Category: Alfresco

Alfresco open source content management

The Public Alfresco API is Now Live: How to Get Started

At JavaOne this morning, Alfresco announced the general availability of the public Alfresco API. The public Alfresco API allows developers to create custom applications (desktop, mobile, or cloud) that persist content to Alfresco in the Cloud. The API includes CMIS plus some Alfresco REST calls that provide functionality CMIS does not cover.

Eventually, this public, versioned API will work against Alfresco in the Cloud as well as Alfresco running on-premise. For now, it is only for Alfresco in the Cloud, although the CMIS calls will work against both. (For example, on my flight to California I worked on an example using CMIS and my local repository. When I got to the hotel, I added in the OAuth authentication and my example worked against Alfresco in the Cloud).

To use the Alfresco API, all you have to do is become a registered developer at http://developer.alfresco.com. Once you’ve verified your email address, you can add applications to your profile. Each application has a unique authentication key and a secret. OAuth2 is used to handle authentication.

Once you have your authentication key and secret, you can start making calls against the API. Calls that hit the Alfresco REST part of the API return JSON. Calls that leverage CMIS return AtomPub XML. If you already know how to make CMIS calls, you already know how to use the Alfresco API–just grab the latest version of your favorite CMIS client, like OpenCMIS or cmislib, and pass in the authorization header. I believe you must use the 0.8.0-SNAPSHOT of OpenCMIS. If you are using cmislib, you’ll definitely need 0.5.1dev.

Here are some resources to help you get started:

If you want to discuss the public Alfresco API, use this forum and any of our other normal community channels like #alfresco on IRC or the Alfresco Technical Discussion Google Group.

Of course we’ll be talking about the API at DevCon in both Berlin and San Jose this November, so don’t forget to register!

Also, Peter Monks and I will be doing this month’s Tech Talk Live on the new API, so if you weren’t lucky enough to be in San Francisco for our session at JavaOne or our booth, you can catch the details there as well.

Two oldies but goodies: Screencasts showing Alfresco, Drupal, and Open Atrium

Back when I was at Optaros and CMIS was first showing up in Alfresco in draft form, we developed the Drupal CMIS module. We had a few customers interested in combining the two technologies but I think we were a few years ahead of our time. Now it seems I come across people wanting to combine the two nearly every week in IRC, the forums, or in internal discussions. Alfresco has contributed additional modules for Drupal integration. And multiple partners have full-fledged solutions or service offerings built on top of both.

Optaros has changed their web site a bit since those days and a couple of screencasts I recorded back then have been removed. Because so many people are still interested in this topic, I’ve posted them on YouTube, with Optaros’ permission (thanks!).

So, if you want to see some examples of Drupal and Alfresco working together, here are a couple of screencasts from the archive…

Drupal Plus Alfresco (Original post, 4/7/2009)

Open Atrium Plus Alfresco (Original post, 10/13/2009)

Drupal, Open Atrium, the CMIS modules, and Alfresco have all progressed since then, but the general gist is the same.

Thanks to Optaros for letting me make these available!

New Dashlet Challenge Deadline: 10 September

Multiple people have asked for an extension of the Dashlet Challenge deadline. So let’s extend it to September 10, 2012 at 12:00 BST. That gives you this weekend and next weekend to get your entries submitted.

That’s also the last day of DevCon early-bird registration. Because some of you might be waiting to see if you win DevCon passes for your submission, it means you are risking missing out on the early-bird discount. I don’t want this to happen, so if you submit your Dashlet Challenge entry by the new deadline, I’ll make sure you get early-bird pricing if you don’t win a DevCon pass. Sound fair?

Now get to coding!

DevCon Hack-a-Thon & Activiti Day

Just a quick note about recent DevCon goings-on in case you’ve missed this via other channels…

Early-Bird Registration Ends 10 September!

Just a friendly reminder: You can save some money if you sign up before 10 September, so do not wait to sign-up.

