Tag: Conference

Alfresco announces DevCon 2019 for Edinburgh in January

Alfresco Software, Inc. has announced that DevCon 2019 will be in Edinburgh, Scotland from January 29 – 31.

Registration opens August 1st with Early Bird registrations costing €199. Full Regular Admissions will be €249.

The format of the conference is the same as past conferences: The first day will be a hack-a-thon followed by two full days of conference sessions.

The conference would be nothing without great content so you should submit a talk. This is a technical conference, so technical how-to’s, technical case studies, and deep dives are all areas to consider. There will be 30-minute sessions, 45-minute sessions, lightning talks, and longer workshops.

I’m excited to see DevCon happening again. It’s always fun to catch up in-person with members of the community and to hear what everyone’s been working on.

I’m less excited about the venue. Don’t get me wrong–I want to visit Scotland. Just not in January. Last year, when Scotland was mentioned as a possibility, even the Scots in the audience were like, “Please, no! Don’t come to Scotland in January!”. But I guess it’s a way for Alfresco to cut costs. They often bring lots of engineers so reducing travel costs from London can make a big difference in the budget for the event.

Oh well, this isn’t a vacation and most of our time will be spent indoors attending sessions from the community and the Alfresco engineers, so grab a sweater, get registered, and we’ll see you in January!

 

Alfresco Software resurrects DevCon

Encouraged by the success of the independently-organized, developer-focused BeeCon conference, and seeking to continue its renewed focus on developers, Alfresco has decided to resurrect its own annual developer-focused event. This week Alfresco announced that DevCon will be held January 16 – 18 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Alfresco had previously given up on big, annual events, deciding instead to focus on smaller, one day events in local markets around the globe. These were primarily sales and marketing events focused on lead generation and did not include an open call for papers.

When the annual events were discontinued, the community stepped in. The Order of the Bee, a global community of Alfresco enthusiasts independent of Alfresco Software, Inc., held two successful conferences in 2016 and 2017. These were low-budget, non-profit affairs with a very high signal-to-noise ratio.

Despite being organized independently by the community, the Order of the Bee events were still heavily supported by Alfresco. The company paid for high-level sponsorships and sent many engineers, John Newton, and other staff to give talks at both Order of the Bee conferences.

The company’s interest in annual events isn’t the only thing to have come back around lately. In the early days, the company was very focused on developers. The repository was pitched as a key foundational technology to content-centric applications. Over time that focus blurred as the company tried to move up-market towards “solutions” and the marketing focus turned to business buyers. But the pendulum has swung back again, centered mainly around the Alfresco Development Framework, a set of components meant to make it easier for developers to build content and process centric applications. So it is no surprise that Alfresco would be interested in being the primary driver behind an annual developer-centric event.

The resurrection of DevCon by Alfresco should be good for the community as long as the event is able to hold on to its community and developer focus. They have invited The Order of the Bee to help with conference planning, so that will help. And, the community and developer outreach functions within Alfresco are now held by many former community members so that also increases its chance of success, at least from a community perspective.

The Alfresco community has always been strongest in Europe. For now, Lisbon is the only date announced. If it is successful, it’s possible we could see a North American date later in 2018, or perhaps they will alternate continents every other year.

The Call for Papers is open now. But if you want to speak, you’d better hurry. The deadline for submissions is Monday, October 23, 2017.

Thoughts on BeeCon 2017, the community-organized conference for Alfresco enthusiasts

At the end of April a couple hundred Alfresco enthusiasts met in Zaragoza, Spain, for the second annual BeeCon. BeeCon is a conference organized by and for the Alfresco community. Attendees represented every continent except Antarctica (and Boriss, who is Chilean, tried to claim that he also represents Antarctica). I was truly impressed with the broad attendance, especially with those that came from as far away as China and Australia to collaborate, learn, and teach together with the rest of the Alfresco community.

Here are some thoughts I had during the conference…

Where are the North Americans, especially U.S.-based partners?

We increased our attendance by North Americans this year from almost no one to a small handful of the usuals plus a few new delegates, including some from the University of Alberta. The Alfresco community has always been stronger in Europe than in North America for whatever reason, but I’d like to see us significantly improve attendance from North America.

