First off, thanks so much to my readers, clients, colleagues, and other friends in the community who have provided a wealth of support in terms of well-wishes and congratulations on the forming of my new company, Metaversant. Several people have asked how things are going so here’s a brief update…

Metaversant is up-and-running and I’m as busy as can be. I finally got a web site up, a logo designed, and business cards aren’t far behind. I’ve even got people to give them to which is an important pre-requisite to actually having business cards.

I’m currently billing on an Alfresco Share customization project. I can’t tell you who or exactly what but the pattern will be familiar: A company needs to manage digital assets. Some come from internal sources, some come from external sources, and all need metadata and security applied. The front-end communicates with the Alfresco repository via RESTful Web Script calls while back-office content providers and application administrators use Alfresco Share (customized here and there) to upload assets, set metadata, and manage the business process. It’s a pretty classic pattern and other than extraordinarily tight timeline pressure, it’s going well.

Beyond technical execution I’ve also conducted some Alfresco training for a pharma client in New England. It was just a quick engagement but it was fun to help a team that had been doing some playing with Alfresco on their own discover the capabilities of the platform and how they could be applied to their business problems. I also love to see the expression on people’s faces when it hits them: They don’t need Documentum for all things DM any more.

I had a great trip to New York City for the Alfresco Community Meet-up. I don’t know what the official ratio was but the customers seemed to heavily outnumber the partners as this particular meet-up which is good for everyone, I think. I caught up with a lot of old friends and met some new ones. I was particularly excited to come across someone who had some plans to leverage cmislib, my client-side CMIS API for Python, a project I’ve sorely neglected this Spring with all of the startup stuff going on. All of this Java code I’ve been writing has me missing Python–I will find time for cmislib soon.

Being fully billable while still having to find new business and take care of everything else about the business is tough, as I knew it would be. I’m loving every minute of it though. One thing I didn’t expect is the helpfulness of friends, former colleagues, and even strangers who have started their own businesses. The entrepreneur community is not unlike the open source community. Everyone loves to talk shop and trade tips and advice. It’s really cool.

My exercise regimen (a generous description) has suffered and it looks like my blogging velocity is on a similar trend. I feel like I’m getting into some regular rhythms though so maybe I can get things back in balance shortly. I’ve got all kinds of things that I need to write about: Alfresco 3.3 Enterprise is out, Alfresco hired the jBPM guys (I totally called it!), and I don’t think I’ve written anything at all about the Alfresco Community Committer Program. It’s going to be a busy Summer.