Differences between Kablink Vibe and Novell Vibe

Kablink Vibe is the open source version of Novell Vibe.

A common Question asked is what are the differences between the two?

The big differences are around Lucene, Document Converters, integrations, off-line file access/synchronization and Support.

 

The ability to install Lucene on another server allows Novell Vibe to scale better than Kablink Vibe and offers a High Availability option is certainly important in large Enterprise systems.

 

Lucene, in general, is used quite heavily by Vibe and a more complete explanation of its services is appropriate. The Lucene version Vibe uses is a fork of the Lucene project that includes the ability to do in place index modifications. This is required because Lucene is used in real-time by all Vibe services (ie. things like folder content lists are generated by a Lucene search), even access control lists (ACLs) are stored in the Lucene index. When a user changes access control for a folder or workspace all references must be changed in the index, even documents that inherit from a parent must change. This requires locking the index for a time while the writes take place. The best way to use Vibe is NOT to modify access control lists unless necessary, use group membership instead. Instead of assigning users to workspaces and folders assign groups, this way when group membership changes a lock of the index is not required.  The remote Lucene feature available in Novell Vibe takes the Lucene index and wraps it with a server wrapper that allows it to run on a different JVM and service requests from multiple Vibe instances. This communication is done via Java RMI. The service wrapper and communication code (RMI) are not included in Kablink Vibe.

 

Document Converters used in Novell Vibe are the Oracle Stellent converters which are proprietary and have a greater range and scalability for the Enterprise environment over the open source OpenOffice conversion that is used in Kablink Vibe.

 

Support for Novell Vibe is the same first class support provided for all of Novell's products were as support for Kablink Vibe is limited to the Kablink forums and community.