Tag: Alfresco

Book Review: Alfresco 3 Cookbook by Snig Bhaumik

I finished reading Alfresco 3 Cookbook, by Snig Bhaumik, a while ago and I’ve been remiss in getting my review posted. Disclosure: Packt sent me the book for free.

Alfresco 3 Cookbook is the latest entry in what is now a fairly voluminous catalog of Alfresco-related titles. So I was excited to read Snig’s book in the hope that there would be new information being shared, particularly on the latest 3.4 release. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed from that perspective–the book does not have much information you can’t find in other books. However, what I do like about the book is that the author covers each use case in very clear, step-by-step instructions. And the book makes use of informative screenshots throughout–I could tell a lot of effort went into that.

The biggest thing missing from the book, in my opinion, is the complete lack of coverage of the Share client. Share has been available since 3.0 and has been the client of choice (over the old Explorer client) for at least a year now, maybe longer, so it is time for authors to shift from Explorer to Share when covering the platform.

Leaving Share out means that some topics, which are most commonly used in Share, get left out as well, such as the Alfresco FTS syntax and “linked rule sets” to name two. But, perhaps more importantly, it means that readers who want to follow along have to use the old client even if their organization is primarily using Share. And, it means there is still no definitive guide available for those who want more technical information on how to customize Share. (As a side-note, I’ve heard one is in the works–I hope the authors of that book will delay publication until they’ve had a chance to incorporate the changes in Alfresco 4 because a lot of work has been done on Share customization in Alfresco 4).

I found a few technical mistakes with the book and I’ve discussed them with the author. Mistakes happen in every book and I normally wouldn’t call them out in a review, but two are important enough to mention here:

  • At the bottom of 271 the author is talking about the name space associated with workflow jPDL. It says, “wf is the workflow namespace defined for jBPM, thus it is pretty fixed, you would use wf namespace prefix in your process definitions,” which is incorrect. This should read, “you would NOT use wf namespace prefix in your process definitions”. The way it reads currently it sounds like the recommendation is to use “wf” as the type namespace, like “wf:someCustomType”, which you should not do.
  • On page 337 it says that Alfresco is GPL, which isn’t accurate. It’s actually LGPL v3.

Still, overall I like the book. The coverage is broad enough to hit just about everything, and deep enough to get most people pointed in the right direction. It should be a good read for those new to the platform. The first four chapters are for end-users or administrators. Topics include things like installing, creating spaces, uploading content and setting metadata, securing content, searching, and creating rules. The author then moves into more technical topics like exporting content, using the node browser, and managing users and groups. The middle of the book is a bit more developer-oriented: Customizing the Explorer client, extending the content model, writing JavaScript and web scripts, and creating and deploying workflows.

One of the last chapters in the book is on integrating Alfresco with Microsoft Office. I thought it was strange that the chapter didn’t mention how to install and configure the SharePoint Protocol module and instead chose to cover the older Office plug-ins.

Bottom-line: If you are new to the platform and are looking for step-by-step instructions for implementing a variety of use cases in Alfresco, grab a copy of Alfresco 3 Cookbook. If you are an experienced Alfresco developer looking for deeper discussions, or you need help with Alfresco Share, look elsewhere.

 

Screencasts highlighting a few new Alfresco 4 Community features

Alfresco 4 Community was released last week. There’s a nice presentation on slideshare that summarizes what’s new in Alfresco 4, so I’m not going to give a comprehensive list here. And we’re going to be covering the technical details on all of the new features at DevCon in San Diego and London so I’ll save the code snippets for DevCon.

Next week, people all over the world will be celebrating the Alfresco 4 release with informal meetups so I thought in this post I’d prime the pump a bit with a brief list of the more buzz-worthy features and record some short screencasts of those so that if you aren’t able to join one of the worldwide release parties, you can have your own little soiree at your home or office. Just try not to let it get out of control. If the cops do show up, you might mention that the New York Police Department uses Alfresco.

Drag-and-Drop

I’ve been showing Alfresco 4 at JavaOne all week and drag-and-drop was pretty popular. You can drag one or more files from your machine into the repo. And you can move them from one folder to another by dropping onto the folder hierarchy. You’ll need an HTML5-enabled browser for this to work. Here it is in action (this one didn’t get created in HD for some reason):

Document Library In-Line Edit

It’s a little thing, but it’s handy. You can change file names and add tags from the document list without launching the edit metadata panel.

Configurable Document Library Sort Order & Better Site Config

How many times has a customer asked you to change the document library sort order? I know, I know. Now they can do it themselves. Also, you can now brand sites individually, so each site can have its own theme. And components can be renamed to things like your document library don’t have to be called “Document Library”.

Better Administration

The Share Administration panel now has a Node Browser, a Category Manager, and a Tag Manager. The Node Browser and the Category Manager were actually direct community contributions. Tell me again why you are still using the old Alfresco Explorer client?

