Back in March of 2007 I gave one of my first public talks on Alfresco in Boston at what was then billed as the first public Alfresco meetup (at least in the US). My topic was “Alfresco as a Platform”. In looking back at the presentation I’m struck both by how much has stayed the same and by how much has changed.
Today I’ve added a post on Alfresco’s socialcontent.com blog entitled, “Alfresco as a Platform“. The post is probably preaching to the converted for many of the readers of my blog. My goal with the post is to encourage IT organizations to recognize the “capture, organize, and share” problem that everyone has and to address it with an IT-approved stack. I then identify the key innovations added over the life of the product–Web Scripts, CMIS, SharePoint/IMAP/SMTP, and Workflow–that make Alfresco a strong platform for content-centric applications, and therefore an excellent choice to be part of that stack.
Many of you have been in the Alfresco community for multiple years now. How has “Alfresco as a Platform” changed over time from your perspective? How has it stayed the same?
Hi Jeff, I enjoyed your post and I want to add my thoughts on the “capture, organize, and share” problem.
About five years ago, an organization I recently contracted with (a long-distance University) identified the need for adoption of an ECM solution. They wanted to streamline and automate their course creation workflows, they needed to roll-out an enterprise-wide records management solution, and they hoped to digitize old paper-based course materials in order to become a true online University. After studying a number of solutions, they adopted Alfresco. And I was contracted to help them with some of their efforts.
As it turns out, this was the first ECM project I had ever been involved with and it took me a while to understand what ECM was all about (workflows, content models, WCM, etc.) And after spending, roughly, a year learning the technologies that make up the Alfresco stack and working alongside some truly great development teams in the field (Zia Consulting comes to mind), I can honestly say that content management and workflow automation are the two technology paths that I want to develop expertise in. And I have really come to appreciate Alfresco as a development platform. It is well designed, it’s incredibly robust, and it’s very powerful.
But Alfesco is only part of a solution to the “capture, organize, and share” problem. An equally important part, at the very least, is the implementation and maturing of governance and release management practices in the enterprise. If governance isn’t in place, it will be hard to standardize core parts of the content model across the enterprise, and if this standardization doesn’t take place, the scope and consistency of searches, workflows, and records management features will diminish. And if the release management practices of an organization is siloed or inefficient, it can be very difficult to sustain high-quality code rollouts — especially if there are parallel development efforts taking place.
These points are true of all significant development efforts (SOA comes to mind here.) But it is especially true of Alfresco development — given the overarching roles that content models, workflows, and records management play in an organization.
I am really hoping that in the months and years to come — and maybe even at the upcoming Alfresco DevCon 2011 — that Alfresco and the Alfresco community will start sharing their ideas on about how to deal with these problems in an Alfresco environment. I’d love to hear, for example, how MIKE2.0 (an open source methodology that provides a framework for information development), or something similar, can be used by others in order to roll-out Alfresco in an organization. This is the discussion that I know a lot of us are wanting to have 🙂
Thanks again for your post and see you at Devcon (I hope!)
Darryl