Tag: Digital Asset Management

Big News: I’ve left Optaros to start my own firm

After nearly four years at Optaros I’ve decided to start a new chapter in my career. I’ve created a new firm called Metaversant that is focused on providing content-centric solutions and consulting to clients across all verticals and geographies. Based on my deep experience with the platform and my active participation in the community, I expect Metaversant to be heavily-focused on Alfresco. We may broaden into other technologies over time, but the over-arching theme will be to help companies get the most out of their digital assets–whether that’s documents, web content, rich media, or legal records–by leveraging Enterprise-ready, open, rich content repositories.

On one hand, I was sad to leave Optaros–it was a great place to work with lots of smart people and interesting clients/projects. And I had fun building the ECM practice into a significant portion of overall revenue. On the other hand, the timing felt right to make this change and I’m very excited about starting my own company. Optaros and I are on great terms and I’m sure we’ll find ways to do business together going forward.

There are a lot of to-do’s to get Metaversant fully functional as a corporation, but nothing’s more important than the success of your project. If you are looking for help in any of the following areas, we should talk:

  • Customized, on-site Alfresco developer training
  • Short-term tactical technical assistance
  • Architectural reviews/product fit assessments
  • Content Management customization & implementation leadership
  • Custom content-centric application development & integration
  • Domino.Doc, Vignette, Stellent, or other legacy ECM migrations

You can contact me at “jpotts” at either this domain or metaversant.com.

As usual, keep an eye out here for news on Metaversant (like a link to the yet-to-be-built web site) and other content management news and thanks for your continued support!

Screencast: Basic Alfresco-Kaltura integration

Bryan Spaulding, Media Practice Lead at Optaros, and I have been thinking about lightweight digital asset management and Alfresco. Alfresco can manage any kind of asset, including rich media. It has some built-in functionality for doing image transformations and you can easily integrate with open source solutions like ffmpeg to work with video. But many of our clients need something more, especially when it comes to video.

That’s where Kaltura comes in. Kaltura is a fully hosted video solution that provides full analytics, flexible and customizable players and playlists, and robust back-end CDN and hosting services. You can also download the open source Kaltura Community Edition and run it yourself if you want.

There are a variety of ways Alfresco and Kaltura could work together. We decided to start with a basic integration focused on the Alfresco DM repository. The idea is to use that as a foundation, expanding in the future based on community and client feedback to include deeper functionality for the DM repository or broader integration with other Alfresco products like Alfresco Share and Alfresco WCM.

In this short screencast, I demo the basic CRUD functions the integration provides. You will probably want to hit the “full screen” icon on the Kaltura player to see the detail.

The integration is available as open source. You can download the integration from Kaltura’s community site and use it on your projects, or better yet, expand on it and contribute back the code. The readme that is included with the source includes installation and configuration instructions.