Key to that is partner participation. A formal partner should be setting the example for contributing to the community. This is not simply altruism–a company can help the community and by doing so add top-spin to the value of their partnership. European partners clearly get that. One European partner had 8 or 9 people at the conference. Zia and Micro Strategies did make it. But most North American partners seem to only be interested in selling and marketing events, which is a real shame.

Alfresco is clearly focused on Cloud and ADF

It is clear that the big focus for Alfresco is on two areas: Cloud and the ADF (Application Development Framework).

For cloud, work is under way to essentially develop a cloud-native content repository and associated services. This is more than just spinning up some virtual machines on AWS, Google, or Azure and running Alfresco as we know it. This would leverage the services those platforms provide in a native way to provide content services. Examples include things like using S3 for storage, Dynamo for metadata, and lambdas for things like actions and behaviors. Alfresco is focusing first on AWS, then they’ll look at other cloud providers.

The ADF is the other area of focus. It is often referred to in the same breath as “Angular components” but it is more than just a set of components for that specific client-side framework. The ADF also includes a more general client-side JavaScript library, so if Angular is not your thing, you can still leverage the client-side JavaScript library from your framework of choice. The ADF also includes some project bootstrapping in the form of a Yeoman generator.

There were also several talks on the server-side REST API that is new in 5.2 which is an essential set of services that enable those front-end libraries to work.

Alfresco confirmed that this focus on ADF means the existing Share client is not receiving much, if any, attention at this point. John Newton said that they are working on an “exemplary” or canonical client built with the ADF. The goal, however, is for that example client to be more focused on a specific use case and not a more general document management use case, which is what Share does. In one of the birds-of-a-feather sessions, the group urged Alfresco engineering to not let the example client accidentally become a de facto Share replacement. Alfresco has a history of releasing example or demo systems that then somehow become real products. Hopefully that won’t be repeated. It’s okay to replace Share at some point, just do so intentionally.

I think the advice I gave last year regarding the ADF still holds, so if you are trying to figure out how the ADF affects your customization plans around Alfresco, read that post.

Not Much Else New and Exciting

If you went to BeeCon looking for big product announcements you were likely disappointed. The cloud and ADF stuff is definitely interesting and critical for Alfresco to stay relevant and so it is naturally sucking every last ounce of energy out of the engineering and product teams leaving little room for innovation in other areas.

John Newton’s talk was basically about “Digital Transformation”, which is what Gartner has decided to call ECM. My clients and I don’t really care what Gartner wants to call what we do. We’re still solving the same problems we’ve always solved using essentially the same approaches with newer tools. That’s just how ECM–sorry, I mean Digital Transformation–is. It’s a mature industry. Should we be shocked that Alfresco did not knock us over with an amazing set of new features no one had ever thought of before? He did hint at some natural learning and machine language applications. I would have loved for him to spend most or all of his talk on that.

Support Tools for Community Edition is a Hot Add-On

Here’s a tip. If you are running Enterprise Edition and you have not installed Support Tools, you need to. It is really helpful for those that administer Alfresco servers. Unfortunately, it has historically been Enterprise-only. But last year, Axel Faust and a merry band of hackers participating in the 2016 Global Virtual Hack-a-Thon wrote their own version of Support Tools that works for both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. In my mind, this could be the single most important add-on written by the community since the JavaScript Console. It’s incredibly useful and it has a lot of people actively participating in its development. Definitely take a look if you haven’t.

Fun at the Hack-a-thon

Speaking of the hack-a-thon, this was the first time I’ve been able to participate in the on-site hack-a-thon for the entire day. It was a lot of fun! My team worked on a little add-on that makes it easier to manage rules (convert local rules to shared, relocate rule sets, etc.).

Like all hack-a-thons it was a little unnerving because you feel a lot of pressure to build something minimally viable with the time and team that you have but I highly recommend the experience. Axel Faust did a great job facilitating the day-long session for the 20 or so attendees from a variety of backgrounds and skillsets.

See You Next Year?

