Month: October 2008

Open Source ECM: My topic for tomorrow’s AIIM DFW Meeting

I’ll be speaking at the AIIM DFW meeting tomorrow at the University of Dallas. My topic is ECM and Open Source Software: A New Force in ECM Solutions. Here’s the abstract:

Open source software is finally getting the recognition it deserves from analysts like Forrester and Gartner as a disruptive force in IT. Over the years, open source has “climbed up the stack” from operating systems to databases and now to business applications where it has established a firm foothold in the content management space.What should enterprises know about open source content management? Is it really just for Web Content Management (WCM) or does it meet the needs of broader Enterprise Content Management (ECM) deployments? Arelarge enterprises doing big, meaningful content management projects with open source or is its appeal limited to subsets of the market? What about Enterprise 2.0 initiatives? Can you assemble an Enterprise 2.0 solution from open source components? How does it compare with something like Sharepoint?

If you are in the Dallas area and are interested in the topic you should swing by. And, as always, please say hello and mention the blog. I look forward to meeting you.

When:
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
11:30a – 1:30p, Registration at 11:20a

Where:
University of Dallas
Haggar University Center – Haggar Dining Room
1845 East Northgate Drive
Irving, Texas 75062-4736
972.721.5123
Parking – Lot A and B
Campus Map Link – Bldg 4

Cost:
AIIM DFW luncheons are $30 at the door if you have not pre-registered. The pre-registration deadline for this event is now closed.

Surfing in D.C. with Alfresco’s new web application framework

If you are in Washington, D.C. today for Alfresco’s North American Community Conference please be sure to stop me and say hello. I’ll be in the sessions, in the Optaros booth, and presenting during the technical track. For my European friends, I’m sad to say that I will not be in Munich for the European version of the conference next week, but I will be in Europe at the end of this year or the first part of January so we can meet up then.

During the technical track (in both D.C and Munich) we will be showing some Surf 3.0 components we’ve built. One is called “Status”. It is kind of like a Facebook status or a Basecamp Journal entry. It allows you to say what you’re working on right now and what your mood is. A dashlet aggregates the status entries for all of your teammates across the site and another one shows status across all sites to which you are a member. When you mark it “Done” that status is archived. When status changes are made the new Activity Service is called so that if people are following site activity by subscribing to the activity feed, the status changes are included.

We’ve also got a simple “bookmark” component that lets you share URLs with other team members. As it exists right this second it allows a team to manage a set of shared bookmarks. Before it is GA we plan to make sure bookmarks are taggable and rateable and marked as shared or private.

I’ll follow up soon with a deconstruction of these components so you can learn more about how they work (and even contribute code to them if you want to make improvements).

Finally, we plan to leverage the Rating Service that was used as an example in the forthcoming Alfresco Developer Guide as the back-end for a five star rating component that would allow any Share or Surf site to enable users to rate any node.

These components will be available for you to add to your Share sites or any site built with Alfresco Surf. Our goal is to have them generally available by the time 3.0 Enterprise ships.

We’ll also be hosting code camps in North America and Europe so that you can learn to build your own Surf components. I’ll provide more details on those as they are available.

Acquia Drupal officially launches

Do you love Drupal but wish you could get a “certified” version and commercial support? Now you can. Acquia, the commercial company recently formed by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson, officially launched Acquia Drupal this week (press release). Acquia Drupal is a commercially-supported distribution of Drupal. It includes Drupal Core plus a handful of essential modules. In addition to the distribution, customers can take advantage of the Acquia Network for things like monitoring, spam blocking, and update notification.

Acquia Drupal and Acquia Network subscriptions are freely-available, even if you don’t pay for support. If you want to try it out, check out the download instructions.

Optaros is very excited about the launch and we look forward to working with the Acquia team. We’ve had success implementing Drupal as a community platform for a number of clients. Having a commercial company behind Drupal is a big step toward broader acceptance among enterprises who can’t or are unwilling to self-support.

And we’re back

According to my hosting provider, the raid controller on the box that hosts this site failed at some point yesterday. I guess my bare bones hosting subscription doesn’t include failing me over to another box because I was down from the point of the failure until new parts could be overnighted and installed. Anyway, we’re back up now with a new appreciation for how many 9’s $9.95 buys you.