Tag: Alfresco Community

Alfresco freenode IRC chat room transcripts now logged, searchable

I told you about the #alfresco chatroom on IRC a couple of years ago when Richard Esplin and I took it over and started promoting its use. Since then it has grown tremendously with somewhere between 30 and 40 people hanging out and discussing various Alfresco-related (and some unrelated) topics.

Richard recently rolled out some new features that I hope will help keep the momentum going.

First, the chatroom is now logged. The last 90 days of messages are available at chat.alfresco.com. That page also includes an embedded web chat client for people who don’t have their own desktop client or for quick questions.

Second, there’s a new member of the chatroom named alfbot. The bot’s primary purpose is to facilitate logging, but it gives us some additional functionality which is pretty handy. Here are a few examples:

  • If you want your message to be excluded from the log you can start your message with [nolog]. Your handle will appear in the log but your message will be redacted.
  • If you need to tell someone something but they aren’t currently logged in, you can say “alfbot later tell jpotts You finally decided to log in, eh?”. Then, when alfbot sees jpotts log in your message will be added to the chat.
  • If you want to know when the last time someone was in the chat room you can say, “alfbot seen resplin” and that would tell you when Richard was last on.
  • If you want to tell alfbot something and you don’t want to type “alfbot” at the start of your message, you can use a tilde as an alias, like this: “~later tell jpotts You finally decided to log in, eh?”.

People that hang out in #alfresco frequently will want their own desktop IRC client. There are many available. On Linux, I’ve used Pidgin and liked it. On my Mac I use Adium. On Windows there is HexChat, which I haven’t used.

Regardless of which client you use, just point it to irc.freenode.net, then join us in #alfresco.

Thanks to Richard and the IT team for getting this in place and to Ian Crew for making the pages on chat.alfresco.com look pretty.

Notes from last week’s office hours

UPDATE: Corrected the Alfresco Summit dates which have changed since this was posted

In case you missed last week’s live Alfresco office hours, here is the re-play:

And here are my notes from the session…

Follow-up items from last office hours

Worldwide, Virtual Hack-a-thon is happening May 9

  • Sign up on the wiki
  • Alfresco team members in all three regions will participate
  • 24 hours

Sign-up for the Alfresco quarterly community newsletter. The next one should be coming out in March.

The new Alfresco Community Landing Page should be live on www.alfresco.com by the end of this week.

IRC improvements

  • Join the live conversation at #alfresco on freenode IRC
  • The chat room is now logged
  • We’ll move the logs to an Alfresco server and domain at some point

Kicking off the Alfresco Community Profile project

  • At a minimum, will provide the ability to use the same credentials for all Alfresco community properties
  • Vision is to use it as each community member’s “face” to the rest of the community

Community translations going strong

  • Get started by reading this wiki page
  • Work on a community-contributed language pack at CrowdIn
  • File patches for officially supported language packs in Jira

The last of the ECM Architect tutorials that still needs a revision (Advanced Workflows) is almost done

  • Tutorials now use Alfresco Maven SDK
  • Tutorials now produce AMPs instead of using the overlay approach
  • All references to old technologies such as Alfresco Explorer, the native Alfresco Web Services API, and jBPM have been removed.
  • Tutorial text and source code are on GitHub

Alfresco Summit Save-the-Date:

  • Two months earlier
  • EMEA: 9/9, 9/10, 9/11 in London Alfresco Summit EMEA
    October 7, 8, & 9 (T, W, R) in London
  • Americas: 9/23, 9/24, 9/25 in San FranciscoAlfresco Summit Americas
    September 22, 23, & 24 (M, T, W) in San Francisco
  • Shorter: Two days (plus the optional workshop day), otherwise roughly the same format
  • Call for papers coming soon

The next Alfresco Office Hours will be March 21. The next Tech Talk Live is March 5. We’ll be reviewing several projects that were created as a result of the Alfresco Summit Hack-a-Thon back in November.

Alfresco Community Edition 4.2.e Now Available

Alfresco Community LogoThe Alfresco engineering team has just released Alfresco Community Edition 4.2.e (Download, Release Notes). This is the final Community Edition release in the 4.2 line before 4.2 Enterprise is released.

This Community Edition release is mainly fixes for bugs found since 4.2.d and contains no new major features.

