Category: Alfresco Summit

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.

What we’re dying to hear at Alfresco Summit

For the first time, ever, I will not be in attendance at this year’s annual Alfresco conference. I’m going to miss catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, learning, and sharing stories.

I’m also going to miss hearing what Alfresco has planned. Now, more than ever, Alfresco needs to inspire. As I won’t be there I need the rest of you to go to Alfresco Summit and take good notes for me. Here’s what you should be listening for…

What Are You Doing With the Money, Doug?

At last year’s conference Alfresco CEO, Doug Dennerline, made a quip about how much fun he was having spending all of the money Alfresco had amassed prior to his arrival. Now he’s secured another round of funding.

I think partners, customers, and the community want to hear what the specific plans are for all of that cash. In a Q&A with the community, Doug said he felt like there were too few sales people for a company the size of Alfresco’s. In the old days, Alfresco had an “inbound” model, where people would try the free stuff and call a sales person when they were ready for support. Doug is inverting that and going with a traditional “outbound” model. That obviously takes cash, and it may be critical for the company to grow to where Doug and the investors would like, but it is rather uninspiring to the rest of us. Where are the bold, audacious plans? Where is the disruption? Which brings me to my next theme to listen for…

Keep Alfresco Weird

Remember when Alfresco was different? It was open source. It was lightweight. It appealed to developers and consultants because it could approximate what a Documentum aircraft carrier could do but it had the agility of a speedboat. And, perhaps above all, it was cheap.

Now it feels like that free-wheeling soul, that maverick of ECM, that long-haired hippy love-child, born of a one-night stand between ECM and Linux, is looking in the mirror and realizing it has slowly become its father.

Maybe in some ways, growing up was necessary. Alfresco certainly feels more stable than years past. But what I want to hear is that the scrappiness is still there. I want to see some features that competitors haven’t thought of yet. I want to look into the eyes of the grown-up Alfresco and see (and believe) that the mischievous flicker of youth is still glowing, ready to shake things up.

Successfully Shoot the Gap Or Get Crushed?

Alfresco is in a unique position. There are the cloud-only players on one side who are beating Alfresco on some dimensions (ease-of-use, flawless file sync, ubiquity) and are, at least for now, losing to Alfresco on other dimensions (on-premises capability, security, business relevance). On the other side, you’ve got legacy players. Alfresco is still more nimble than they are, but with recent price increases, Alfresco can no longer beat them on price alone. That gap is either Alfresco’s opportunity or its demise.

Every day those cloud-only players add business-relevant functionality that their (huge) user base demands. They’ve got endless cash. And dear Lord, the marketing. If I have to read one more bullshit TechCrunch article about how Aaron Levie “invented” the alternative to ECM, I’m going to lose it. Bottom-line is that the cloud-only guys have their sites set on Alfresco’s bread-and-butter.

And those legacy vendors, the ones Alfresco initially disrupted with an open source model, are not only showing signs of life, but in some cases are actually introducing innovative functionality. If Alfresco turns away from the low-cost leader strategy they miss out on a huge lever needed to unseat incumbent vendors. “Openness” may not be enough to win in a toe-to-toe battle of function points.

So what exactly is the strategy for successfully shooting the gap? We’ve all heard the plans Alfresco has around providing content-centric business apps as SaaS offerings. That sounds great for the niche markets interested in those offerings. But that sounds more like one leg of the strategy, not the whole thing. I don’t think you’re fighting off Google, Microsoft, and Amazon with a few new SaaS offerings a year.

So Take Good Notes For Me

Alfresco has had two years to establish the office in the valley, to get their shit together, and to start kicking ass again. What I’m hoping is that at this year’s Alfresco Summit, they will give us credible details about how that $45 million is going to be spent in such a way as to make all of the customers, partners, employees, and community members glad they bet their businesses and careers on what was once an innovative, game-changing, start-up called Alfresco.

Take good notes and report back!

Nominate an Alfresco community star

Every year I select a handful of “community stars”. These are people who have gone above-and-beyond during the previous year in the Alfresco community. Community stars get a free conference pass to Alfresco Summit and bragging rights for the coming year.

To select community stars the community team and I look at things like:

  • Forum, IRC, and Stackoverflow helpfulness
  • Significant contributions to the product in terms of bug reports, fixes, or other code or documentation contributions
  • Meetup activity
  • Evangelism in social channels
  • Authors of particularly helpful books, blog posts, wiki pages, screencasts, tutorials, or add-ons

The community team has some visibility into the people making a consistent difference in these areas, but we can’t be everywhere all of the time. Every year it is inevitable that we miss one or two deserving individuals.

So I need your help.

If you know of someone who deserves to go to Alfresco Summit for their work in the community, please submit this form. I need their name, contact info, and why you think they should be identified as an Alfresco community star. It should take you less than 5 minutes.

Thanks ahead of time for helping me give our community stars the recognition they deserve!

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.

Alfresco Tech Talk Live Re-Cap: Content hashes, cloud dashlets, & MongoDB

If you didn’t catch Alfresco Tech Talk Live today you missed one heck of a session. We had a motley crew of panelists showing off their creations from November’s Alfresco Summit Hack-a-Thon. Here’s the recording:

Three of the hack-a-thon teams gave demos. We heard from:

  • Axel Faust (Prodyna) and Martin Cosgrave. They showed us a solution they created for a hash-based content store. Content is given a hash as it is added to the repository, then if subsequent content is added, it simply points to that file on disk rather than duplicating it. They also used a hash to create a cache for Alfresco Share. Axel and Martin’s project is hosted on GitHub.
  • Will Abson (Alfresco) showed us a couple of cool things. One was an integration between on-premise Alfresco Share and Alfresco in the cloud. It included, a dashlet like My Sites that lists your sites on Alfresco in the Cloud as well as a search modification that allows you to do a single search against on-premise and Alfresco in the cloud. The project is on GitHub. He also showed an admin console add-on called the Alfresco Cloud API Explorer that lets you run HTTP GETs against the public Alfresco API.
  • Derek Hulley (Alfresco) showed a proof-of-concept he’s been working on. His POC is aimed at replacing the relational back-end that Alfresco uses to store metadata with MongoDB. It isn’t complete yet, but he was able to show that you could add aspects to a node and those aspects and property values were persisted in MongoDB.Derek’s project is on GitHub.

Nathan McMinn (Alfresco), Richard McKnight (Alfresco), Ben Kahn (Red Hat), and Alexey Ermakov (VIDEL) were also on our panel and participated in the discussion but we ran out of time for their demos. We’ll circle back with them another time.

We also have three brief announcements:

Thanks to all panelists and viewers who participated!

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.

Reminder: Sign Up for Alfresco Summit Hack-a-Thon

Don’t forget, folks. If you DevCon 2012 San Jose Hack-a-Thonare planning on arriving in time for Day 0 of Alfresco Summit in either Barcelona (Nov 4) or Boston (Nov 12) so that you can participate in the hack-a-thon, you need to let us know so we can plan for food. Space is limited, so people who sign-up ahead of time using of these forms will be given priority (Barcelona, Boston).

 

An Alfresco Summit letter-to-your-boss template for every type of boss

Office SpaceThese days every conference seems to provide a pretty standard letter-to-your-boss template. And they may be helpful for people who have normal, rational bosses. But we all know there are many different types of bosses out there and some require specialized strategies for getting them to do what you need them to do. That’s why the Alfresco Summit team has put together a list of letter-to-your-boss templates with one for every type of boss.

Don’t see your boss type listed? Let us know. We don’t want you to miss out on the conference!