I’m really excited to announce a new area for ICN!

Ok, maybe I’m overreacting but this is really, I hope, the beginning of something great.

My colleague Kerry Langford and I, have been working for months internally on the idea of building a global, centralized, IBM managed, open source repository for ICN Plug-ins and get me approved to commit code there. The idea is a public repository of Plug-ins, a bit like Jenkins does, where people can choose what they need and just download production-ready releases, but also give feedback, open issues, enhancement requests or even contribute.

I really wanted to thank Kerry in this post because he has been doing an amazing job internally to push open source and build a better FileNet/ICN community, which is IMHO one of the weak spot of FileNet and ICN, but probably because I’m used to open source, community driven projects 🙂 Nothing would have been possible without him so Thank you Kerry for making this possible!

So, after a lot of discussion with the ICN Team (they own the GitHub repository), we finally did it. It’s live here. Hosted by IBM, one unique repository to rule them all!

At this time, this is mostly me committing, with the ICN team publishing some samples. But as for all open source projects, we hope to get other people on board at some point 🙂

My main goal at first will be to publish production-ready plug-in to fill some ICN gaps and help our users to migrate from Workplace XT to ICN, main goal being to ease ICN adoption. There are already two production-ready plug-in releases, the Custom MIME Type Plug-in and the Workplace XT File Type Plug-in, with both extended documentation, videos tutorials and their first release available.

We hope to get people to use them and get feedback. People will be able to open Issues, Enhancement requests which I will be monitoring. Of course this is an open source project, without official support, so we can’t and won’t commit to any deadline but I’ll try to do my best, depending on my personal time. Of course, all Pull Requests are welcome as well 🙂

Then, in a second time, I hope to use this repository to publish more advanced features that are not really meant to be in the core product but could make some users really happy. A few ideas I have in progress:

• D&D of folder and zip (to do a bulk add) like I explain in this post
• A compound editor for P8
• A comet support to have 2 ways communication on services like I explained here
• A Jenkins Plug-in to trigger job from the ICN context menu
• And many other ideas when I’ll have time

Any idea you have is welcome as well, feel free to comment here or on the repo.