I had the opportunity to ask James McGourlay, OpenText Executive Vice President, Operations, a few questions about this week’s announcement that OpenText would begin offering support for Alfresco Content Services.
What follows is a list of questions I submitted to James followed by his answers, which I unfortunately received after the deadline we had agreed to for the publication of my blog post on the subject.
Jeff Potts: OpenText has many large ECM platforms and products in its portfolio. Alfresco is as complex as many of those. What can you point to that establishes your ability to support mission-critical workloads on such a complex platform, especially given that no one associates “OpenText” with “Alfresco”?
James McGourlay: OpenText knows ECM and Content Services. We specialize in supporting and maintaining enterprise software for mission critical systems at many of the largest organizations in the world. As such, we also have the global infrastructure and systems to provide enterprise-class services for docker installs/containerization, global call-intake, service level targets, etc.
Jeff Potts: The press release says that, “OpenText has put in place a dedicated team to manage and contribute to the Alfresco open source community”. How big is that team? What types of roles do you have on that team? e.g., First-level support? Engineers? Are there any community managers on the team? Will the team be developing new features? Or is the focus exclusively on bug fixes?
James McGourlay: We developed this service to help customers – including joint OpenText and Alfresco customers – protect their investment and get the most out of their Content Services. Level one support is not our focus. Our offering starts at level 2 support, with seasoned, experienced professionals that know how to set up environments and do detailed service. Our support professionals have been doing sustaining maintenance for enterprise software for 20 years or more in many cases. They are expert on trouble shooting, patching, enhancing, and releasing patches and fixes to provide support through level 3.
Jeff Potts: The OpenText fact sheet says: “All open source fixes are submitted to the community for consideration in the next release. OpenText will maintain the fixes it submits until they are confirmed in an Alfresco Community Edition release.” What does “fixes are submitted to the community for consideration” mean? How will that happen? Where will the fixes be maintained? In a publicly accessible repository? Will this be run as a public open source project? Has OpenText ever submitted any fixes/changes to Alfresco? Do you anticipate any hurdles given that Alfresco Software, Inc. employs 100% of the Alfresco committers?
James McGourlay: Any code we develop that is derivative work of Alfresco Community Edition we will submit through the Alfresco community committer program. It will be up to the Alfresco community to act on this work or not. However, we will maintain all our fixes in the OpenText OpenSource Edition for Alfresco, that will be available to our customers that subscribe to the OpenText OpenSource Support for Alfresco program. It will not be publicly available.
We have not yet submitted fixes, as we are just launching this service this week. Any bugs we identify we will report via the issue tracker and we will submit our proposed fixes to the community. We are also looking to complete fixes as requested by our customers. We hope that Alfresco will treat the fixes we submit as any other community submission and it will be up to the community to determine if they also believe there is value there.
Jeff Potts: Will OpenText provide any features to the community that are currently only available to Alfresco Software’s enterprise edition subscribers?
James McGourlay: Our intention is to enhance the community edition based on the needs of our customers that subscribe to the OpenText OpenSource Support for Alfresco program. So, our customer needs will be the driver of all changes and enhancements we make.
Jeff Potts: Will OpenText make its branded edition of Alfresco Content Services freely available under an OSI-approved license? Or will it only be available to paying OpenText customers?
James McGourlay: As mentioned previously, while we’ll submit fixes and enhancements to the community, our OpenText OpenSource Edition will only be available to customers that subscribe to the OpenText OpenSource Support for Alfresco program.
There you have it
So, although OpenText got these answers to me nearly a day past the deadline, at least they did eventually respond to every question posed, which I really appreciate.
For the community, we now know for sure this is a private fork, but it is good to see that OpenText will contribute fixes via Alfresco Jira. That could be a good thing.
Their plan to offer support sounds dubious, but the mention of “joint” OpenText and Alfresco customers is sensical…if they have customers who have both products, why not offer to support both. I’m still skeptical that an Alfresco-only customer would ever consider it, but we’ll see.
Photo credit: Big Question Mark, by Benjamin Reay