DevCon 2012 Promo Video

Includes a few quotes from the Alfresco community’s colorful cast of characters.

http://youtu.be/-bL1wZ1k22k

DevCon 2012 Hack-a-Thon

We’re going to be doing a Hack-a-Thon the day before the main conference starts in both Berlin and San Jose. This will run concurrently with the optional Fundamentals and Advanced Training classes. So if you are an Alfresco old-timer who doesn’t need Fundamentals or Advanced training, show up a day early and join us in the hack-a-thon. We’re still deciding which projects we’re going to work on that day. More info will be posted on the DevCon Hack-a-Thon page as it develops.

Activiti Day Berlin

If you are attending DevCon Berlin and you have any interest in Activiti, you should plan on staying an extra day and joining us for an Activiti Community reception the night of 7 November and then an all day Activiti Community event on 8 November. See the DevCon blog for more details.

DevCon Lightning Talks Debut

We’re planning on having two lightning talk sessions, one on each day of the main conference, at both DevCon events this year. We are planning on using the Ignite format, but if that is holding a significant number of people back, we may decide to relax that requirement. If you want to give a 5-minute talk at DevCon, sign up now.

Alfresco demo showing rule based on lat/lon, Mobile App, & CMIS

When I go to conferences and events like OSCON, JavaONE, and Red Hat Summit that are broader than our little ECM corner of the IT world, I run into many people who have yet to discover Alfresco. So I always try to have a demo ready that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Here’s a screencast of the one I used for OSCON this year:

It isn’t technically mind-blowing, but that’s not the point of the demo. The point is to answer the simple question: What can I do with Alfresco?

I like this demo because it shows…

  • Multiple examples of rules. The ability for an end-user to configure rules in the user interface is such a simple concept, but it is a very powerful feature.
  • Metadata extraction. In this case I’m using the out-of-the-box image metadata extraction to grab the lat/long from some image files. The rule then sorts the images into folders that correspond to the geographic region where the photos were taken.
  • Multiple ways of getting content into the repository. I’m showing inbound SMTP and drag-and-drop, but if someone asks about FTP, WebDAV, or CIFS, that’s easy to show too. And showing that those rules fire in any case is key.
  • A simple example of server-side JavaScript, which is great for power users and administrators.
  • A custom data list (which can lead to a discussion of custom content models). I’m using a data list to define the geographic regions the script uses to sort the photos into.
  • Two of my favorite community contributed Add-Ons, the Geotagged Content Dashlet and the JavaScript Console.
  • The mobile app and gives a glimpse of what you can do with a mobile app when it integrates with other cool mobile apps (PDFExpert in this example).
  • A custom application (happens to be a little Python app, less than 200 lines of code, IIRC) using CMIS. If I really want to drive the CMIS point home I’ll show the app hitting Alfresco, then I’ll point the same app at another vendor’s CMIS-compliant repository. Database people yawn, but anyone that’s ever had to code against more than one vendor’s ECM repository love that.

If I’m doing this for a small group this is usually enough to get a conversation started and we can go off into the weeds based on what piqued their interest, whether that’s a lower level of detail on the points above or some other part of the platform that the demo didn’t hit (like search, workflow, versioning, security, web scripts, and on and on).

There are some rough spots and the “photo contest” story could be tightened up, but I think it gets people’s gears turning.

What about you? What’s your favorite way to demo Alfresco to newcomers?

 

Alfresco News Recap: DevCon, Survey, Dashlets, & a Forums Milestone

The news in the Alfresco world is happening faster than my sluggish blogging pace can keep up with, so I am forced to write a “recap” style post to keep you informed. It won’t win a Peabody, but at least you’ll be in the know…

Alfresco DevCon Registration Goes Live

Alfresco DevCon registration has been live for a little over a week. This year, we have a cool site just for DevCon that includes the full agenda, travel info, speaker bios, and a sponsor listing. Early-bird registration ends September 10 for both Berlin and San Jose. We’re on a pretty good pace right now with registrations so I would not wait around to secure your spot.