We haven’t identified a location for next year’s conference yet. Before you start shouting out your favorite cities from around the globe, realize a couple of things. The Order of the Bee puts on this conference with an all-volunteer committee. The venue is free or extremely low cost. The free venue together with help from our sponsors allows us to keep the price very low, but it also requires a lot of work from the team which includes a local in-city coordinator to work with the venue, catering, audio-visual, etc. So we do want to hear suggestions, but viable suggestions will take all of that under consideration.

There is some talk of Alfresco resurrecting DevCon. They’ve been a wonderful and supportive sponsor of BeeCon these last two years and as long as the event continues its high signal-to-noise ratio and community inclusiveness (both in terms of the ecosystem and Community Edition, specifically) then it is probably a good thing. Until they commit, we’ll assume there will be a BeeCon 2018, and I hope to see all of you there next year, wherever that may be!

Join me in Spain for BeeCon, the community-organized Alfresco conference

Registration for BeeCon 2017 is now open. What is BeeCon? It’s a conference focused on Alfresco organized by The Order of the Bee, a grassroots community of Alfresco enthusiasts.

This year the conference is April 25 – 28. We’ll be in Zaragoza, Spain, a beautiful city about 1.5 hours by train from Madrid.

If you’ve ever been to Alfresco DevCon, the conference is a lot like that. The focus is on providing high-quality content free of sales pitches.

Despite being run by volunteers with costs kept to a minimum (it essentially runs as a non-profit), last year’s conference was well-attended and felt very professional and well-planned. I have no doubt that the hard work of the conference committee and the support of our sponsors will result in another proud moment for The Order of the Bee and, more importantly, a productive use of your time.

This year the format changed slightly. We moved the hack-a-thon to the beginning of the conference so it would not conflict with sessions. That night we’ll have a welcome party. Sessions start the next morning. The conference features two and-a-half days of traditional sessions, which are mostly technical, as well as lightning talks, which are always entertaining and informative. The schedule is on the conference site.

BeeCon is planned, organized, and executed entirely by volunteers. Alfresco Software, Inc. and other vendors pay to sponsor the event, but the program is driven by a committee of Order of the Bee members. Speaker selection is based on the merit of the proposal. Do you have an Alfresco story to share? Become a speaker!

For me, BeeCon is a time to lift my head up from my projects and spend time learning what others are doing in this space. It also gives me a chance to physically hang out, chat, and laugh with people I collaborate with online nearly every day. This year, I hope you’ll decide to join us in person. I am looking forward to seeing you in Zaragoza!

Elasticon 2016 is only two weeks away

elastic_logo_color_horizontalElasticon 2016 is just around the corner. The annual conference covering all things Elastic is happening February 17 – 19 in San Francisco.

Last year, the buzz was all about Elasticsearch 2.0. Attendees learned a lot about what to expect with that release. But my favorites were the sessions that covered real world implementations. Some of these included:

  • How the U.S. Geological Survey uses Elasticsearch to be notified of earthquakes as they happen by monitoring and analyzing social media.
  • Verizon’s best practices around scalability–they have 128 nodes indexing 10 billion documents per day.
  • Goldman Sachs was another big one–at that time they were running 700 nodes.
  • Interesting case studies from Wikimedia, Quizlet, Zen Desk.
  • Focus on analysis challenges from the team that runs Elasticsearch to provide web search for 1500 dot gov web sites such as the NIH and the U.S. Army.

Beyond informative sessions, you can learn a lot in the hallway track. At last year’s conference there were 1300 attendees from 32 different countries. I met people from both ends of the business spectrum doing all sorts of different things with Elasticsearch and the rest of the ELK stack.

This year’s agenda looks pretty interesting. I’m looking forward to the roadmap sessions, of course, but it’s the sessions from folks like Thomson Reuters, Yammer, HotelTonight, Eventbrite, Etsy, The New York Times, and Adobe that will probably give me the most bang for my buck. It only takes a few key insights here and there to pay for the entire trip.

Amazingly, this year’s conference has not sold out yet. Grab a spot and join us. Today is the last day for the discounted rate.

