Tag: Roadmap

Top Takeaways from the Alfresco Kickoff

Alfresco kicked off their fiscal year with a meeting last week in Orlando. About 100 Alfresco employees and 50 partners attended two days of Alfresco-led talks on business and technical topics. As an aside, the conference food at the JW Marriott was maybe the best I’ve ever had at any tech event. Lobster Corn Dog. Enough said.

More importantly, the trip helped clarify in my mind Alfresco’s message around “social content management”. I now see it as taking two different forms: social content management and social content management. The first is basically just marketing what they’ve already got: content services, collaboration, task tracking, wikis, and blogs, exposed through a modern user interface that’s closer to the experience most users have come to expect from using consumer-facing sites and services. The idea is that when you add things like comments, tags, and ratings you go from boring, old-school Enterprise Content Management to fun and exciting social content management. Obviously, there’s other stuff going on here about how when people collaborate, they don’t do it in a vacuum, they do it around content.

The second form–social content management–is when you need to manage content that is published to one or more social channels. For example, Marketing might have a press release, a video, and a tweet that all need to go live at the same time. Order matters, and if one step fails, none of the steps should be performed. Alfresco is building a social publishing framework to handle this kind of use case. So, in this example, “social” doesn’t describe the features of the system–it describes the type of content being managed.

Alfresco didn’t explicitly differentiate between these two forms of social content management but they have current and future functionality that addresses both.

One of my other purposes of the trip was to find out what’s coming in Project Swift, which is the code name for an up-coming release of Alfresco. It sounds like Marketing has the final say on what specific release Swift will be, but after hearing what’s slated for the release, most of us in the room agreed it should be labeled as a major release (4.0). We’ll see.

So what’s going to be in Swift? Lot’s of cool stuff, but here are the top five technical takeaways from the Project Swift Roadmap that jumped out at me:

#5: CIFS, SharePoint, and FTP will be clusterable. CIFS and SharePoint performance are both issues at one of my clients so this one caught my eye.

#4: New Share extension points are coming in Swift including a framework for custom actions, dialogs, and evaluators. The goal is to reduce the amount of copy-and-paste that goes on during typical customizations of Share and to make upgrades a bit easier.

#3: Alfresco is developing a “social content publishing framework” with publishing endpoints for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Drupal, and more to address the social content management use case I described earlier in this post. I like this one a lot because I think a lot of people have this problem and because it leverages Alfresco in exactly the “right” way.

#2: Swift will sport a new Apache-licensed workflow engine called Activiti, which is a separate Alfresco-sponsored open source project founded by the creators of JBoss jBPM, which is currently the workflow engine embedded in Alfresco. With Swift, both engines will exist side-by-side. It sounds like you may be able to have jBPM continue to handle running workflow instances and use Activiti to handle new instances if you want to. Activiti will show up in Community soon for people to start playing with.

#1: Apache Solr will be implemented as an optional, separate shared search server and index. As part of this, Lucene will no longer be updated in the same transaction. Instead, the index will be eventually consistent. This should result in a huge performance gain and easier clustering. You’ll also get better control over what gets indexed. In Swift you’ll be able to configure full-text indexing by things like content type and path. The Solr server will accept CMIS Query Language and Alfresco FTS queries but not the current raw Lucene syntax so it might make sense to start moving your queries over to one of these two options if you anticipate leveraging Solr when it is available. Note that it is possible Alfresco may choose to make the Solr server an Enterprise-only feature. It didn’t sound like a final decision had been reached on that.

A Community release of Swift should happen some time in August, but we should start seeing a lot of activity in subversion starting in April. The Enterprise release is slated for mid-November. I predict some late nights ahead for QA and Engineering between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know there’s not a huge difference between November and January but I’d love to see Swift go GA before year-end.

One comment about Share customizations: I get asked a lot about when I will be updating the Alfresco Developer Guide to include a chapter on Share. I have most of the SomeCo examples ported to Share in an as-yet-unshared code base but, as you can see from some of the changes coming in Swift, Share is still changing a lot with respect to customizations, so I’ve been hesitant to update the book. If you’re looking for Share examples you should take a look at Will Abson’s Share Extras project on Google Code. He’s got about 18 different examples of varying complexity and type. I believe each one is individually deployable.

Not bad for the price of a couple of days in Orlando.

Top Five Alfresco Roadmap Takeaways

Now that the last of the Alfresco Fall meetups has concluded in the US, I thought I’d summarize my takeaways. Overall I thought the events were really good. The informative sessions were well-attended. Everyone I talked to was glad they came and left with multiple useful takeaways.

Everyone has their own criteria for usefulness–for these events my personal set of highlights tend to focus on the roadmap. So here are my top five roadmap takeaways from the Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and LA meetups.

1. Repository unification strategy revealed

Now we know what Alfresco plans to do to resolve the “multiple repository” issue. In a nutshell: Alfresco will add functionality to the DM repository until it is on par with the AVM (See “What are the differences…“). What then? The AVM will continue to be supported, but if I were placing bets, I would not count on further AVM development past that point.

