Category: Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Web Content Management (WCM), Document Management (DM). Whatever you call it this category covers market happenings and lessons learned.

Notes from today’s Alfresco Office Hours

We had another live broadcast of Alfresco Office Hours today on Google Hangouts on Air. If you missed the broadcast you can watch the recorded session.

Here are my rough notes from today’s session:

CMIS & Apache Chemistry book is now in print

Lightning talks deadline is this weekend!

Why don’t more people use the source code?

Question raised on #alfresco freenode IRC about Share moving away from YUI:

Forum fix update:

  • Have you noticed that tags and alfresco version are being shown in forum posts now?
  • When creating posts in the forum, please try to remember to set your Alfresco version.

Alfresco Developer Series stuff moved to github

  • Code lives here
  • Thinking about converting the actual tutorials themselves to a plain-text based format and checking that in as well. WDYT?
  • Need to move that code and all of my other code to the Maven SDK

Speaking of the SDK, it is time for the community to step up and rescue that project

  • Engineering is on board with us doing that
  • I’ll move the code to github and will then start taking pull requests
  • I’d like to get the SDK converted to use Maven
  • We should refactor old code if it needs it
  • We should add new examples where none exist, like for CMIS, the Public API, and simple Share customizations.

Other projects we need your help on…

Pages marked as needing work on the wiki

Jira bug triage

  • I think we can increase the attention community-reported issues get if we can focus engineering on the quality bug reports
  • Maybe the community could help triage these
  • If you are interested, let me know

Projects on the help wanted page

Organizing local meetups

As you can see, we covered a lot of ground and had some great discussion. We were even joined for a little while by a fellow community member, Alfresco partner, and Alfresco Summit speaker, Boris Mejias. It could be you next time. See you at Alfresco Office Hours on August 30.

Last Call for Alfresco Summit Lightning Talk Proposals

LightningGot a great idea or tip that you want to share with the rest of the Alfresco community? You should consider giving a lightning talk at this year’s Alfresco Summit. We did these last year and they were very popular with the attendees because each session of lightning talks offers a lot of condensed information on a broad range of topics.

Lightning talks are strictly five minutes long. As an added challenge, we use the ignite-style, which means each slide advances on its own. It takes practice, but when it is done well it is really impressive.

We’re accepting lightning talk proposals until midnight on Sunday, August 4, so do not wait to submit yours.

Crikey! Alfresco Day Sydney is Almost Here

Sydney Opera HouseCrikey! Alfresco Day Sydney is almost here. On Thursday, August 22, I will be with the local Alfresco Sydney team at the Sydney Harbour Marriott Hotel. We’ll be doing a day long meetup aimed at both business and technical audiences. We want to show anyone who is interested what Alfresco has to offer.

I’m hoping to see strong representation from customers, partners, and other community members. I want to get you all talking to each other about how you are using Alfresco, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what we can do to help you be more successful with the platform.

I’ll be giving talks on CMIS, developer fundamentals, and how you can get involved with the Alfresco community. We’ll also have talks from Alfresco customers and partners.

If you haven’t signed up already, you can do that here. I look forward to seeing you in Sydney!

Alfresco Developer Series tutorial source code now on github

The source code for the tutorials in my Alfresco Developer Series has always been available to download as a zip. But for some reason I never put it in a project where we could collaborate on it. That’s fixed now. The code’s now on github. (Note that the source code that accompanies the Alfresco Developer Guide is on Google Code. I don’t intend to maintain that going forward and will instead focus on these github projects).

As part of that I’ve made sure that the content types, behaviors, actions, web scripts, and workflow tutorial code works on 4.0.d and 4.2.c. The original zips referenced in the tutorial PDF still work with the versions they were written for, of course, but if you grab the source from github, they’ll work on the version they are tagged for.

One thing I’ve realized as part of this is that with the actual tutorials in PDF, keeping the written instructions in sync with the code is tough. Maybe I should convert the tutorial text into markdown or something similar and check that into the source code repo as well. Let me know what you think about that idea.

Next step for the code is to convert from the old Ant-based Alfresco SDK to the new Maven-based SDK.

CMIS and Apache Chemistry book now available

cmis-bookI am very pleased to announce that the book project I have been working on with Jay Brown (IBM) and Florian Mueller (SAP) has finally reached the most important milestone in any such project: The book has gone to press. You should now be able to purchase CMIS and Apache Chemistry in Action at fine bookstores everywhere.

I’m extremely proud of the end result. This book is the most comprehensive, most helpful resource on Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) that exists. I hope it encourages developers everywhere to adopt the standard and leverage CMIS-based tools from Apache Chemistry as part of their content-centric applications, desktop tools, or server implementations.

If you aren’t yet familiar, CMIS is an industry standard for working with Enterprise Content Management repositories (ECM) like Alfresco, IBM FileNet, Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, Nuxeo, and others. Once you know the CMIS API and SQL-like query language you can work with any repository that supports CMIS.

