Author: Jeff Potts

Up-coming Alfresco meetups in Sydney, Atlanta, London, New York, Chicago & Seville

Toronto Alfresco MeetupThe months leading up to Alfresco Summit are typically popping with meetup activity and this year is no exception. I thought I’d give you a quick rundown of the Alfresco meetups I know about that are coming up this month and next month:

  • Alfresco Sydney Day, August 22. This is a day-long meetup featuring talks from customers, partners, and yours truly. If you find yourself down under, it is not too late to sign up.
  • Atlanta, August 27. This meetup will feature a talk about Alfresco in the Insurance industry as well as a technical talk on the new backup and recovery toolkit. Sign up here.
  • London, September 11. Beer and Alfresco. What’s not to like? And this one has a hometown advantage. You never know who might drop by. Sign up here.
  • New York, September 24. We’ll hear from Mitch Brodsky, Digital Archive Manager from the New York Philharmonic. And I’ll be there to share some CMIS tips and tricks. Mitch is going to be organizing this group going forward, so he’ll want to hear your ideas on how to shape the revitalized New York Alfresco community. Sign up and share your ideas.
  • Chicago, September 25. How about a long lunch with the Alfresco Chicago community? The good folks at TSG once again offer up their sweet digs for the local community to swap tips and tricks. I’ll be there to hear about the great work being done with Alfresco in chi-town and maybe share a few tips of my own. Sign-up here.
  • Seville, October 8. Our Spanish community is one of the most passionate and committed on the planet. Sample what’s in store for Barcelona by hanging out with this awesome community in October. Inscribete aqui.

If you’ve never been to an Alfresco meetup, you’re missing out on a wonderful chance to hear first-hand from people just like you who are implementing Alfresco in their companies. These local communities vary greatly. Some meet very regularly, others not so much. Some lean towards the technical end of the spectrum while others are more focused on end-users. Often there is a formal agenda with one or more talks. Other times the goal is to spend time chatting over drinks.

Regardless of the style of the local Alfresco community in your geography, these principles hold true across all of them:

  1. Everyone is welcome. If you are interested in Alfresco, for whatever reason, we want you to participate. It doesn’t matter which product you use, whether or not you are a partner, or what your experience level is. Ours is a friendly, welcoming community online as well as in-person.
  2. You get out of it what you put into it. Most meetups are run by the local community. Organizing the meetings, finding people to speak, and finding a location all takes time and energy. So find a local community in your area, attend, and ask the organizer if you can help with the next one (even if the organizer works for one of your competitors).
  3. These aren’t sales events. Sure, the group might have one or more sponsors who paid for the food or supplied the venue, and they should get a few minutes to say who they are and let people thank them for their much-needed support of the group, but these meetups are for learning, sharing, and socializing. I haven’t heard of any problems in this area–I just want you to know our meetups are intended to be hard-sales-pitch-free zones.

If you are thinking about starting your own meetup and want some tips, take a look at Amy Currans’ Lightning Talk from last year’s DevCon.

If hosting your own Alfresco meetup is too much of a commitment for you at the moment, find an existing one and show up. I think you’ll have fun, you might learn something, and you’ll meet some really cool people. At the very least, you might walk away with some coveted Alfresco footwear. (Seriously, ask around).

I hope to see you at one of these meetups before Alfresco Summit!

New Alfresco community project: Refactor the Alfresco SDK

Veere: tools by DocmanOne of the best things a community can do for its members is to make it easy for newcomers to get started. In the Alfresco community, we’ve made some improvements rather recently such as:

Those all help people get pointed in the right direction. Now it is time to focus on the specific tools people use to write code for their Alfresco projects.

When someone wants to customize or extend Alfresco they often start with the downloadable SDK. The downloadable SDK includes dependencies (Alfresco & third-party), source for Alfresco dependencies, JavaDoc, and sample projects.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the downloadable SDK. It has existed in pretty much the same state since it was originally created and has served us well. But there are newer tools available. For example, thanks to the hard work of Gab Columbro and some of his cohorts, there is now a set of officially-supported artifacts for both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. That means you can use a tool like Maven to resolve dependencies for you. There are also Maven archetypes that make it easy for you to start a new Alfresco project with the appropriate folder structure for the type of customization you need to do, complete with a ready-to-import Eclipse project.

So all of this great work has been done on the Maven-based SDK but the “last mile” is making it easily consumable by brand new developers. The best way to do that, I think, is to refactor and revitalize the downloadable SDK. I think we need to:

  • Remove old sample projects that are no longer relevant
  • Add new sample projects for areas of the platform that may currently be missing
  • Convert all sample projects to builds that leverage the Alfresco Maven SDK
  • Provide a light set of documentation that explains how to use the Alfresco Maven SDK and how to build the sample projects. This should not replace any formal official documentation on customizing Alfresco. Instead, it should be just enough to understand what’s in the SDK, how to build and run the samples, and how to use the Alfresco Maven SDK to start a new project.

Toward this end, I’ve grabbed the Alfresco SDK source out of Alfresco SVN and used it to create an Alfresco SDK project on Github. If the community leaves it up to me, I’ll work on it in fits and starts as I am able and it will get done in a few years. Instead, I’m hoping that a few of you who are excited about this idea will fork the project and start giving me pull requests. We can discuss this effort in #alfresco on freenode IRC. If enough people are interested we could also have a regular Skype call to coordinate efforts.

Thanks ahead of time for any time you are able to put in to this project. I’m hoping that if we work together we can get this looking great by Alfresco Summit, but that depends on you!

Notes from today’s Alfresco Office Hours

We had another live broadcast of Alfresco Office Hours today on Google Hangouts on Air. If you missed the broadcast you can watch the recorded session.

Here are my rough notes from today’s session:

CMIS & Apache Chemistry book is now in print

Lightning talks deadline is this weekend!

Why don’t more people use the source code?

Question raised on #alfresco freenode IRC about Share moving away from YUI:

Forum fix update:

  • Have you noticed that tags and alfresco version are being shown in forum posts now?
  • When creating posts in the forum, please try to remember to set your Alfresco version.

Alfresco Developer Series stuff moved to github

  • Code lives here
  • Thinking about converting the actual tutorials themselves to a plain-text based format and checking that in as well. WDYT?
  • Need to move that code and all of my other code to the Maven SDK

Speaking of the SDK, it is time for the community to step up and rescue that project

  • Engineering is on board with us doing that
  • I’ll move the code to github and will then start taking pull requests
  • I’d like to get the SDK converted to use Maven
  • We should refactor old code if it needs it
  • We should add new examples where none exist, like for CMIS, the Public API, and simple Share customizations.

Other projects we need your help on…

Pages marked as needing work on the wiki

Jira bug triage

  • I think we can increase the attention community-reported issues get if we can focus engineering on the quality bug reports
  • Maybe the community could help triage these
  • If you are interested, let me know

Projects on the help wanted page

Organizing local meetups

As you can see, we covered a lot of ground and had some great discussion. We were even joined for a little while by a fellow community member, Alfresco partner, and Alfresco Summit speaker, Boris Mejias. It could be you next time. See you at Alfresco Office Hours on August 30.

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.