Register now for BeeCon, the Alfresco Community Conference

Order of the BeeRegistration for BeeCon 2016 is now open. What the heck is BeeCon? BeeCon is the first-ever, independently-organized conference focused entirely on Alfresco. The BeeCon web site says it best:

Alfresco professionals and enthusiasts come to BeeCon to sharpen their technical skills and collaborate with other experts…Whether you are a developer, information professional, student, or Alfresco employee, BeeCon is the place to dive deep into Alfresco and develop the relationships which you will need to be successful in the coming year.

The conference is organized by the Order of the Bee, an independent community focused on Alfresco.

Who Will Attend?

BeeCon is an event organized by and targeted towards the Alfresco community. It is built around the idea that what makes our community great is its open, collaborative spirit. And that, from time-to-time, it is important to meet face-to-face to learn from each other, hash out ideas, strengthen personal relationships, and just have fun.

If Alfresco is just a piece of software to you, then this is a conference with a lot of technical how-to’s that will help you get your project done, and you should come for that reason. When you arrive, though, you’re going to find out that a lot of people have crossed oceans and continents to be in Brussels because not only is the software important, but because, as a community, we have a lot of work to do. And the people who care about the Alfresco community are using this event to get organized and to map the way forward.

If you love sales pitches and marketing fluff you should sit this one out. But if you…

  • want to learn more about the technical details from experts;
  • are already running Alfresco in your organization, whether that’s Enterprise or Community Edition; or
  • want to help shape the future of the community and the platform

…then you need to attend BeeCon 2016.

More than a Meetup

This is more than a meetup. It’s a real two-day conference with keynotes, tracks, and a hack-a-thon. The goal is to make it similar to past events like DevCon with really great content and outstanding people, but without the big budget (or price tag).

You can register now for about 60 Euros. If you wait the price goes up to about 90 Euros.

Support from Alfresco and Other Sponsors

The BeeCon team has focused on keeping things practical and inexpensive. But events like this simply cannot succeed without help from sponsors. This year, CIRB-CIBG is providing the venue, A/V equipment, and WiFi, which is amazing because those three items are the biggest in terms of cost for any event. What’s even more amazing is that we enjoy additional support from a number of sponsors including Alfresco, Contezza, ITD Systems, keensoft, VDEL, and Xenit. You should thank these folks when you see them.

Stay Tuned for the Detailed Agenda

The program team received a number of speaking submissions from Alfresco engineers and community members from all over the world. They are busy reviewing those and will get the conference web site updated as things solidify. The team is picky–they want sessions to be high quality and packed with information you can use on your Alfresco projects right away. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished agenda, but I’m not going to wait to register.

Space is Limited, Do Not Wait to Register!

While you’re thinking about it, complete your registration. It’s only 60 Euros. I’ll bet you can slip that into an expense report without much fuss. And when you bring the things you learn back to the office, you’ll win respect and adoration from your boss and coworkers. Not bad for 60 Euros.

When making your travel plans for Brussels, remember that we’ll be getting together Wednesday night, April 27, for a welcome reception. The conference runs two days, April 28-29. Then, whomever is interested can come with us to the medieval city of Bruges on Saturday, April 30, for a day of sightseeing. I’ve been to Bruges–it’s gorgeous. You won’t want to miss it. Plus, it will be nice to hang out with your favorite community members, Belgian-style.

I look forward to seeing you in Brussels in April!

Alfresco cancels Summit, asks community to organize its own conference

summit-community-editionEarlier this week, in a post to a public mailing list, Ole Hejlskov, Developer Evangelist at Alfresco, announced that the company will not be putting on its annual conference, Alfresco Summit, this year as originally planned. Instead, the company is focusing on smaller, shorter, sales-oriented events which have been very successful in several cities around the globe.

Ole said that Alfresco will be adding developer content to its Alfresco Day events, which have historically been mostly end-user and decision-maker focused. In contrast, Alfresco’s yearly events started out as developer-focused conferences, but in recent years had a more balanced agenda with both technical and non-technical tracks.

Alfresco had announced earlier in the year that their annual conference would be in New Orleans in November. In each of the last five years the company put on two conferences–one in Europe and the other in United States. For 2015 the plan was to have a single conference only in the U.S. which drew criticism from the community that skews heavily toward a non-U.S. demographic.