If you happen to be at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon today, Jay, Florian, and I will be hanging out in the Apache Software Foundation booth starting at 5:00p and we will have books for a lucky handful of folks. If you miss out on that, Manning is running a Deal of the Day promotion today. You can get 50% off the book with code dotd0723tw.

Writing a book is a seriously tough project. I was lucky I didn’t have to do it alone this time and even luckier still that Jay and Florian are top-notch experts in CMIS, great writers, and just a pleasure to work with. Thanks, guys!

 

Alfresco Office Hours with Jeff & Richard

Alfresco Office Hours with Jeff & Richard is our periodic Hangout on the Air that we use to keep everyone up-to-date on things going on in the Alfresco community. If you missed today’s session, you can watch the replay.

And here are some rough notes…

  • If you cannot login to the support portal, are having trouble with the download links, or you have any other problem or feedback with the new system, please let your main contact know. If you don’t know who that is or how to get in touch with them, let me or Richard know.
  • Alfresco Summit Can’t Wait Rate ends 7/19. That’s tomorrow! For a complete discount schedule, go to http://summit.alfresco.com/pricing
  • Alfresco Summit speakers should now know their status and have received speaker instructions.
  • CMIS Book is in print! We’ll have free copies at OSCON next week.
  • New York City meetup is happening 8/14. Sign-up at http://www.meetup.com/webcms-45/
  • Alfresco Day Sydney is happening 8/22. Sign-up at https://www.alfresco.com/events/alfresco-day-sydney
  • Sounds like a San Francisco meetup may also happen in August. Watch http://www.meetup.com/BayAreaAlfresco/ for date announcements
  • A Kansas City meetup is trying to happen, but struggling. There are a lot of Alfresco users in Kansas City–don’t you all want to meet to trade tips and tricks?
  • Add your meetup to the Local Communities page on the wiki. http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Local_Communities
  • Thanks to marsbard who reported a problem with the ecmarchitect.com workflow tutorial on 4.2.c in our last Office Hours. It’s fixed now. Download the updated zip from https://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2012/02/20/1552
  • I will move the tutorial code from ecmarchitect.com to github. The old Alfresco Developer Guide code is already on Google Code but I don’t really update it any more.
  • Check out the Community Edition How-To vids on YouTube: http://youtube.com/alfresco101
  • Please use us. If your Jiras aren’t getting attention or if you have a large code contribution that you want to make, we can help facilitate that. That’s just one example. The point is, we want to help you get plugged in to the community. Don’t be afraid to reach out.

Five of your favorite Alfresco-related presentations

If views of my presentations on SlideShare are any indication, a whole lot of you are interested in integrating Drupal and Alfresco. Despite the fact that the presentation is four years old, it consistently makes the “most viewed” list out of my uploads. If you are considering Drupal but need something a bit more document-centric to serve up your files as part of that Drupal site, take a look:

With over 12,000 views, it is safe to say there is definitely something to the combination of Alfresco and Drupal.

Another apparent classic is:

Which is kind of scary given its age and brevity. I think the popularity of this is due to the seemingly inexhaustible demand for “getting started” resources for new Alfresco developers.

This one has similar info, but with more details, and is probably a better choice for developers trying to get an extremely high-level overview:

The CMIS API is now the preferred way to interact with the Alfresco repository remotely, and many people use this presentation to get a quick overview:

In fact, I’ll have a CMIS powerhouse panel on Tech Talk Live tomorrow (July 10, 2013). So if you are just getting started with CMIS, please join us.

If you like CMIS but you don’t want to fool around with your own server, you can use Alfresco in the Cloud. This deck gives a CMIS overview and discusses the Alfresco API at a high-level with links to sample code and screencasts:

Thanks to everyone who has made use of these presentations!

Who would you most like to meet at Alfresco Summit and why?

Every year I create a list of “community stars” and I send them a free pass to our annual conference. Some of the things I use to create my list include things like forum helpfulness, #alfresco IRC presence, mailing list activity, meetup hosts, participation in contests, wiki edits, blog and book authors, open source add-ons, contributions to the product (bug reports ,fixes, new features), and activity on stackoverflow.com.

But a key ingredient that has always been missing is you. Of course, you’ve given me your input indirectly–when you award someone points in the forum or you link to one of their blog posts you are boosting that person’s standing in our community. But now I want to ask the question explicitly: Who from our community would you most like to meet in-person at Alfresco Summit and why?

Note that my definition of the Alfresco community is always all-inclusive: employees, partners, customers, and other community contributors, regardless of which specific product they use, all participate in our ecosystem. For this, I’m looking for non-Alfresco employees. Most likely, if you can name an Alfresco employee, they will be at Alfresco Summit.

If you want to name someone publicly you can comment on this post or send a tweet and cc @jeffpotts01. If you’d rather nominate someone privately, feel free to send me an email. My Alfresco address is jeff dot potts at alfresco dot com.

Be sure to specify Boston or Barcelona.