Let’s stop writing books about Alfresco Explorer

I used to be of the opinion that when it came to books about Alfresco, the more, the better. But with about a dozen on the market at this point, I think it is probably past time to start focusing on quality over quantity.

A big driver of quality is relevance. We’re at a point where the old web client, Alfresco Explorer, is no longer relevant to any new project and most existing implementations. And yet Alfresco Explorer keeps showing up in new books. Come on, people. Alfresco Share made its debut in Alfresco Labs 3a way back in September of 2008. Granted, it needed a few releases before it became the preferred web client, and there are still a few minor things you cannot do in Share, but Alfresco Explorer has been virtually unchanged since then.

Alfresco Share is the preferred web client and has been for quite some time. Yes, there are people who still run old versions of Alfresco. Yes, there are people who like JavaServer Faces. But I’m pretty sure the existing catalog has those folks well-covered. I’d rather see authors spending their energy (and the readers’ time) elsewhere.

I say it all of the time and it seems like it ought to be common knowledge, but I’ll repeat it: No new customizations should be happening with Alfresco Explorer. Talking about Alfresco Explorer customizations is almost a disservice to the community, so let’s stop.

From time-to-time, publishers ask me to review book proposals. I know many of you get the same emails. Let’s all make a stand: No more green lights for books that feature significant coverage of Alfresco Explorer from here on out. Sound good?

Alfresco Explorer was a great web client in its day. It’s not that I dislike it at all. I’m just saying it’s time to say goodbye. So let’s all bid a fond farewell and let it go gently into the good night. We can remember it fondly over drinks at meetups, but for goodness sake, let’s stop writing about it.

23 comments

  1. Jett says:

    Slightly a little offtopic – One use case for us which may just be a very small minority is the use of Alfresco as just a repository. In this scenario, I don’t even deploy Share at all.

  2. jpotts says:

    Jett,

    If you use Alfresco for just a repository, you probably don’t really need Alfresco Explorer. If you do need it you probably don’t need to customize it. And if you do need to customize it, as you said, you are in the minority and there are plenty of existing books that cover it.

    One of these days maybe we’ll separate the Alfresco Explorer code completely so that when you run Alfresco as a repository, you literally would run it as just a repository, without the Explorer client at all.

    Jeff

  3. Andreas Steffan says:

    Hi Jeff,

    I think the interesting part here is to ask why this is actually happening. My personal theory goes like this:

    Alfresco states “Alfresco’s customer base is dominated by large enterprises with over 10,000 employees.” I think it is safe to assume that it is the daily business of those companies which is driving Alfresco for the most part.

    So what is that like ?

    First thing that comes to my mind is speed. Companies at that scale tend to move rather slowly. IE6 may have been mostly weeded out, but they still have a lot of legacy software to deal with for various reasons. Some of them are more or less stuck with eroded Explorer based investments which plague their IT service providers today. They cannot argue to refactor, but they have enough budget to employ an army of engineers working on legacy maintenance and that is accepted. Hence, most enterprise engineers do not have the pleasure to work with bleeding edge stuff and are forced to work on the old stuff. instead. Some of them write books.

    regards
    Andreas

  4. AngelBorroy says:

    That’s right, but what’s about Alfresco Share? With the new
    Alfresco Wordesk, Alfresco Mobile and Alfresco Cloud it seems that
    Share is not the future neither. Maybe it’s time to think Alfresco
    in some other way…

  5. jpotts says:

    Neither Alfresco Mobile nor Alfresco Workdesk are perfect replacements for Alfresco Share, but I agree that the number of clients will likely continue to increase whether those clients are developed by Alfresco or by customers, partners, and others.

    Jeff

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  8. jpotts says:

    Jose,

    Unfortunately, it takes a bit of work to separate the Alfresco Explorer UI from the repository process and its sub-systems. Doing that work has not yet been a priority. We hope to do this in the future, though.

    Jeff

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