Sorry I’m so slow in responding to an excellent comment. When people ask me about any concerns I have about Alfresco, it is this issue.

I suppose being backed by a commercial company makes even open source software vulnerable to potential feature bloat and can run the risk of absorbing resources that could/should be working on foundational issues.

Not being directly in the commercial software business, I don’t know what the trick is to walking the line between riding hype waves or implementing buzz-worthy features on the one hand, and minding your knitting on the other at the potential expense of being innovative.

Given a limited set of resources, I would rather see Alfresco rely on its ability to be integrated with other open source components, particularly for social features like social graph management, blogs, and wikis, which would allow them to concentrate more on improving clusterability, unifying the repository, and continuing to mature the WCM offering.

Time will tell whether or not Alfresco is able to maintain such a balance.

Jeff

And I would also like to add that it’s somewhat disappointing to see this trend. Does Alfresco need to reinvent the wheel by moving towards “better front-end site development”? No, they do not. As it stands now, Alfresco is a good enterprise content management system, but not a great one. There is still a lot of work to do on existing features — a quick scan of the Alfresco forums confirms this. Trying to do everything dilutes the core product.

Why don’t they specialize and continue working on what they have? We need a great open source enterprise content management system.