Category: Alfresco

Alfresco open source content management

Alfresco DevCon 2011 Call for Papers

I’ve just posted the official call for papers for Alfresco DevCon 2011. I know a lot of ecmarchitect.com readers have done some really cool things with Alfresco. This is a great opportunity for you to share those stories with the rest of us.

Also, let me know if there is anything significant missing from the proposed list of tracks, which is:

  • Alfresco as a Platform
  • Best Practices
  • Customizing Alfresco
  • Case Studies
  • BPM
  • Building WCM Solutions with Alfresco

Just like last year, we’ll have three sessions running concurrently throughout the day. We’ll start Day 1 with opening remarks from me, then move right into a keynote from John Newton, which is always a crowd favorite. Then I was thinking it would be good to have a “What’s New in 4.0?” general session, then split into breakouts after that. The only other general session I could see us doing would be an Engineering Panel Discussion, maybe on the morning of Day 2.

Any and all feedback is welcome!

Alfresco DevCon coming to San Diego and London this Fall

We’ve finally got everything settled around the cities, venues, and dates for our annual Alfresco DevCon. This year we will be in San Diego at the Hard Rock Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter October 26th & 27th and in London at Prospero House in Central London November 9th & 10th.

In both cities, the two conference days will be preceded by a Training Day. So, if you want to take the Jump Start or Advanced training courses and attend the full conference, you’ll need to block out three days. If you are skipping Training Day, you’ll need to block out two days.

My official announcement is on the DevCon blog, here. You should get in the habit of following that blog for all DevCon related news. I’ll try to point you to additional posts on that blog as they happen, but that feels kind of redundant.

We’ll get registration turned on soon. And we’ll be sharing additional info around hotel and travel, so watch that blog.

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?

Calling all Alfresco bloggers!

The other day, a member of the Alfresco community pointed out to me that while it is great we have so many people blogging on Alfresco topics–from authors both inside and outside the company–there isn’t a single aggregated feed of all of those valuable sources of information. I completely agree.

While we do have the blogs page, the technology we’re using to produce that is a bit cumbersome to keep updated. And that feed is mostly Alfresco employees. We also recently launched www.socialcontent.com, but that does not have links to a universal blog roll either.

To address this, I’ve created several new feeds in Yahoo Pipes. There’s one feed for each of the following:

This should let you subscribe to specific feeds according to your needs.

Now, there’s no way I got everyone on my first pass. If I missed your blog, no worries! The whole point of using Pipes is to make it easier to maintain. To get listed, just shoot me an email with your ATOM feed and which bucket you belong in or respond to this blog post with the same and I’ll add you at my next opportunity.

At some point, hopefully in the near future, we’ll clean up blogs.alfresco.com with a new look-and-feel and we’ll switch the data source to use these feeds. Until then, add one or more of these to your feed reader and enjoy.

Last-minute San Diego Alfresco meetup on 7/13

A few of us are getting together in San Diego tomorrow (7/13) at the Hopping Pig to wallow around in some Alfresco topics. Want to join us? Hop over to the Orange County/San Diego Alfresco Meetup Google Group to let us know you’re coming, to check on logistics, and to be advised of last minute changes. This is an informal networking/planning type of meetup, so there is no formal agenda for this one.

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.

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.

Tech Talk Live, Dashlet Challenge, & other Alfresco community events

Just wanted to clue you in to some upcoming Alfresco events in case you missed them via other channels.

Tech Talk Live Reloaded

We’re going to start doing Tech Talk Live webinars again. In the past these webinars were run by Luis and Yong pretty much on a weekly basis. They typically started out with a short presentation on some topic and then opened up to general technical discussion. We’re going to start these back up, but we’ll do them monthly (at least to start out) on the first Wednesday of each month and we’re going to rotate the Alfresco engineers that participate.

The first call will be Wednesday, July 6th. Will Abson is going to talk about Share Extras and then field questions on Share dashlet development and other customizations. Get more information on the event details page.

Community Vision and Plan

I’ve presented a vision and plan for the Alfresco community to the rest of the senior management team at Alfresco, and recently I’ve been sharing that presentation with members of the community. On July 7th, I’ll be sharing it more broadly in a webinar. I’d really like as many members of the community to attend as possible and then provide me with feedback on the plan. Sign up for the webinar here.

Intro to Alfresco Development

On July 20th I’ll be giving a talk for people new to the Alfresco platform. We’ll be walking through the major sub-systems and taking a high-level look at the development model. Again, this is aimed a beginners–this is not a technical deep dive. Sign up for the webinar here.

Take the Dashlet Challenge

Speaking of writing code, got any cool ideas for Alfresco Share dashlets? If you code it up, make it available as open source, and send a pointer to your project to dashletchallenge@alfresco.com, you could win an iPad2. Your dashlet has to run on either Community or Enterprise 3.4 and will be judged on the basis of creativity, business applicability, code quality, and packaging. Will Abson, Mike Vertal (RivetLogic), and I will pick the winner. The contest runs until the end of August, so get coding. More details on the contest can be found here.

Alfresco launches Team for Departments and SMBs

Alfresco launched a new offering yesterday called Alfresco Team. Team is an attempt by Alfresco to reach out to departments and smaller organizations who would like a supported tool for collaboration, but don’t have the number of users, volume of documents, or support level requirements necessary to justify an Enterprise support subscription for Alfresco Share.

Team is essentially Alfresco Share plus some new features that haven’t yet made it into the Share product. Team will not be a separate code base going forward. After the next release of Alfresco, the features should be on parity and the difference between Team and Share will be the cost (which, for Team, is based on number of users and number of documents) and support levels.

Team can be downloaded and run on-premise, on the customer’s own cloud infrastructure (public or private), or on Bitnami’s cloud infrastructure. It is not yet offered as true SaaS–the customer must install and maintain the software. We will likely see a true SaaS offering of Team later this year.

In July, Alfresco will be releasing iOS apps for Team that run on both iPad and iPhone. I haven’t yet played with these but the use case is primarily around content creation and capture, so that collaborators can grab content (from a camera, from iWork, etc.) and get it into the Team repository where it can be routed, reviewed, updated, and commented on by the rest of the team members.

Once the new Team features are added in to Share, the iOS apps will probably work with Share as well (not certain, but likely).

We’re going to release the iOS code as open source so that you’ll be able to take it, tweak it, re-brand it, or develop new Alfresco-centric mobile apps with it. I’ll give you more details on that as we get closer.

One early concern partners had was whether or not they would be able to implement and customize Alfresco Team. The answer is a qualified “yes”. Partners can install the product for clients, but customization is limited to creating custom themes or adding new mash-up style dashlets. In other words, if you want to change how the document library works in Team, you can’t do it. There’s a complete list of what customizations can and cannot be done here. It’s important to note that this isn’t really a partner issue–customers are subject to the same list. It’s really about keeping support costs down due to the lower price point.

So, for partners, the reaction to the new offering will probably be lukewarm based on the limited opportunities for big projects to happen around Team, although I suspect we’ll see a fair number of folks doing short Team install and config engagements. One of the nice things about Team is that because it is Share, partners already know how to install it and create add-ons for it.

I see Team as an opportunity for Alfresco to find new use cases and functionality for Share, which will improve both the Community and Enterprise editions of the Share product, and as a way to get Alfresco in front of a lot more people. What will be interesting to see is if there is enough room in the market between extremely low cost collaboration tools like Basecamp and relatively higher-cost, higher-end tools like Alfresco Team.