Category: Alfresco Community

January 30, 2012

Tech Talk Live Lives: Join us on the 1st Wednesday of each month

They say good habits are like fine crystal: Hard to make and easily broken. We resurrected the Tech Talk Live series a few times last year and then DevCon rolled around and obliterated any hope of continuing the monthly webinar in the last quarter of 2011.

So after a brief hiatus, it is time to get it going again. We do these on the first Wednesday of each month and that means this Wednesday is the day. Our topic will be “Packaging and Deployment Best Practices” and with the panel we’ve put together it should be lively and entertaining. Joining me will be Richard McKnight, Gabriele Columbro, Jared Ottley, and Richard Esplin. We’ll be talking about the new Add-Ons directory, AMPs, Maven, and all sorts of good stuff around packaging and deploying extensions for Alfresco.

December 22, 2011

Alfresco Wiki Cleanup In Progress: Want to Help?

For someone who’s made the better part of a career about content management, my office is an abomination. Glancing around, I see a box of critical business documents sitting next to and virtually indistinguishable from a pile of papers ready to be recycled. In the closet, months (years?) of bills and other household detritus are stacked precariously atop the filing cabinet meant to organize them.

From time to time, Christy and I will get fed up and we’ll declare war on that stack of papers, spending an entire Sunday shredding and filing. Cleanup projects like this all start pretty much the same way:

Create a filing system you like
Make sure everything is filed
Go folder by folder, pruning content, merging folders, splitting out folders, etc.

The steps are simple, but each cleanup is time-consuming. In-between cleanups it’s tough to find things, although, curiously, Christy has an uncanny knack for finding last month’s cable bill within seconds, regardless of the pile it’s been put in.

The critical breakdown in the process, of course, is that we aren’t disciplined enough to file and prune as we go. Chalk it up to laziness, time constraints, and even the poor quality of the filing cabinet and the cramped physical layout of the office closet. Whatever the reason, it’s a bit of a mess.

My office closet is almost perfectly analogous to the Alfresco Wiki:

There is good content in there if you know where to look.
There is a lot of outdated content, some of which begs the question, “Why are we saving this?”.
New pages get added with little thought to proper categorization.
Newcomers to the community are often hard-pressed to find what they are looking for because the browsability sucks.

This last point is really important. We did a Community Survey earlier in the year that had a section on the wiki. The results indicated that most people can find what they are looking for. But multiple people came up to me during DevCon and mentioned how difficult the wiki is for newcomers and even offered to help. I think the reason for this may be that experts know what they are looking for but newcomers often don’t. Experts search (or already have their favorite pages bookmarked) while newcomers need a hierarchy to browse.

I believe that, in general, we could be doing a much better job getting new developers ramped up on the platform, and the wiki is a starting point for many of them, so getting the wiki in shape (and keeping it that way) is important, even if experts can already find what they are looking for.

In short, it’s time to do a cleanup. Now, unlike my domestic situation, where the maximum possible number of people who would help with the office closet cleanup job is 4 (and that’s wildly optimistic), the Alfresco community is thousands strong. I know not everyone in our community is interested or even good at cleaning up and curating the wiki. But several have volunteered. We’re calling them Alfresco Wiki Gardeners.

The goal is not to do a one-time cleanup and then ignore it until it gets messy again. We do have to clean up what’s there, of course, but I’m hoping that, as a community-owned, community-managed asset, the Alfresco Wiki Gardeners will take ownership of the wiki and provide consistent curation over time. What we need to help make that happen is:

A group of people that care enough to spend time on it
High-level guidelines and loose direction
Channels for coordinating work
Regular attention

So here’s what we’ve done so far:

Formed the Alfresco Wiki Gardeners and had an initial meeting. We are using a Google Group to coordinate activities. We plan to meet online each month. We’re using chat to coordinate in-between meetings.
Created a Wiki Guidelines page, linked to from the Wiki main page. The document explains what the wiki is, what it should contain, some guidelines for authors, and how to get involved.
Categorized every category. We’ve moved from a flat list of categories to a hierarchy. The result is that we now have a pretty clean set of categories at the top level that is effectively our Table of Contents.
Categorized every page. This is almost done. We want every page to live in at least one bucket. Starting today, if you create a page on the wiki and you don’t categorize it, it’s going to get categorized. If it defies categorization it’s going to get deleted.
Drafted a set of “Special Categories”. These categories will be used to tag things like “Engineering Notes” or “Obsolete Pages” or pages that “Need to be Reviewed”.