This makes a lot of sense to me. We do a lot of “WCM” for people using the Alfresco DM repository, especially when Alfresco is really being leveraged as a core repository. It also makes sense with Alfresco’s focus on CMIS (see next takeaway) because you can’t get to the AVM through CMIS.

2. CMIS, CMIS, CMIS

Clearly, CMIS is an important standard for Alfresco. (In fact, one small worry I have is that Alfresco seems to need CMIS more than any of the other players behind the standard, but I digress). Alfresco wants to be the go-to CMIS repository and believes that CMIS will be the primary way front-ends interact with rich content repositories. They’ve been on top of things by including early (read “unsupported”) implementations of the draft CMIS specification in both the Community and Enterprise releases, but there a number of other CMIS-related items on the roadmap:

  • When the CMIS standard is out of public review, Alfresco will release a “CMIS runtime”. Details are sketchy, but my hunch is that Alfresco might be headed toward a Jackrabbit/Day CRX model where Alfresco’s CMIS runtime would be like a freely-available reference CMIS repository (Alfresco stripped of functionality not required to be CMIS compliant) and the full Alfresco repository would continue as we know it today. All speculation on my part.
  • Today deployments are either FSR (Alfresco-to-file system) or ASR (Alfresco AVM to Alfresco AVM). The latter case is used when you have a front-end that queries Alfresco for its content but you want to move that load off of your primary authoring server. In 3.2, the deployment service has gotten more general, so it’s one deployment system with multiple extensible endpoint options (file system, Alfresco AVM, CouchDB, Drupal, etc.). Alfresco will soon add AVM-to-CMIS deployment. That means you can deploy from AVM to the DM repository. Does it mean you can deploy to any CMIS repository? Not sure. If not, that might be a worthwhile extension.
  • One drawback to using DM for WCM currently is that there is not a good deployment system to move your content out of DM. It’s basically rsync or roll-your-own. On the roadmap is the ability to deploy from DM instead of AVM. This is one of the features the DM needs to get it functionally equivalent to what you get with the AVM. I wouldn’t expect it until 4.0.

3. Shift in focus to developers

Alfresco WCM has always been a decoupled system. When you install Alfresco WCM you don’t get a working web site out-of-the-box. You have to build it first using whatever technology you want, and then let Alfresco manage it. So, unlike most open source CMS’, it’s never been end-user focused in the sense of, “I’m a non-technical person and I want a web site, so I’m going to install Alfresco WCM”. Don’t expect that to change any time soon. Even Web Studio, which may not ever make it to an Enterprise release, is aimed at making Surf developers productive, not your Marketing team.

Alfresco is realizing that many people discard the Alfresco UI and build something custom, whether for document management, web content management, or some other content-centric use case. To make that easier, Alfresco is going to rollout development tools like Eclipse plug-ins, Maven compatibility, and Spring Roo integration (Uzi’s Spring Roo Screencast, Getting Started with Spring Roo ).

Alfresco has also announced that web scripts, web studio, and the Surf framework will be licensed under Apache and there were allusions to “making Surf part of Spring” or “using Surf as a Tiles replacement”. I haven’t seen or heard much from the Spring folks on this and I noticed these topics were softened between DC and LA, but that could have just been based on who was doing the speaking (see “What do you think of Alfresco’s multi-event approach?“).

Essentially what’s going on here is that Alfresco wants all of your future content-centric apps and even web sites to be “CMIS applications”, and Alfresco believes it can provide the best, most productive development platform for writing CMIS apps.

4. Stuff that may never happen but would be cool if it did

This is a grab bag of things that are being considered for the roadmap, but are far enough out to be uncertain. Regardless of if/when, these are sometimes a useful data point for where the product is headed directionally.

  • Native XML support. Right now Alfresco can manage XML files, obviously, but, unlike a native XML database like eXist or MarkLogic, the granularity stops with the file. Presumably, native XML support would allow XML validation, XPath and XQuery expressions running against XML file content, and better XSLT support.
  • Apache Solr. I think the goal here is to get better advanced search capability such as support for faceted search, which is something Solr knows how to do.
  • Repository sharding. This would be the ability to partition the repository along some (arbitrary?) dimension. Sharding is attractive to people who have very, very large repositories and want to distribute the data load across multiple physical repositories, yet retain the ability to treat the federation as one logical repo.

5. Timeline

Talk to Alfresco if you need this to be precise, but here’s the general idea of the timeline through 4.0 based on the slides I saw:

  • 3.2 Enterprise 12/2009
  • CMIS 1.0 Release Spring 2010
  • 3.3 Enterprise 1H 2010
  • 4.0 Enterprise 12/2010 (more likely 2011)

Thanks, Alfresco, and everyone who attended

Lastly, thanks to Nancy Garrity and the rest of the team that put these events together. I enjoyed presenting on Alfresco-Drupal in Atlanta and giving the Alfresco Best Practices talk (Alfresco Content Community login required).

I always enjoy the informal networking that happens at these events. There’s such a diverse group of experience levels, use cases, and businesses–it makes for interesting conversations. And, as usual, thanks to the book and blog readers who approached me. It always makes me happy to hear that something on your project was better for having read something I wrote. It was good meeting you all and I’m looking forward to the next get-together.