When the community realized Alfresco Summit 2015 would be held only in the U.S., an independent community organization called The Order of the Bee began making plans to hold their own conference in Europe. Alfresco says it will support the community’s efforts to hold its own event and wants to explore “…ways in which participation from Alfresco corporate makes sense”.

I understand where Alfresco is coming from. Annual conferences are expensive in both real dollars and the time and attention it takes to plan and execute. When you multiply that times two it obviously represents an even bigger investment.

You also have to look at what Alfresco gets out of the conference. Alfresco is increasingly sales-focused. The conference has historically been focused on knowledge-sharing and camaraderie. Yes, there were deals closed at Alfresco Summit but it was not geared towards selling. It was more about coming together to share stories, good and bad.

The Alfresco Day events are unabashedly sales and marketing. The attendees (and they get very large turnouts) know this which means Alfresco does not have to apologize for coming off too sales-y. Multiple cities with hundreds of prospects is a better investment for them than two cities with 1400 attendees who are existing customers and community members.

As the guy who led DevCon and Alfresco Summit and together with my team grew it year after year, it is weird to see Alfresco cancel the conference for 2015. I was looking forward to attending.

As a member of The Order of the Bee, I’m intrigued by the challenge of using an all-volunteer organization to potentially put together a replacement conference of some sort. If you have any interest in helping and you did not see my email to the mailing list, we’ll probably be meeting next week to get organized. Reach out to me and I’ll add you to the invitation.

Alfresco Summit 2014 Save-the-date & Call-for-papers

I am pleased to announce that Alfresco Summit 2014 will be held this year in San Francisco and London. Similar to last year, we’ll have an optional “Day 0” which will include training and a hack-a-thon and then the main conference will start on the following day. This year, the main conference lasts only two days, regardless of the tracks you are interested in.

San Francisco
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
September 23, 24, & 25

London
Hilton London Metropole
October 7, 8, & 9

San Francisco and London are two of my favorite cities so I’m looking forward to spending time in each one.

The Program At-a-Glance

The business tracks were popular last year so we’re going to do those again. Laurence Hart is heading up the business tracks this year. I expect the business sessions, two tracks full of non-technical presentations from customers as well as a few sessions from Alfresco product management, will be well-attended.

I’m taking the technical tracks again, which is always fun. Several of you said you had too many tough choices last year so we’re moving from four technical tracks down to three. So that’s two full days of technical content for both beginners and experts delivered by Alfresco engineering, partners, and other community members.

The solutions track will work the same way as it did last year with Joe Tong and Peggy responsible for selecting content that showcases entire solutions built for the Alfresco platform. And the ever-popular lightning talks that Richard Esplin puts together every year will also be on the agenda.

Another change we made in response to your feedback is that we’ve reduced the sessions from 50 minutes to 40 minutes, which effectively doubles the time between sessions. This will give you more time to network in the “hallway track” and to browse the booths in the exhibit hall.

We Need Your Great Content!

I’ll fill you in on the killer keynotes, the can’t-miss party, and other details later. None of that really matters without one key ingredient: Outstanding content. This is where you come in. Every year we get some great responses to our call-for-papers. I expect this year to be no different.

You should submit a proposal to speak at Alfresco Summit. Your colleagues want to hear:

  • What have you been doing with Alfresco that others could learn from?
  • What was the good, the bad, and the ugly from your last project?
  • What are those tips and tricks that would have saved you days or weeks had you only known beforehand?

This kind of information is invaluable to the broader community.

Before I tell you how to submit your idea for a topic, let me give you some hints on what I think makes a great Alfresco Summit topic abstract.

Think about what everyone else is going to propose, then pick something different

A good abstract is one that shows us you’ve got a unique or innovative topic. At the same time, the topic can’t be so niche or specialized that it’s only interesting to a handful of people. If your talk is one of ten just like it, you’re odds aren’t very good. Think new and different.

Related to this, try to avoid topics an Alfrescan is likely to propose. For example, a talk on the latest features of Alfresco One is something that the Alfresco One product managers will present.

