Tag: Order of the Bee

Alfresco Software resurrects DevCon

Encouraged by the success of the independently-organized, developer-focused BeeCon conference, and seeking to continue its renewed focus on developers, Alfresco has decided to resurrect its own annual developer-focused event. This week Alfresco announced that DevCon will be held January 16 – 18 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Alfresco had previously given up on big, annual events, deciding instead to focus on smaller, one day events in local markets around the globe. These were primarily sales and marketing events focused on lead generation and did not include an open call for papers.

When the annual events were discontinued, the community stepped in. The Order of the Bee, a global community of Alfresco enthusiasts independent of Alfresco Software, Inc., held two successful conferences in 2016 and 2017. These were low-budget, non-profit affairs with a very high signal-to-noise ratio.

Despite being organized independently by the community, the Order of the Bee events were still heavily supported by Alfresco. The company paid for high-level sponsorships and sent many engineers, John Newton, and other staff to give talks at both Order of the Bee conferences.

The company’s interest in annual events isn’t the only thing to have come back around lately. In the early days, the company was very focused on developers. The repository was pitched as a key foundational technology to content-centric applications. Over time that focus blurred as the company tried to move up-market towards “solutions” and the marketing focus turned to business buyers. But the pendulum has swung back again, centered mainly around the Alfresco Development Framework, a set of components meant to make it easier for developers to build content and process centric applications. So it is no surprise that Alfresco would be interested in being the primary driver behind an annual developer-centric event.

The resurrection of DevCon by Alfresco should be good for the community as long as the event is able to hold on to its community and developer focus. They have invited The Order of the Bee to help with conference planning, so that will help. And, the community and developer outreach functions within Alfresco are now held by many former community members so that also increases its chance of success, at least from a community perspective.

The Alfresco community has always been strongest in Europe. For now, Lisbon is the only date announced. If it is successful, it’s possible we could see a North American date later in 2018, or perhaps they will alternate continents every other year.

The Call for Papers is open now. But if you want to speak, you’d better hurry. The deadline for submissions is Monday, October 23, 2017.

Thoughts on BeeCon 2017, the community-organized conference for Alfresco enthusiasts

At the end of April a couple hundred Alfresco enthusiasts met in Zaragoza, Spain, for the second annual BeeCon. BeeCon is a conference organized by and for the Alfresco community. Attendees represented every continent except Antarctica (and Boriss, who is Chilean, tried to claim that he also represents Antarctica). I was truly impressed with the broad attendance, especially with those that came from as far away as China and Australia to collaborate, learn, and teach together with the rest of the Alfresco community.

Here are some thoughts I had during the conference…

Where are the North Americans, especially U.S.-based partners?

We increased our attendance by North Americans this year from almost no one to a small handful of the usuals plus a few new delegates, including some from the University of Alberta. The Alfresco community has always been stronger in Europe than in North America for whatever reason, but I’d like to see us significantly improve attendance from North America.

Key to that is partner participation. A formal partner should be setting the example for contributing to the community. This is not simply altruism–a company can help the community and by doing so add top-spin to the value of their partnership. European partners clearly get that. One European partner had 8 or 9 people at the conference. Zia and Micro Strategies did make it. But most North American partners seem to only be interested in selling and marketing events, which is a real shame.

Alfresco is clearly focused on Cloud and ADF

It is clear that the big focus for Alfresco is on two areas: Cloud and the ADF (Application Development Framework).

For cloud, work is under way to essentially develop a cloud-native content repository and associated services. This is more than just spinning up some virtual machines on AWS, Google, or Azure and running Alfresco as we know it. This would leverage the services those platforms provide in a native way to provide content services. Examples include things like using S3 for storage, Dynamo for metadata, and lambdas for things like actions and behaviors. Alfresco is focusing first on AWS, then they’ll look at other cloud providers.

The ADF is the other area of focus. It is often referred to in the same breath as “Angular components” but it is more than just a set of components for that specific client-side framework. The ADF also includes a more general client-side JavaScript library, so if Angular is not your thing, you can still leverage the client-side JavaScript library from your framework of choice. The ADF also includes some project bootstrapping in the form of a Yeoman generator.

There were also several talks on the server-side REST API that is new in 5.2 which is an essential set of services that enable those front-end libraries to work.

Alfresco confirmed that this focus on ADF means the existing Share client is not receiving much, if any, attention at this point. John Newton said that they are working on an “exemplary” or canonical client built with the ADF. The goal, however, is for that example client to be more focused on a specific use case and not a more general document management use case, which is what Share does. In one of the birds-of-a-feather sessions, the group urged Alfresco engineering to not let the example client accidentally become a de facto Share replacement. Alfresco has a history of releasing example or demo systems that then somehow become real products. Hopefully that won’t be repeated. It’s okay to replace Share at some point, just do so intentionally.

I think the advice I gave last year regarding the ADF still holds, so if you are trying to figure out how the ADF affects your customization plans around Alfresco, read that post.

Not Much Else New and Exciting

If you went to BeeCon looking for big product announcements you were likely disappointed. The cloud and ADF stuff is definitely interesting and critical for Alfresco to stay relevant and so it is naturally sucking every last ounce of energy out of the engineering and product teams leaving little room for innovation in other areas.

John Newton’s talk was basically about “Digital Transformation”, which is what Gartner has decided to call ECM. My clients and I don’t really care what Gartner wants to call what we do. We’re still solving the same problems we’ve always solved using essentially the same approaches with newer tools. That’s just how ECM–sorry, I mean Digital Transformation–is. It’s a mature industry. Should we be shocked that Alfresco did not knock us over with an amazing set of new features no one had ever thought of before? He did hint at some natural learning and machine language applications. I would have loved for him to spend most or all of his talk on that.

