secondly, you must set the Security of the area within the wiki you want to grant access to to make the required users Editors - again do this by linking to their User Item.

Q. Can comments be disabled?

The Comments Mode property on Items controls how Comments behave for that Item - note that this works on a per-Item basis.

See Item Properties 

Q. Can I search external documents?

A popular feature of Perspective 0.9X is to allow searching over documents that are stored in folders outside of Perspective.

Perspective V3.0 does not support this.

However, this is planned for V3.1 which will also support linking to files outside of Perspective through the ability to map external folders and files into the hierarchy of Items within Perspective.