Explain who will attend your session and what they will take away

When you are writing your abstract, figure out who will want to attend. This might be job titles or even specific individuals. With those people in mind, ask yourself what is it that they are trying to get out of your talk. A good abstract explains who will attend, why they are interested, and what they will take away from your talk.

Be descriptive, but succinct

When you write your abstract, be descriptive but be succinct. I want to know why this is going to be an interesting talk and why you are the best person to give it, but I don’t need your life story. This year some of the fields have character limits to keep length reasonable.

Don’t Wait, Submit Today!

To have your topic considered you must submit a complete form by the end of April regardless of whether you are submitting for a business talk, a technical talk, or a lightning talk. Solution talks will be handled separately through Joe and Peggy.

The form itself is pretty simple: You’ll tell us who you are, what you are presenting, and what Alfresco products the talk is related to.

If you are selected to present a full session you will receive a free conference pass. We won’t pay for your travel expenses, but you’ll save on registration. You’re in it for the glory anyway, right?

I look forward to another bumper crop of great topic ideas. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

My takeaways from the Alfresco Summit keynotes

This year we tried something new at Alfresco Summit. Rather than have all of our keynotes delivered by Alfrescans we invited some external speakers to both Barcelona and Boston.

Day 1: Big ideas, big opportunities–Doug Dennerline, Jimmy Wales, Andrew McAfee, & John Newton

In both cities we opened the conference with our new CEO, Doug Dennerline. This was Doug’s first annual conference since joining Alfresco, so it was a great opportunity for him to introduce himself to the community and talk about the tremendous opportunity he sees in front of us.

Then, in Barcelona we had Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikimedia Foundation. Jimmy spoke of the phenomenal growth of Wikipedia, particularly in emerging countries and in various languages. He talked about an initiative called Wikipedia Zero, which seeks to provide free access to Wikipedia over cell phone networks. He showed a never-before seen video of school children in South Africa who wrote an open letter to carriers to explain how much Wikipedia helps them with their studies and how much free access would mean to their community. That video totally got to me–I’m such a softy.

One of the things that stuck with me from Jimmy’s talk is that we should be asking what our community needs to get done and then help them make that happen rather than constantly asking what our community can do for us. It’s tough to do because our community is so diverse but this might be a useful guiding principle in the coming year.

In Boston the first day keynote was Andrew McAfee. Andrew is Principle Research Scientist for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management. You may know him as the guy who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0”. His talk was about the unbelievable growth of content in our lives and businesses–“Content is growing faster than our ability to find words to describe it,” he said.

He talked about the importance of following the data rather than always deferring to the HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person in the Organization). He spoke of various studies that showed how areas once ruled by pundits (politics, wine, real estate) are now more accurately forecast using big data techniques.

There were all kinds of amazing stats Andy shared with us that morning. The one most shocking to me was that 500 million searches every day are completely new to Google (here is an article where that is referenced). Apparently 15% of Google searches have been new to Google for each of the last 15 years. Wrap your head around that!

We monitor all kinds of stats related to the Alfresco community. Each quarter we pick a few and see if we can make improvements in those numbers. Andy’s talk was a reminder to me that we need to pay attention to what the community is trying to tell us through data.

That evening John Newton, Alfresco co-founder and CTO, provided a Back to the Future themed keynote focusing on the future of work. John pointed out how unimaginable the work environment of today was ten years ago and asked for all of us to try to predict what work might be like ten years from now. If you have ideas, he’d love you to tweet them with the hashtag “#Work2023”. John’s slides are here. We’ll post the video soon.

Day 2: The Inevitability of Change. Simon Wardley and Dries Buytaert

Day two brought a new set of speakers. In Barcelona we kicked off with Simon Wardley, researcher at the CSC Leading Edge Forum. His talk covered a lot of ground. It was about the best way to think strategically about your organization (find the “why”, not just the “what”) and the inevitability of change and the incredible phases of discovery and innovation that follow major shifts in technology.

He compared cloud, which is simply the shift in computing from product to commodity, to the mass commoditization of electricity. He expects a period of unfathomable new products and services that will be achievable thanks to the cloud much in the same way radio, television, and other major innovations appeared after electricity was commoditized.

