What is it ?

Goozzee's goal is to offer an easy-to-use knowledge management solution, suitable for small teams or companies.

Unlike most existing knowledge management software, Goozzee's classification system isn't based on hierarchies or tags: it uses Topic Maps, which allow a much more advanced and flexible knowledge classification.

Goozzee is in fact a mix of the features of three kinds of applications:
  • Topic Maps authoring/browsing tools: Goozzee offers a very easy-to-use Topic Maps implementation, with topics, associations, occurrences (aka documents), roles, association types and scopes.
  • Wikis: Goozzee is NOT a wiki. But it fills the same need: fast and easy documentation creation, and easy links between pages.
    In Goozzee, each topic can be compared to a Wiki page, where you can type your documentation and share it immediately with other users; the Topic window offers a real WYSIWYG text editor, so you don't even have to fight with some wiki syntax, and linking your topics together - or creating new ones - is a matter of a couple of seconds, using contextual menus or even drag'n drop.
  • Document Management Systems: Goozzee's Document Management functionnality is - and will remain - pretty simple. Any kind of document can be uploaded into the repository : text files, spreadsheets, presentations, PDFs, images, videos, music, programs.. whatever. Each document is assigned a scope and access rights, and can be linked to any number of topics. A check-in/check-out system is also implemented to prevent editing conflicts between users.
    But Goozzee doesn't offer any workflow engine. And it probably never will.

Goozzee is available in two versions :
  • "Personal Edition" (PE) : this is the single-user edition. It installs very easily, and includes an embedded Mysql Database. The database datafiles are located in the goozzee.docs directory, on your hard drive.
  • "Network Edition" (NE) : this is the multi-user version, with security features such as ownership, access right... It connects to a Mysql or Mariadb database server on which you'll have initialized a Goozzee schema.


Features

  • Multi platform : it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux
  • Freeware open source. And it will remain so.
  • Centralized storage : everything is stored in a Mysql database, except some user preferences.
  • WYSIWYG text editor
  • Multi-user, with :
    • Unix-like security on topics and documents : Read/Write access rights for User/Group/Others
    • Locking system to prevent multiple users from updating the same data simultaneously
    • per user preferences for windows layout, colors, language...
  • Support for single-user embedded Mysql database
  • Multlingual : the Graphical User Interface is available in English, French and Dutch. And all data is stored in unicode format in the database, which means that you can fill Goozzee with data encoded in any alphabet : arabic, hebrew, indian, chinese... whatever..
  • Unlimited number of topics and documents. Unlimited number of associations between them.
  • Fast searches : Goozzee takes advantage of Mysql full text searches, that are pretty fast an powerful
  • User-defined Shortcuts for quick access to the topics you use most
  • History : Back and Forward buttons to browse back and forth, like an Internet browser
  • Multi-threaded : some operations -- such as uploads, cleanup, connection keep-alive -- are performed in the background, while you are browsing / updating your data
  • Classes system, with inheritance between classes and instances, contraints between classes, reporting..

How does it work ?

Unlike many Knowledge Management/Document Management systems, Goozzee isn't web-based, but client/server.

The repository is stored in a Mysql database. (In the future, support for other databases will be added.)

A client software must be installed on each user's machine. This software is written in C++, using the wxWidgets library, which allows easy ports to many operating systems. For now, you can download versions for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Wanna help ?

Goozzee is a one man hobby project. That's why it's evolving very slowly.

If you want to take part in it and boost things up, don't hesitate to mail me : michel dot laglasse at gmail dot com