Highlights from the Alfresco Meetup in Chicago

Other than the drenching I received between the blue line and the hotel (both coming and going) I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Chicago with the Alfresco crew last week. I ran into some Optaros customers, past colleagues, blog and book readers, and even some consultants from another firm who told me they came across some code I wrote for a client many years ago that they now support. (It was a custom Documentum WDK app for a certain carbonated beverage company that was actually pretty cool at the time, but I’d love to re-do it on an open stack).

The day was well-spent with Matt Asay kicking off with a state of the union, of sorts, followed by a couple of sessions from Michael Uzquiano, Alfresco product manager. I thought Uzi’s discourse on the macro- and micro-economic climate was interesting, but a bit arduous. Yes, we’re in some tough times and that’s good for open source. Check. Next slide. My favorite part of his talks were on the Alfresco roadmap (see Highlights, below).

Ed Wentworth, from Orbitz, gave a cool talk on how they’re using Alfresco. Ed’s team is implementing what I think is a best practice pattern: Services-Oriented Content Management. Orbitz has a lot of dynamic sites built on content chunks, not complete, fully-baked pages. So they leverage Alfresco’s strengths as a core repository, and then expose the repository as a service to the front-end (and to other services). They use the web client only for atypical or administrative interactions, and custom Share components and Surf apps for content authoring.

Orbitz also leverages an “Enterprise Content Bus” comprised of a ServiceMix ESB, BPM, and a rules engine (more info on ECB here and here). The ECB is primarily focused on orchestrating content-centric processes like content routing and delivery. Not everyone is going to need an ECB but if you’ve got anything that resembles a content production pipeline, it can really make your processes much more flexible with less code.

TSG did a cool demo on an open source solution for annotating attachments (screencast). It looks like it is still in dev mode but it’s got a great start and hopefully they’ll continue to enhance this and make it available to the community.

I did the Alfresco-Drupal CMIS integration demo (screencast) which seemed to go over well. Most people in the room acknowledged that they have more than one CMS, so there was interest something that could enable multiple web sites talking to one or more back-end CMS repositories using a standard API (CMIS).

At the end of the day a sort of “Everything you wanted to know about Alfresco but were afraid to ask” roundtable formed which was cool. I tried to demo the Alfresco-Django integration we’ve been working on. It worked on the plane and works now, but the demo gods chose that very day to expire my Alfresco license, and although hard to miss, I didn’t notice that as the root of my problem until after the meeting. It’s all good now so if you’ll be at the San Francisco event next week and want to see Django and Alfresco working together, let me know.

Highlights of the Alfresco Talks

  • Alfresco now has 1000 paying customers. Matt says it took Documentum many years to get to that point. With the price disparity, obviously, Alfresco needs many more customers than Documentum to thrive, but still, that’s quite an achievement.
  • There’s a Groovy renderer coming to Surf after 3.2.
  • Speaking of Surf, I’m not sure when it is coming, but Spring WebFlow is now being integrated into Surf which is much-needed.
  • If you’re looking for CMIS resources, CMISDev.org is a new site aimed at pulling a lot of that stuff together.
  • 3.2 Labs targeted for June
  • 3.2 Enterprise targeted for September 2009
  • 3.3 Labs/Enterprise targeted for 1Q 2010
  • 4.0 Labs/Enterprise targeted for 2nd half of 2010

The 3.2 release is shaping up to be pretty major. Here are some of the things planned for 3.2 that caught my ear:

Surf Mobile. This is an addition to the Surf framework that makes it easier to develop Surf apps that work well on the iPhone, although audience members said the demo site was also usable on their Blackberries.

New Form Service. Today you’ve got “property sheets” in the Explorer client which are driven by the content model and the web-client configuration XML, web forms in WCM which are defined using XSD, and custom forms in Surf which aren’t defined using any kind of framework at all. The new form service will provide a single form definition/presentation framework across the entire Alfresco platform. It’s a Good Thing.

IMAP integration. This allows you to use your Outlook client (and Thunderbird and whatever else you use that knows IMAP) to get things into and out of the repository. One use for this is to archive email by dragging-and-dropping mail into mail folders which are backed by Alfresco. Another is to easily snag content from the repo without leaving the mail client. I don’t know if it will be in there, but a great feature would be to allow me to drag-and-drop a piece of Alfresco content onto my message which would then get translated into the download URL rather than a file attachment.

Clustering. Several attendees fell to the ground and wept, overcome with emotion, when Uzi said 3.2 would support real clustering of both the DM and WCM repositories. Clustering is something that has bedeviled complex Alfresco implementations. I’ll maintain my composure until I see this actually working.

Index refactoring. Ever do a search that fails to return a piece of content you know is in the repo? Or, the other way, when you see something that you know was deleted? Do you mark the time it takes to reindex your repository (to fix index inconsistencies) by how many times the moon rises and sets? I have no idea whether any of these issues will get better in 3.2 but hearing “index” and “refactor” in the same sentence makes me hopeful.

All-in-all I’d say it was one of the better Alfresco-led meetups. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with many of you next week in San Francisco. I’ll see you there.