Tag: Alfresco

Alfresco Share Screencast Part Two

My colleague, John Eckman, has posted the second part of the Alfresco Share screencast at Optaros Labs. In this screencast I show how a couple of examples of custom share components. One is a team bookmarks component and the other is a status/microblogging component. These components were built with Surf and should work in any Surf-based web site. Obviously, that includes Share but could be other Surf sites that you build. We will make both components available as open source.

New Optaros Screencast: Alfresco Share Part One

My Optaros colleague, John Eckman, has been asking me to do this for some time so I finally caved and knocked it out. It’s a 12-minute screencast that shows the basics of Alfresco Share, an open source team collaboration tool which Alfresco markets as an alternative to Microsoft Sharepoint.

There’s also a “Part Two” which John will post on Optaros Labs next week that shows a couple of the custom Share components we developed. One is a Facebook-like “status” component and the other is a “team bookmarks” component. I’ll post the link when it’s up.

Share is pretty cool both from a functional perspective and with respect to the underlying technology. Share is built on Alfresco Surf plus a ton of YUI. The version I used in the screencast is 3.0.1 Enterprise.

Are you in Dallas-Ft. Worth and interested in Alfresco?

A few of us in the area are talking about putting together an Alfresco meet-up the first week of March. Nothing fancy (and definitely not a sales pitch). Maybe we’ll have one or two presentations from real world implementations. The goal is for everyone to learn what we’ve all been up to, share ideas, etc.

I’ve got a venue squared away and someone to foot the bill for pizza and beer. Now I need the most important ingredient: You.

So respond here with a comment or contact me directly if this is something you think you might attend. If you have a topic you want to share with the group let me know that too. We’ll finalize the agenda and logistics based on the level of interest.

Alfresco Surf Code Camp: Do-It-Yourself

Did you miss the Alfresco Surf Code Camps? I’ve got you covered. With Alfresco’s blessing (they wrote most of the content, after all) I’ve uploaded the Optaros Alfresco 3.0 Surf Code Camp instructor presentations and class labs to slideshare.net.

You might start by looking at the agenda to get an idea of the order you should progress through the lecture and labs. Then, move on to the introduction. Use the agenda to guide you through the rest.

The labs will be a little bit more painful than they were in-person. That’s because for the in-person camps, we used a virtual machine image that had everything pre-installed. For the DIY Code Camp, you’ll need to set this up yourself. To approximate what was on the image:

  1. Install the Alfresco-Tomcat bundle.
  2. Install a second Tomcat instance. This will be your Surf tier.
  3. Build a fresh Surf war. It’s in the “web framework” project in the source code. It will produce a WAR called alfwf.war.
  4. The labs will refer to “assets.zip”. I had an assets.zip file for just about every lab. For this setup, I’ve just got one zip, which is the entire solution source available for download. So when you see that, you’ll have to pick through the solution to find the file dependencies. Sorry.

The image we used for the class ran on 3.0 Labs from head circa mid-November. I believe people have had success running on 3.0 Enterprise. I haven’t tested on Labs 3 Stable. If someone tries it please post a comment here to let us know your degree of success.

The Code Camp doesn’t cover Web Studio. I’ll leave that up to someone else–I’ll be happy to link to it.

UPDATE: Making you find your own dependencies for the labs was lame. I had a few extra minutes so I pulled them into a Code Camp Assets file organized by lab/walkthrough. Now you’ve got no excuse.

Enjoyed the Code Camp in Munich last week

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Germany last week. In addition to presenting the details around Alfresco’s web application framework, Surf, I met lots of great people, ate some outstanding food, and drank plenty of German beer. Out of the three Code Camps we conducted, this location had the most character. Check out the pics to see what I mean.

About 30 people from around Europe spent the day learning Alfresco Surf. We then finished up with a round table discussion. One of the campers, Gabriele Columbro, posted a great recap of the Code Camp if you want a taste of what we covered. Gabriele has a few screenshots of the slides. We’ll be posting all of the materials and labs in full soon.

Alfresco Surf overview: Recorded webinar available online

I’m looking forward to the Surf Code Camp we’re conducting on Tuesday in Munich. If you’re attending and you want a little taste of the framework, Alfresco has a one hour recorded webinar available. If you don’t get a chance to watch it prior to the Code Camp, that’s okay. We’re covering everything that’s discussed in that webinar and more. Some people have said that they would rather not come in cold, so this is for those folks.

I know not everyone’s been able to get to a Code Camp. We’re going to work with Alfresco to get the presentations, labs, code samples, and maybe even the VMWare image posted at some point this quarter in case people want to go through the material on their own.

Alfresco 3.0 Surf Code Camp Boston Wrapped Up

We hosted a good crowd of folks at Optaros headquarters in Boston today for our second Code Camp around Alfresco 3.0 Surf. Alfresco’s own Dr. Yong Qu was on hand to provide an early gift to campers–a live demo of Alfresco’s browser-based site designer tool, Web Studio. It looked like it was coming along nicely. The new tool is in Labs head but I haven’t had a chance to take a look so it was great that Yong was able to show us how it worked.

Yong showed a quick demo in which he stepped through a site creation wizard. Behind the scenes, Web Studio was creating a new web project in the Alfresco WCM store and configuring a user sandbox. Once the site was created, Yong put the site in edit mode. It makes more sense when you see it but what happens is a tray opens up that contains various lists of templates, components, and assets that can be dragged-and-dropped onto regions on the site’s pages. Once put in place, the component can be configured. Again, behind the scenes, Web Studio is creating the Surf model objects in the Alfresco WCM store (Code Campers become painfully aware of the variety and number of model objects required to build a Surf site because they do it by hand all day in the labs).

It’ll be a while (multiple months?) before Web Studio makes it into Enterprise. Until then, try it out. And while you’re in there, look at the library of components. Alfresco is hoping you will be inspired to create and submit additional components that can be similarly shared with the community.

The next Optaros-led Alfresco 3.0 Surf Code Camp will be in Munich on January 13th. I’ll be there as well as some of my other Optaros teammates, Alfresco will be there, and we’re hoping you will be there too. Read more details on the Munich event and sign up here.