Now we need to start cleaning up existing pages and some of the lower level categories. Obsolete content needs to be flagged, forward references to formal documentation on docs.alfresco.com need to be added. Some categories need to be combined or relocated.

I’m hoping that soon we’ll be able to identify major holes where new content is needed. I can already tell we need a ton of new content on Alfresco 4, particularly around Share Extensibility. We also need to spruce up the “Getting Started” category.

There is a lot of work to do. You can help. If you see a problem on a wiki page, log in and fix it. You don’t need to be a formal member of the Gardeners group to do that. But if you want to adopt a category or a topic area or commit to spending time regularly curating the Alfresco Wiki, you should join the Alfresco Wiki Gardeners group on Google so we can coordinate our efforts.

I hope this new team gets traction. I want to see a wiki we can be proud of instead of one we have to apologize for. Who’s with me?

November 7, 2011

Alfresco Community Pledges & other things that worked well at DevCon

I had so much fun putting on Alfresco DevCon last week in San Diego. You can read my short wrap-up on the Alfresco DevCon Blog. Claudia Saleh also provides Day 1 Re-Cap and Day 2 Re-Cap posts as well. And Claudia took a lot of great pics at the event and put them on Flickr. After London we’ll get all of the presentations from both events on SlideShare for everyone to enjoy.

We tried a lot of new things at DevCon last week. I thought I’d re-cap what worked well here:

Purposeful lunches. DevCon was two days. On Day 1, we assigned a technical topic to each lunch table and then made sure an Engineer was at each table to cover that topic. Attendees sorted themselves to the table they were interested in discussing over lunch. Some tables really worked their topic over thoroughly during lunch. Others used it as an icebreaker and then moved on to other stuff. On Day 2 we divided the tables up by geography and industry vertical. Most people I talked to liked the concept.

Engineering Office Hours. The concept is a repeat from our first DevCon, but this year we had a bulletin board with each Engineer, their bio, their picture, and a sign-up sheet. Attendees grabbed a slot, then met with their Engineer. This worked out really well. For London we’ll pre-print the time slots rather than have them be freeform.

Panel Discussion. Last year at DevCon in New York, the panel discussion was a little ad hoc. This year we put the panel discussion on the morning of the second day as a general session and that seemed to work. For London, we’re moving the panel discussion to the end of the second day so any questions that the day 2 sessions raise can be asked at that time. It should also give us a nice opportunity to recap the conference.

Alfresco Community Pledges. DevCon serves a lot of purposes. One is to energize and motivate people to get involved with the Alfresco community. I had some extra Alfresco “attitude” t-shirts so I decided to give them to people who would pledge to make some contribution to the community in the coming weeks and months. Here are some that we got via twitter.

@dev_kraig Kraig Van Houten
@Alfresco I #pledge to write one #alfresco related blog post per month

@SunilRehman Sunil Rehman
@Alfresco I #pledge to report 5 new #Alfresco 4.0 b bugs before thanksgiving

@WillWhite18 Will White
I #pledge to report at least 5 bugs in #Alfresco 4.0b before thanksgiving.

@Michaelcford Michael C Ford
@Alfresco I #pledge to answer 6 unanswered #Alfresco forum post in the next 3 weeks

@emmichie Eric Michie
I #pledge to host an #Alfresco meetup in my area twice this quarter. Salt Lake City Utah

@tenthline_ecm Tenthline
@tenthline_ecm will #pledge to host #Alfresco meetup in #Toronto twice this quarter.

@aaronaheath Aaron Heath
I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month for the next 12 months. I will also become more active on the #Alfresco forum.