DM to File System Publish

Last year at DevCon in New York, a bunch of us tackled Brian Remmington, wrestled him to the ground, and refused to let him up until he agreed to add this to the product. Once security was able to break up the scrum we apologized and had a good talk. I think deep down he appreciated our passion. I’m joking, of course, but what’s not a joke is that the DM-to-file system publish functionality is now in there. I’ll update this post with a screencast as soon as I figure out how it works.

So take a look at the presentation for a more complete summary. I didn’t show Activiti or Solr, which are two much-anticipated additions to the product, because the value they add is hard to convey in a short screencast. Feel free to record your own screencasts of your favorite new features and point me to them.

List of Alfresco Dashlet Challenge 2011 Entries

The Alfresco Dashlet Challenge contest has been over for quite a while and our winner, Florian Maul, has received his iPad and has already racked up some impressive Fruit Ninja scores, but I’m just now getting around to posting the entire list of entries. I’ve put the list on the Alfresco wiki.

Please do take a look at these projects and try them in your own installations. In many cases, it’s a single JAR you drop in, then restart and you’re done. If you find problems, don’t hesitate to log issues or maybe even crack open your editor, fix it, and contribute it back to the author.

I should take this opportunity to mention a little project we’ve got brewing. If you’ve heard any of my “State of the Community” talks you may already know about Alfresco Add-Ons. It’s a site we’re building that will do a better job of helping you find and rate add-ons the community is creating for the Alfresco platform. An Add-On might be a dashlet, like the Dashlet Challenge entries, or it might be an integration, or an API, or just about anything else that works with Alfresco.

Add-Ons isn’t meant to be a project hosting site. There are already a lot of those available. Instead, think of it as a directory or index with some social features to help the cream rise to the top. This will give everyone (Community & Enterprise users) a one-stop shop for add-ons and extensions.

We’re hoping to have a minimum viable product ready by DevCon. If it gets done and enough people want to see it, we’ll have an ad hoc session so we can look at it together. We’d obviously like to get feedback from the community for the next sprint.

Alfresco as a Platform: Your thoughts?

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?

Alfresco DevCon 2011 Call for Papers

I’ve just posted the official call for papers for Alfresco DevCon 2011. I know a lot of ecmarchitect.com readers have done some really cool things with Alfresco. This is a great opportunity for you to share those stories with the rest of us.

Also, let me know if there is anything significant missing from the proposed list of tracks, which is:

  • Alfresco as a Platform
  • Best Practices
  • Customizing Alfresco
  • Case Studies
  • BPM
  • Building WCM Solutions with Alfresco

Just like last year, we’ll have three sessions running concurrently throughout the day. We’ll start Day 1 with opening remarks from me, then move right into a keynote from John Newton, which is always a crowd favorite. Then I was thinking it would be good to have a “What’s New in 4.0?” general session, then split into breakouts after that. The only other general session I could see us doing would be an Engineering Panel Discussion, maybe on the morning of Day 2.

Any and all feedback is welcome!

Alfresco DevCon coming to San Diego and London this Fall

We’ve finally got everything settled around the cities, venues, and dates for our annual Alfresco DevCon. This year we will be in San Diego at the Hard Rock Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter October 26th & 27th and in London at Prospero House in Central London November 9th & 10th.

In both cities, the two conference days will be preceded by a Training Day. So, if you want to take the Jump Start or Advanced training courses and attend the full conference, you’ll need to block out three days. If you are skipping Training Day, you’ll need to block out two days.

My official announcement is on the DevCon blog, here. You should get in the habit of following that blog for all DevCon related news. I’ll try to point you to additional posts on that blog as they happen, but that feels kind of redundant.

We’ll get registration turned on soon. And we’ll be sharing additional info around hotel and travel, so watch that blog.

Calling all Alfresco bloggers!

The other day, a member of the Alfresco community pointed out to me that while it is great we have so many people blogging on Alfresco topics–from authors both inside and outside the company–there isn’t a single aggregated feed of all of those valuable sources of information. I completely agree.

While we do have the blogs page, the technology we’re using to produce that is a bit cumbersome to keep updated. And that feed is mostly Alfresco employees. We also recently launched www.socialcontent.com, but that does not have links to a universal blog roll either.

To address this, I’ve created several new feeds in Yahoo Pipes. There’s one feed for each of the following:

This should let you subscribe to specific feeds according to your needs.

Now, there’s no way I got everyone on my first pass. If I missed your blog, no worries! The whole point of using Pipes is to make it easier to maintain. To get listed, just shoot me an email with your ATOM feed and which bucket you belong in or respond to this blog post with the same and I’ll add you at my next opportunity.

At some point, hopefully in the near future, we’ll clean up blogs.alfresco.com with a new look-and-feel and we’ll switch the data source to use these feeds. Until then, add one or more of these to your feed reader and enjoy.

Last-minute San Diego Alfresco meetup on 7/13

A few of us are getting together in San Diego tomorrow (7/13) at the Hopping Pig to wallow around in some Alfresco topics. Want to join us? Hop over to the Orange County/San Diego Alfresco Meetup Google Group to let us know you’re coming, to check on logistics, and to be advised of last minute changes. This is an informal networking/planning type of meetup, so there is no formal agenda for this one.