Month: July 2013

Last Call for Alfresco Summit Lightning Talk Proposals

LightningGot a great idea or tip that you want to share with the rest of the Alfresco community? You should consider giving a lightning talk at this year’s Alfresco Summit. We did these last year and they were very popular with the attendees because each session of lightning talks offers a lot of condensed information on a broad range of topics.

Lightning talks are strictly five minutes long. As an added challenge, we use the ignite-style, which means each slide advances on its own. It takes practice, but when it is done well it is really impressive.

We’re accepting lightning talk proposals until midnight on Sunday, August 4, so do not wait to submit yours.

Crikey! Alfresco Day Sydney is Almost Here

Sydney Opera HouseCrikey! Alfresco Day Sydney is almost here. On Thursday, August 22, I will be with the local Alfresco Sydney team at the Sydney Harbour Marriott Hotel. We’ll be doing a day long meetup aimed at both business and technical audiences. We want to show anyone who is interested what Alfresco has to offer.

I’m hoping to see strong representation from customers, partners, and other community members. I want to get you all talking to each other about how you are using Alfresco, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what we can do to help you be more successful with the platform.

I’ll be giving talks on CMIS, developer fundamentals, and how you can get involved with the Alfresco community. We’ll also have talks from Alfresco customers and partners.

If you haven’t signed up already, you can do that here. I look forward to seeing you in Sydney!

Alfresco Developer Series tutorial source code now on github

The source code for the tutorials in my Alfresco Developer Series has always been available to download as a zip. But for some reason I never put it in a project where we could collaborate on it. That’s fixed now. The code’s now on github. (Note that the source code that accompanies the Alfresco Developer Guide is on Google Code. I don’t intend to maintain that going forward and will instead focus on these github projects).

As part of that I’ve made sure that the content types, behaviors, actions, web scripts, and workflow tutorial code works on 4.0.d and 4.2.c. The original zips referenced in the tutorial PDF still work with the versions they were written for, of course, but if you grab the source from github, they’ll work on the version they are tagged for.

One thing I’ve realized as part of this is that with the actual tutorials in PDF, keeping the written instructions in sync with the code is tough. Maybe I should convert the tutorial text into markdown or something similar and check that into the source code repo as well. Let me know what you think about that idea.

Next step for the code is to convert from the old Ant-based Alfresco SDK to the new Maven-based SDK.

CMIS and Apache Chemistry book now available

cmis-bookI am very pleased to announce that the book project I have been working on with Jay Brown (IBM) and Florian Mueller (SAP) has finally reached the most important milestone in any such project: The book has gone to press. You should now be able to purchase CMIS and Apache Chemistry in Action at fine bookstores everywhere.

I’m extremely proud of the end result. This book is the most comprehensive, most helpful resource on Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) that exists. I hope it encourages developers everywhere to adopt the standard and leverage CMIS-based tools from Apache Chemistry as part of their content-centric applications, desktop tools, or server implementations.

If you aren’t yet familiar, CMIS is an industry standard for working with Enterprise Content Management repositories (ECM) like Alfresco, IBM FileNet, Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, Nuxeo, and others. Once you know the CMIS API and SQL-like query language you can work with any repository that supports CMIS.

If you happen to be at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon today, Jay, Florian, and I will be hanging out in the Apache Software Foundation booth starting at 5:00p and we will have books for a lucky handful of folks. If you miss out on that, Manning is running a Deal of the Day promotion today. You can get 50% off the book with code dotd0723tw.

Writing a book is a seriously tough project. I was lucky I didn’t have to do it alone this time and even luckier still that Jay and Florian are top-notch experts in CMIS, great writers, and just a pleasure to work with. Thanks, guys!

 

Alfresco Office Hours with Jeff & Richard

Alfresco Office Hours with Jeff & Richard is our periodic Hangout on the Air that we use to keep everyone up-to-date on things going on in the Alfresco community. If you missed today’s session, you can watch the replay.

And here are some rough notes…

  • If you cannot login to the support portal, are having trouble with the download links, or you have any other problem or feedback with the new system, please let your main contact know. If you don’t know who that is or how to get in touch with them, let me or Richard know.
  • Alfresco Summit Can’t Wait Rate ends 7/19. That’s tomorrow! For a complete discount schedule, go to http://summit.alfresco.com/pricing
  • Alfresco Summit speakers should now know their status and have received speaker instructions.
  • CMIS Book is in print! We’ll have free copies at OSCON next week.
  • New York City meetup is happening 8/14. Sign-up at http://www.meetup.com/webcms-45/
  • Alfresco Day Sydney is happening 8/22. Sign-up at https://www.alfresco.com/events/alfresco-day-sydney
  • Sounds like a San Francisco meetup may also happen in August. Watch http://www.meetup.com/BayAreaAlfresco/ for date announcements
  • A Kansas City meetup is trying to happen, but struggling. There are a lot of Alfresco users in Kansas City–don’t you all want to meet to trade tips and tricks?
  • Add your meetup to the Local Communities page on the wiki. http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Local_Communities
  • Thanks to marsbard who reported a problem with the ecmarchitect.com workflow tutorial on 4.2.c in our last Office Hours. It’s fixed now. Download the updated zip from https://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2012/02/20/1552
  • I will move the tutorial code from ecmarchitect.com to github. The old Alfresco Developer Guide code is already on Google Code but I don’t really update it any more.
  • Check out the Community Edition How-To vids on YouTube: http://youtube.com/alfresco101
  • Please use us. If your Jiras aren’t getting attention or if you have a large code contribution that you want to make, we can help facilitate that. That’s just one example. The point is, we want to help you get plugged in to the community. Don’t be afraid to reach out.

Five of your favorite Alfresco-related presentations

If views of my presentations on SlideShare are any indication, a whole lot of you are interested in integrating Drupal and Alfresco. Despite the fact that the presentation is four years old, it consistently makes the “most viewed” list out of my uploads. If you are considering Drupal but need something a bit more document-centric to serve up your files as part of that Drupal site, take a look:

With over 12,000 views, it is safe to say there is definitely something to the combination of Alfresco and Drupal.

Another apparent classic is:

Which is kind of scary given its age and brevity. I think the popularity of this is due to the seemingly inexhaustible demand for “getting started” resources for new Alfresco developers.

This one has similar info, but with more details, and is probably a better choice for developers trying to get an extremely high-level overview:

The CMIS API is now the preferred way to interact with the Alfresco repository remotely, and many people use this presentation to get a quick overview:

In fact, I’ll have a CMIS powerhouse panel on Tech Talk Live tomorrow (July 10, 2013). So if you are just getting started with CMIS, please join us.

If you like CMIS but you don’t want to fool around with your own server, you can use Alfresco in the Cloud. This deck gives a CMIS overview and discusses the Alfresco API at a high-level with links to sample code and screencasts:

Thanks to everyone who has made use of these presentations!