@perejnar Per Ejnar Thomsen
I #pledge to report 5 new (legitimate) #Alfresco 4.0b bugs before Thanksgiving

@dstaflund Darryl Stafflund
I #pledge to answer 6 unanswered #Alfresco forum posts in the next three Weeks.

@iancrew Ian Crew
I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month.

@trisofer Chris Paul
@jeffpotts01 I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month.

It was great to see these and to talk to people between sessions who said the conference was the kick in the pants they needed to get going again with their contributions.

Thanks to everyone who attended, sponsored, or spoke at DevCon San Diego. It exceeded my expectations and hopefully yours as well. I’ll report back here after London and we’ll see if these ideas were just as successful for that event.

October 9, 2011

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.

October 7, 2011

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.

September 14, 2011

Worldwide Alfresco 4.0 Community Release Party

You have probably heard that Alfresco 4.0 (formerly known by its codename, “Swift”) will be officially released in the Community edition at the end of September. I’ve been playing with the latest Community code sitting in subversion and I have to tell you that, although there are still plenty of issues to resolve, I’m getting pretty excited about the release.

I know I’m not the only one that’s been looking at 4.0 with building anticipation toward an official release. So here’s what I think we should do. Let’s celebrate. This year, the week of October 10 shall be known as the Week of Worldwide Alfresco 4.0 Community Release Party Meetups! Wherever you are in the world, pick a day that week and get together with 1, 10, or 100 other people and share why you’re excited about 4.0. It doesn’t have to be formal and you don’t have to go to a lot of trouble. Grab Community 4.0 from the download page when it becomes available (or use one of the nightly builds or build it yourself), install it, and give a demo. Or just get a conversation going about favorite new features, when/how you plan to upgrade, or how you are using Alfresco today. Exactly what you talk about doesn’t really matter–the point is to celebrate this major release.

I’ve already spoken to several of the local community organizers around the world and they are totally into it. Madrid, Paris, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Jakarta, The Netherlands, and Southern California are all likely to have events going on the week of October 10 to celebrate. I believe Germany will be doing some virtual meetups online. To help you find these and others that will hopefully be inspired to spring up, refer to this wiki page that lists new or still-forming meetup groups. If you don’t see one there, go to Alfresco Meetups Everywhere and sign up. When another person in your area signs up you can organize a time and a place to meet.

I really want to see this happen. And I know the way to an Alfresco Geek’s heart is through his or her stomach. So if you promote your plan to have a meetup the week of October 10 via Twitter, and then you post pictures of the event on Flickr tagged with “Alfresco”, you can submit your food receipt to me and I’ll reimburse you up to $100. If you plan to take advantage of this you must register your interest with me two weeks prior to your meetup date so I can get you the details. Just shoot an email to jpotts at alfresco dot com with your plans.

I’ll also try to get a “What’s New in Alfresco 4.0” presentation posted, maybe with some screencasts as well, to help with the content.

There you go: A major release of the software to the community, free food, and starter content. The only key ingredients remaining are you, your laptop, and a friend or two. What do you say? Are you in?

July 24, 2011

What the hell do I do all day: The bucket model of community leadership

I am at the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) in Portland this weekend where hundreds of people whose jobs it is to lead communities have come together to collaborate on a wide variety of community-related topics.

One of the talks I attended yesterday was “What the Hell Do We Do Everyday?” by Evan Hamilton. The goal was to compare notes on how community leaders spend their time day-to-day. As part of the discussion, I roughed out a “Bucket Model” that groups the types of tasks that seem to me to be part of the job. Many people seemed to like it so I thought I’d post it here.

Although I’ve been active in the Alfresco community for a long time, it didn’t become my full-time job until a few months ago. When that happened, the first thing I did was think about what the community needed from me. I wrote down all kinds of things, from tactical stuff like, “Answer questions in the forum” to more strategic stuff like, “Make the community more vibrant”. As I looked at my list I realized that there were buckets of things I needed to do that probably wouldn’t change much over time. Because I’m part of the Marketing organization, I also realized that my buckets should all start with the same letter. And maybe if my buckets were one word action verbs, they’d stick in the minds of my team and the community. So here are the 3 E’s of Community Leadership: Engage, Enable, and Expose.