In a recent press release, we announced that Alfresco One 4.2 as well as the much-anticipated Records Management 2.1 release will be available on October 29. However, on the 4.2.e file list page on the wiki I notice that there is an RM 2.1 module available for download.

If you need the source, the public SVN revision number for Alfresco Community 4.2.e is 56674 and it has been tagged as COMMUNITYTAGS/V4.2e.

Help us improve the ecosystem: Take the Alfresco Community 2013 Survey

Surveying by IamNotUniqueHopefully, you find the Alfresco community team and our company in general extremely approachable. My perception is that people aren’t afraid to reach out and give us feedback directly, which is exactly how we like it. But I think it is important for us to stop and ask for specific feedback on areas we are tracking on a regular basis. That’s why we do a survey of the Alfresco community every year.

So if you are involved at all with Alfresco, whether you are an Alfresco One subscriber, a partner, an employee, or a Community Edition user, please take 15 minutes to complete the survey.

We’ll use your feedback to make the Alfresco ecosystem a better place. If you’ve participated in the past, I hope you’ve seen some of your suggestions become a reality as we continuously improve over time. I’m hoping to consolidate the feedback and report on the results during my session at this year’s Alfresco Summit.

As a small way to say thanks for your time, we’re going to randomly draw two prize winners from valid, completed surveys. Each lucky winner will receive a $250 USD gift card from Amazon (see survey for contest rules and details).

My presentations from Alfresco Day Sydney

Well over a hundred people showed up to Alfresco Day Sydney today to spend a day hearing from customers, partners, and Alfrescans about the platform. We’ll get all of the talks uploaded somewhere. Mine are on slideshare:

I enjoyed meeting everyone and hearing about the wonderful things you are doing with Alfresco. I look forward to running into more of you online and in-person.

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.

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 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.

End-User How-To Videos for Alfresco Community Edition

I’ve started creating some how-to videos for performing common end-user tasks on Alfresco Community Edition. You can get to them all on this YouTube Playlist or take a look at the ones created so far, below…

The playlist currently includes:

  • Reviewing the sample site
  • Adding users (one at-a-time and by importing a CSV)
  • Creating groups
  • Create a new site
  • Five ways to create content
  • Versioning a document
  • Starting a workflow
  • Updating your profile
  • Exploring social features
  • Configuring user and site dashboards
  • Adding new features to your site

In the very near future I’d like to add some technical how-to’s for Community Edition, including LDAP configuration, CIFS/WebDAV/FTP/IMAP configuration, installing the SharePoint Protocol, installing the Google Docs Integration, configuring inbound and outbound SMTP, basic content model extensions, and basic dashlet development.

If you have ideas for Alfresco Community Edition videos you’d like to see that would help make your Alfresco Community Edition rollout more successful, let me know.

Alfresco Summit 2013 Registration Now Open

Alfresco Summit LogoIt looks like some of you have already taken advantage of the fact that registration for Alfresco Summit 2013 went live yesterday. I guess our “Can’t Wait!” rate is aptly-named!

We’ve updated the web site with a high-level agenda, training course descriptions, hotel and venue information, detailed pricing, and, of course, the registration form (Barcelona, Boston).

Regarding pricing, note that we are doing something a little different this year. Instead of having a single early-bird period we’re having multiple price breaks leading up to the event. The biggest savings happens now through mid-July and then the prices start to go up until we eventually reach the full-price rates.

Networking with others in the community, talking to industry visionaries and Alfresco Engineers, and taking some time to look at your ECM implementation from a new angle are all great reasons to come to Alfresco Summit. But I think the biggest benefit that justifies the cost of the conference, travel, and time away from work is the great content.

If you’ve been to past DevCons you know that this is an information-dense event. That will be the case again this year. To help make that happen, we rely on our passionate community of customers, partners, employees, and other members of the ecosystem to come to the conference and share their story with the rest of us, whether that’s a full-length session or a lightning talk. If you would like to speak, there is still time. You have until June 15 to get your proposal turned in.

Alfresco Summit is the must-attend event for anyone doing anything with our software. Do not wait to register because I want to see you there, have a chance to shake your hand, and thank you for helping make Alfresco the last true innovator in the ECM industry.