I agree with Simon that cloud is not an if but when. Even organizations that say there is no way they will ever put certain data in the cloud will ultimately shift to that style of computing. It will take time–probably less time than any of us think–but it will happen. Until then, Alfresco thinks that 20% of your content will stay on-premise, 20% will move to the cloud, and 60% will be in or moving between both.

Simon’s talk got me thinking about how our community will change over time. On-premise is still a huge part of our business and will be for some time, but SaaS is definitely the direction we’re headed. That will certainly change the make-up, goals, and tactics of the Alfresco community. It’s important for people to know, though, that our values around openness and transparency are fundamental to who we are. We may evolve our products and services, but you should continue to hold us to those values.

In Boston we kicked off day two with a keynote from Drupal creator and Acquia founder, Dries Buytaert. Dries talked about the evolution of content management. He took us from those humble beginnings in his Antwerp dorm room to today where Drupal runs 5% of all web sites and one-size-fits-all approaches are being abandoned in favor of best-of-breed, often incorporating open source software like Drupal and Alfresco.

I loved the “Do Well, Do Good” slide in Dries’ talk because it speaks to a reason why I like working in commercial open source. We can do well as a company–grow the business, earn profits for our stakeholders–but we can also do good for our fellow humans. Software like Drupal and Alfresco are helping all kinds of people fulfill their missions despite their lack of budget. We spend a lot of time worrying about the people who have huge budgets who aren’t paying us and we forget about the tremendous good we do for those who can’t.

Directly relevant? Maybe not always. Inspiring? I hope so!

It’s tough picking keynote speakers. Regarding the exact same speaker I had some people who asked, “Was that talk really relevant to what we do?” and others who exclaimed, “Wow, that was spot-on!”. It’s sort of like art–the perceived relevancy is totally in the beholder. I found elements from all four talks that were relevant to me–the themes played right into my community keynote on day 3–I wish I could say that was totally planned.

The goal wasn’t to have industry visionaries talk to us about our own products or even our own market. The goal was to have someone inspiring give a talk that opened your mind to new possibilities. That’s the best frame of mind you could be in when you go to a conference like Alfresco Summit, I think.

The most well-attended and highest-rated sessions at Alfresco Summit

This year I asked our Alfresco Summit room monitors to capture the number of attendees in each session. It’s interesting to look at the data. For the most part, it’s as I expected, although there are a few surprises here and there.

It’s important to note that a well-attended session reflects topics in which people are interested, a well-written title and/or abstract, position in the schedule, and potentially the reputation of the speaker. It may not be an accurate indicator of how great the session turned out. We also didn’t capture the attendance for every session nor did we get a perfect count every time.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s look at the attendance of the non-technical sessions first. This was the first year we’ve included business sessions in our annual conference and I think it worked really well. Here are the top 5 non-technical sessions in terms of attendance for Barcelona:

Top 5 Business Sessions by Attendance (Barcelona)

  1. The NextGen ECM Goes Social, Mobile & Cloud (Hanns Koehler-Kruener)
  2. Alfresco for Salesforce (Jared Ottley, Will Abson)
  3. Share in Action at University of Westminster and iMinds (Multiple speakers)
  4. Putting Content to Work in the Public Sector (Multiple speakers)
  5. The Missing Link: E-Mail-Integrations for Alfresco to Increase Acceptance, Enrich Experience, Enhance Quality & Simply Do Better Work (Hofkens)

And here is the list of the most well-attended business sessions in Boston:

Top 5 Business Sessions by Attendance (Boston)

  1. Getting Users to Adopt the Technology That IT Loves (Multiple speakers)
  2. The Extended Enterprise: The Future is Cloud but Hybrid is Reality (Multiple speakers)
  3. What You Need to Know: Running a Successful Content Management Project (Multiple speakers)
  4. Managing Mobile Content in the Enterprise (Marc Dubresson & Mike Hatfield)
  5. Centralizing and Optimizing All Kinds of Content: Panel on Digital Asset Management (Gauss)

In Barcelona, the technical sessions were attended by almost twice as many people as the business sessions, on average, while in Boston the average attendance was almost the same for both technical and non-technical. This isn’t surprising as the conference has been historically more technical in EMEA than the Americas both in terms of content and attendees.