Alfresco Community Survey

The survey ended a couple of months ago. Honestly, we had a disappointing response rate compared to last year. Still, there was some good feedback provided. I’m responding to many of you to get you to elaborate further on your suggestions or to respond to specific questions. I’m about halfway through my follow-up list. Last year, I published the survey results and I’ll do that again this year before too long.

Alfresco Dashlet Challenge

The Alfresco Dashlet Challenge has just kicked off. This is a developer-focused contest in which people try to see who can create the coolest Add-Ons for Alfresco Share. You could win one of three Android tablets and a free DevCon pass if you can edge out the stiff competition. My blog post on socialcontent.com talks about some of last year’s submissions and includes a link to the full terms and conditions. My fellow American citizens were a big no-show in last year’s Dashlet Challenge, so I’m hoping to see that corrected this year!

Mark Rogers Makes His 4,000th Post

If you’ve spent any time in the Alfresco Forums, odds are you’ve come across Mark. He’s been a dedicated soul, working tirelessly to answer questions on just about every topic imaginable, since 2008. He’s routinely in the top 1 or 2 users in terms of volume in any given month. What’s great about Mark, though, is not just that he’s prolific–he’s also helpful. The guy has racked up 287 points, which is second only to Mike Hatfield. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of Mark’s. Well, last month, Mark made his 4000th post in the Alfresco Forums. 4000 posts! Just to give you some perspective, that’s about 1.5 times higher than the person with the 3rd highest number of posts (Kevin Roast). Of course everyone who spends significant amount of time in the forums on their own time deserves kudos, but when you see Mark at DevCon (or run into him in the forums) please congratulate him on this milestone.

While I’m on the topic of forums, we did pretty good on cutting down on unanswered posts in February, March, and April. Those months had some of the lowest number of unanswered topics as a percentage of topics created. But now we’re creeping back up to our old numbers. If you get a chance, maybe you could spend an extra 30 minutes in the forums this week. If everyone did an extra post a week (which is about 1/30th of Mark’s pace!) it would really help out.

Alfresco Virtual Meetup Recording and Related Links

If you missed watching the live streaming of the Alfresco Virtual Meetup live, well you missed a little nugget of Alfresco history. But you can re-live it in all of its glory by watching the recording.

Here are some links related to the discussion:

  • Learn about Alpaca: http://code.cloudcms.com/alpaca/1.0.1-SNAPSHOT/
  • Chris Paul’s Repo: http://github.com/cmpaul/alfraca
  • Dave’s Chrome Extension: http://code.google.com/p/alfresco-activities-browser-extensions/
  • And AlfJS is available at GitHub here: https://github.com/Alfresco/AlfJS

Let me know what you think of the format. Maybe we should start doing Tech Talk Live using Google Hangouts instead of WebEx?

 

Alfresco virtual meetup via Google Hangouts on July 2

On Monday, July 2 at 13:00 US/Central 19:00 London time we will have the first-ever Alfresco virtual meetup using Google Hangouts on Air. Planned panelists include Luis Sala, David Draper, Chris Paul, and myself. We’ll be talking about some cool side projects these guys have going, including a low-level JavaScript client for Alfresco called AlfJS, a Share Activities Browser Plug-in, and a look at Alpaca, a client-side forms and templating engine.

The meetup will be broadcast live on the Alfresco Google+ Page and recorded for later viewing on YouTube. Join us!

New features make Alfresco in the Cloud worth a look

It occurred to me today that I’ve never blogged about the great work that David Gildeh and the Engineering team have been doing on Alfresco Cloud, which is a huge oversight on my part. The team launched several new features today, so that’s given me the nudge I needed. And if you haven’t tried it yet, maybe it will be the nudge you needed too.

I’ve been using Alfresco in the Cloud for some time now, both as a tester of the early offering and to do real work. For example, we’ve got an external firm working on the design of a new web site just for DevCon. It was a no-brainer to simply spin up a new Alfresco site to share documents with the external team via Alfresco in the Cloud. Much easier than it would be to get them access to our internal, on-premise Alfresco server. I think we’ll also create an Alfresco site for DevCon speakers and sponsors, to make it easier to share things like presentation templates, presentations, speaker bios, speaker headshots, sponsor collateral, etc.