Support Tools for Community Edition is a Hot Add-On

Here’s a tip. If you are running Enterprise Edition and you have not installed Support Tools, you need to. It is really helpful for those that administer Alfresco servers. Unfortunately, it has historically been Enterprise-only. But last year, Axel Faust and a merry band of hackers participating in the 2016 Global Virtual Hack-a-Thon wrote their own version of Support Tools that works for both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. In my mind, this could be the single most important add-on written by the community since the JavaScript Console. It’s incredibly useful and it has a lot of people actively participating in its development. Definitely take a look if you haven’t.

Fun at the Hack-a-thon

Speaking of the hack-a-thon, this was the first time I’ve been able to participate in the on-site hack-a-thon for the entire day. It was a lot of fun! My team worked on a little add-on that makes it easier to manage rules (convert local rules to shared, relocate rule sets, etc.).

Like all hack-a-thons it was a little unnerving because you feel a lot of pressure to build something minimally viable with the time and team that you have but I highly recommend the experience. Axel Faust did a great job facilitating the day-long session for the 20 or so attendees from a variety of backgrounds and skillsets.

See You Next Year?

We haven’t identified a location for next year’s conference yet. Before you start shouting out your favorite cities from around the globe, realize a couple of things. The Order of the Bee puts on this conference with an all-volunteer committee. The venue is free or extremely low cost. The free venue together with help from our sponsors allows us to keep the price very low, but it also requires a lot of work from the team which includes a local in-city coordinator to work with the venue, catering, audio-visual, etc. So we do want to hear suggestions, but viable suggestions will take all of that under consideration.

There is some talk of Alfresco resurrecting DevCon. They’ve been a wonderful and supportive sponsor of BeeCon these last two years and as long as the event continues its high signal-to-noise ratio and community inclusiveness (both in terms of the ecosystem and Community Edition, specifically) then it is probably a good thing. Until they commit, we’ll assume there will be a BeeCon 2018, and I hope to see all of you there next year, wherever that may be!

Register now for BeeCon, the Alfresco Community Conference

Order of the BeeRegistration for BeeCon 2016 is now open. What the heck is BeeCon? BeeCon is the first-ever, independently-organized conference focused entirely on Alfresco. The BeeCon web site says it best:

Alfresco professionals and enthusiasts come to BeeCon to sharpen their technical skills and collaborate with other experts…Whether you are a developer, information professional, student, or Alfresco employee, BeeCon is the place to dive deep into Alfresco and develop the relationships which you will need to be successful in the coming year.

The conference is organized by the Order of the Bee, an independent community focused on Alfresco.

Who Will Attend?

BeeCon is an event organized by and targeted towards the Alfresco community. It is built around the idea that what makes our community great is its open, collaborative spirit. And that, from time-to-time, it is important to meet face-to-face to learn from each other, hash out ideas, strengthen personal relationships, and just have fun.

If Alfresco is just a piece of software to you, then this is a conference with a lot of technical how-to’s that will help you get your project done, and you should come for that reason. When you arrive, though, you’re going to find out that a lot of people have crossed oceans and continents to be in Brussels because not only is the software important, but because, as a community, we have a lot of work to do. And the people who care about the Alfresco community are using this event to get organized and to map the way forward.

If you love sales pitches and marketing fluff you should sit this one out. But if you…

  • want to learn more about the technical details from experts;
  • are already running Alfresco in your organization, whether that’s Enterprise or Community Edition; or
  • want to help shape the future of the community and the platform

…then you need to attend BeeCon 2016.

More than a Meetup

This is more than a meetup. It’s a real two-day conference with keynotes, tracks, and a hack-a-thon. The goal is to make it similar to past events like DevCon with really great content and outstanding people, but without the big budget (or price tag).

You can register now for about 60 Euros. If you wait the price goes up to about 90 Euros.

Support from Alfresco and Other Sponsors

The BeeCon team has focused on keeping things practical and inexpensive. But events like this simply cannot succeed without help from sponsors. This year, CIRB-CIBG is providing the venue, A/V equipment, and WiFi, which is amazing because those three items are the biggest in terms of cost for any event. What’s even more amazing is that we enjoy additional support from a number of sponsors including Alfresco, Contezza, ITD Systems, keensoft, VDEL, and Xenit. You should thank these folks when you see them.

Stay Tuned for the Detailed Agenda

The program team received a number of speaking submissions from Alfresco engineers and community members from all over the world. They are busy reviewing those and will get the conference web site updated as things solidify. The team is picky–they want sessions to be high quality and packed with information you can use on your Alfresco projects right away. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished agenda, but I’m not going to wait to register.

Space is Limited, Do Not Wait to Register!

While you’re thinking about it, complete your registration. It’s only 60 Euros. I’ll bet you can slip that into an expense report without much fuss. And when you bring the things you learn back to the office, you’ll win respect and adoration from your boss and coworkers. Not bad for 60 Euros.

When making your travel plans for Brussels, remember that we’ll be getting together Wednesday night, April 27, for a welcome reception. The conference runs two days, April 28-29. Then, whomever is interested can come with us to the medieval city of Bruges on Saturday, April 30, for a day of sightseeing. I’ve been to Bruges–it’s gorgeous. You won’t want to miss it. Plus, it will be nice to hang out with your favorite community members, Belgian-style.

I look forward to seeing you in Brussels in April!