Technical Sessions

Here are the most well-attended technical sessions in Barcelona. If the session didn’t make the top 10 well-attended list in Boston (either because it wasn’t presented or because it wasn’t as well-attended relative to the other talks) it is marked with an asterisk (“*”):

Top 10 Technical Sessions by Attendance (Barcelona)

  1. Querying for Metadata (Andy Hind)
  2. *Beating the Benchmarks with a Billion Objects (Robin Bramley)
  3. What’s New in the Bulk File System Import Tool (Peter Monks & Richard McKnight)
  4. *The Share Widget Library (David Draper)
  5. Inspecting Alfresco: Tools & Techniques (Nathan McMinn)
  6. Share Page Creation Live (David Draper)
  7. Alfresco Backup and Recovery Tool: A Real World Backup Solution (Toni de la Fuente)
  8. Getting Started with Alfresco Development (Gethin James)
  9. *What’s Coming in CMIS 1.1 (Greg Melahn)
  10. Enabling Test-Driven, Rapid Dev, & Continuous Delivery of Alfresco Apps (Gabriele Columbro)

The list for most well-attended technical sessions in Boston has some of the same talks as Barcelona with a few exceptions (talks only appearing on the Boston list are marked with “*”):

Top 10 Technical Sessions by Attendance (Boston)

  1. Getting Started with Alfresco Development (Ray Gauss)
  2. Alfresco Backup and Recovery Tool: A Real World Backup Solution (Toni de la Fuente)
  3. Inspecting Alfresco: Tools & Techniques (Nathan McMinn)
  4. *Boost Your Productivity with Next Gen BPM Tooling (Joram Barrez)
  5. What’s New in the Bulk File System Import Tool (Peter Monks, Richard McKnight)
  6. Enabling Test-Driven, Rapid Dev, & Continuous Delivery of Alfresco Apps (Gabriele Columbro)
  7. *The Art of the Upgrade (Kyle Adams)
  8. Querying for Metadata (Andy Hind)
  9. *Performance Troubleshooting & Tooling (Romain Guinot)
  10. Share Page Creation Live (David Draper)

I should note that the “top 10” cutoff is completely arbitrary. In Barcelona, for example, the next 10 sessions still had 65 to 70 people in attendance.

What about lightning talks?

The lightning talks were extremely well-attended in both cities. In fact, most of the lightning talk sessions had enough attendees to make it into the top ten well-attended list, but I wanted to call them out separately.

Richard Esplin did a bang-up job pulling together two dozen lightning talks in each city. The overwhelming majority of lightning talks used the Ignite format which meant the slides advanced themselves after 30 seconds. Delivering these talks requires a ton of prep and practice and the presenters did not disappoint.

I didn’t see every lightning talk but my personal favorites out of the ones I did see were Boriss Mejias’ hilarious talk on “Alfresco Related WTFs in the Wild” in Barcelona and three talks in Boston: Peter Monks’ “Advice for Building an Alfresco Extension”, Tony Parzgnat’s talk on “Dynamic Datalist Driven Constraints in Share”, and “Help Your Users to RTFM!” by Andy Healey.

The lightning talk sessions were so impressive and so popular, I wonder if we ought to have an Alfresco Ignite event at some point.

Highly-Rated Talks

Now if you only followed the crowds you would have caught sessions that were not only well-attended but also highly-rated (and potentially a few that failed to live up to expectations). You would have also missed some hidden gems. Here are sessions that stood out in terms of ratings received regardless of how well-attended they were:

Highly-rated Sessions in Barcelona

Highly-rated Sessions in Boston

So that’s a little taste of what you missed in Barcelona and Boston. There are many great talks I haven’t called out in this post (I haven’t even talked about the keynotes yet!). You should explore the Alfresco Summit web site to find ones that suit your interest.

Most presentations are attached to their session page on the web site. By mid-December we hope to have the recordings embedded on each session page as well, so stay tuned for that.