Engage

Engage is about engaging community members, regardless of skill set or role in the community, to participate more deeply. This encompasses tasks like connecting community members with community initiatives, speaking at local community events, or facilitating a community advisory board or some other type of discussion. Engage is really about being an active and present part of the community.

Enable

Enable is a bucket of tasks around making sure the community has the tools they need to meet their goals. This is not only removing hurdles and resolving conflict, but also providing technical tools and infrastructure like wikis, forums, IRC channels, etc. If your community is technical, it could also mean providing examples, tutorials, and code snippets.

Expose

Expose consists of tasks that are about exposing the greatness already existing in the community, both community projects and individuals. The goal here is to really be the amplifier around the good things going on in the community. This helps increase community awareness, but it also helps reinforce and model the behavior that you want to encourage from the rest of the community.

The tasks in the “3 E’s” buckets are all about moving forward toward achieving the community vision. But there are also a set of “run-and-maintain” tasks that are really about keeping the wheels from falling off. Maybe this ought to be a fourth “E” bucket called “Execute“. These tasks fall into sub-buckets like:

Monitor. As community leaders, we have all sorts of channels we’re wired into: Email, Social, IRC, Forums, Wiki, Blogs, etc. Part of execution is monitoring and responding to these channels. As one of the attendees pointed out, if you aren’t careful, this one can suck the life out of you if you don’t manage it properly.

Measure. Putting measures in place and keeping track of those measures is an important way to figure out if you’re making progress against your plan. The specific measures are different for each community but they might be things like survey results, downloads, installs, registered forum/wiki users, forum points awarded, etc.

Report. Report is about getting reports from your team and reporting status to the rest of the community.

Plan. This bucket is about periodically reviewing and refining your plan.

I’ve spun up projects/initiatives that slot into each of these buckets. So, on any given day, I’m either personally working on tasks that fall into these buckets, or I’m working with team mates and other members of the community who are doing the same.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what Alfresco’s Chief Community Officer does, now you know. And if you’re also a community leader, I’d love to see how this maps up to what you do. What did I miss?

July 12, 2011

2011 Alfresco Community Survey Results

We had over 1400 people from 70 different countries participate in this year’s survey on the state of the Alfresco community. I appreciate the time each of you took to give me your feedback. There were a lot of great ideas submitted. If you did participate, I hope you were also able to watch last week’s webinar where I outlined the plan for the community for the rest of the year. (If not, check out the recording or the slides). Hopefully, you recognized some of your feedback in the plan.

As promised, I’ve compiled a presentation with the survey results and uploaded it to slideshare. I’ve put some light analysis and insights into the deck along with charts showing the survey results. I welcome other insights you may have after you take a look.

In case you are wondering, we did give away the $250 Alfresco gift cards. The lucky respondents hailed from India and Colombia. Despite what you might think from my recent travel schedule, I did not deliver these in person, although that would have been fun.

I want to do this again next year. I think it is an important input into the community planning process. And, hopefully, we’ll be able to see the fruits of our labor in real, measurable terms when we compare subsequent surveys to prior years.

July 11, 2011

Join the conversation in IRC

There has been an #alfresco channel on freenode for years but it is usually fairly quiet. Recently, Richard Esplin and I decided it might be interesting to breathe a little life into this potentially valuable communication channel. So Richard procured admin rights and several of us at Alfresco have started hanging out there when we’re able.

If you are new to IRC you might have a look at Richard’s recent blog post for tips and tricks.

The channel is open to anyone interested in Alfresco, whether you are on Enterprise or Community, but it is not a resource for official Enterprise support.

The chat room is not an effective replacement for the forums–we’re not currently logging anything so there is no archive of past discussions.

The channel is primarily aimed at either highly interactive discussions where you want to bounce some ideas around or for quick questions. It’s the virtual equivalent of a cubicle drive-by, except that instead of your circle of co-workers, you’ve potentially got Alfresco experts worldwide to use as a sounding board.

Stop by and say hi when you get a chance.