In case you haven’t tried it, Alfresco in the Cloud is a multi-tenant SAAS offering of Alfresco Enterprise. Well, it isn’t exactly Alfresco Enterprise–there are a few differences. At the moment it is only about file sharing. You can add comments and ratings to a document and you can follow other users, but there aren’t other types of collaborative features that are available in the on-premise version. Still, if you’ve used Alfresco on-premise you’ll immediately recognize and be familiar with Alfresco in the Cloud.

A Few New Features Worth Mentioning

Today Alfresco released several new features that should motivate you to try it out. The first is the ability to publicly share any document. You just click the “Share” link and Alfresco generates a shortened URL. When your colleagues click the link you send them, they’ll go straight to the document preview with no login and no download required. That’s pretty cool. (One thing I’d like to see, though, would be a link to the full context so that if I have the rights I could then edit the metadata and so on, but that seems obvious, so I’m sure it is already on the list) (UPDATE: It’s in there, as David Caruana points out, see comments).

The next new feature is the addition of folders rules and actions. This is huge because (1) it is so useful and (2) it is a unique feature compared to what you’d see typically in consumer-grade cloud file sharing. In case you aren’t familiar, folder rules and actions make it possible to automate repetitive tasks as documents are added, updated, or deleted to/from a folder. In the Cloud, the actions are currently restricted to “Move”, “Copy”, and “Transform”. So, for example, suppose you want to transform all GIFs to PNGs as they arrive (similar for DOC to PDF and so on). A rule lets you do that. Or maybe you want to put everything that has “requirements” somewhere in the file name into a folder called “Requirements”. Rules are great for stuff like that.

For people who have upgraded from the free forever 10 GB account to a Cloud subscription, you can take advantage of another nice feature that was recently-added: WebDAV support. This means you can work with files that live in the cloud directly from Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, Office, or other tools that support WebDAV.

The final new feature is the addition of 256-bit AES encryption. It doesn’t provide much in the way of a sexy demo, but it is certainly a critical requirement to Enterprise users looking to store sensitive content in the repository.

The Beauty of Alfresco: One Platform, One API

What I think is really cool, though, is that the software we’re running in the Cloud is the same as what you can run on-premise (or on your own cloud infrastructure or on your developer laptop). So there is no mystery in how it works–it is all open source, after all. And it means that the lessons we learn about running Alfresco for thousands of users with tons of data make their way into Community Edition and Enterprise Edition.

But it gets better. Sometime later this year, as a developer, you’ll be able to write your own custom apps that persist content to Alfresco in the Cloud. That’s when it is going to get real interesting to me. Because at that point, you’ll be able to write apps that use Alfresco as a back-end, and it won’t matter whether you’re persisting against Cloud or on-premise (or both)–it is the same API (CMIS-based, I might add). And it won’t matter whether your users need to get to their content from a mobile device or from their browser (or both). Your app can run everywhere your users are and still use the same API to work with content.

I’m chomping at the bit to get my API key so I can play with this. I know several of you will be to.

Try It, You’ll Like It

Until then, you’ll just have to be patient and just enjoy Alfresco in the Cloud as an end-user. It is free to get started (sign-up). Partners get a free upgraded account, if I’m not mistaken, so if you are a partner and you don’t know about that already, ask your partner rep.

Great idea: Alfresco Training goes a la carte

Just wanted to pass along this little gem in case you missed it: Alfresco Training now offers its eLearning courses a la carte. They’ve taken their popular topics, upgraded them to Alfresco 4, and made them available as online courses under the “Alfresco Elements” moniker.

This seems like a smart move for both Alfresco and potential students. It doesn’t really cost Alfresco anything to offer modules individually and students get to take exactly what they need at a reasonable price.

Some courses are available free of charge. Most are $99. More information is available here.