It is interesting to see how many people have commented on both posts who are craving more information about Drupal and Alfresco integration and it is no wonder. As I mentioned last year in this post, Optaros sees the two offerings as highly complementary–they aren’t (yet) competitors.
We do a lot of implementations in both Drupal and Alfresco. We think PHP plus Alfresco, or in this case, Drupal plus Alfresco is a great combination. Why? Using PHP and Alfresco together is the best-of-both-worlds: You get the speed of development that PHP brings plus the strength of an
open, enterprise repository on the back-end. In Drupal’s case, specifically, add to that the
availability of thousands of pre-built modules as well as a true site (presentation) framework which is something Alfresco currently lacks (more on that in a second). The interface between the two is best facilitated by Alfresco’s REST-based web script framework which is itself based on lightweight coding tools (JavaScript and FreeMarker).
If you’ve been following this blog and the Alfresco Community Conferences, you know that Alfresco is making a move to the front-end. Clearly, Alfresco sees the lack of a Drupal-like front-end as a short-coming, and they are working hard to address this in their coming releases. Here are examples of what’s coming down the pike that may ultimately position Alfresco more directly against Drupal in the future:
- Web scripts are being split out from the repository process. In the Community head it is now possible to run web scripts in a process separate from that of the core Alfresco repository process. And web scripts running in that standalone process can remotely invoke web scripts running in the Alfresco repository, even if the two are running on separate physical hosts. This will likely form the foundation of Alfresco’s dynamic web site approach: Web scripts running outside of the context of Alfresco, in a plain old servlet container, say, can take advantage of the web script framework, even if they never make a single call to Alfresco.
- Alfresco is building a WYSIWYG, browser-based site builder tool. The Alfresco Dynamic Website (ADW) will allow you to assemble web sites and web pages by selecting modules (built with web scripts) from a module library and arranging them on the page.
- Alfresco is moving their web clients from JSF to web script-based web sites. The new Alfresco client will be based on web scripts with the eventual goal being to build it and manage it as if it were any other normal, dynamic web site. The client will be a reference site which you can use to build your own dynamic sites.
- Alfresco is trying to generate developer excitement around web scripts. Alfresco’s push in the developer community to get people excited about web scripts is no coincidence. If they can get the community to help develop a compelling library of web script-based modules, and if they can create a productive front-end development framework that can plug in those modules, Alfresco will be much more attractive to clients who benefit from a front-end presentation framework and pre-built components than it is today.
- Alfresco is marketing heavily around community and Enterprise 2.0. As you may have seen at the Community Conference and other Meet-ups, Alfresco is driving towards more community, social networking, and general “Enterprise 2.0” features and functionality. This is usually mentioned in the context of being a Sharepoint Killer but it could also mean a blurring of the differences between Drupal and Alfresco as well.
I’m not saying that when the 3.0 release of Alfresco comes out it is going to be on par with Drupal. But I do think it is interesting to watch what’s happening as Drupal and PHP solutions look for more robust back-ends while Alfresco moves toward better front-end site development and module frameworks.
I agree with this post.
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.
Matthew,
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
I do agree with Matthew, that we need powerfull ECM system, Alfresco is good and we need to add other so many features.
But as Jeff mentioned, in today’s market client are always asking for batter UI, many times they do not agree to alfresco in back end and on front end we can have tool which has good UI (Drupal , LR).
So Alfresco has to be strong at Front end as well and Alfresco Share is the right step towards that, but yes Alfresco focus should be on main ECM functionality as well.
Hetal