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.

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.

Enjoyed the Atlanta Alfresco Meetup last week

Last week I joined about 15 other Alfresco fanatics for the Atlanta Alfresco Meetup. The attendees braved some seriously crappy weather to attend. We’re talking about trees falling on roads and power outages so I was pleasantly surprised it was more than just me and the guys who work in the building that showed up.

I gave a talk on my high-level plan for the Alfresco Community. Then, Dimy Jeannot of Armedia gave a project walkthrough based on some work they did with Alfresco Web Quick Start, the Web Editor Framework, Google Fusion Tables, and Salesforce.com. It was a good progression from business need to code. I think this particular meetup group is looking to get even more hands-on in the future–they’ve got a hack-a-thon style get together in the works.

Thanks to Dimy and Doug Bock for organizing the meetup and to Jim Nasr of Armedia for providing the location and snacks. I look forward to more great events from this group in the future.

This meetup was what I hope will be the start of several locally-driven Alfresco meetups happening around the world (see “Getting Involved with a Local Alfresco Community“). I know that the Boston, Washington, D.C., and Southern California groups are all planning on getting together soon. I’ll be at “Alfresco Day” in Madrid on June 22nd, which is an Alfresco-led event. I’m hoping to see (and attend) locally-driven Alfresco meetups in Spain and other parts of Europe later this year. South Africa is also planning an event that I’m really excited about.

If there’s not already a meetup in your corner of the world, put your name on the Alfresco Meetups Everywhere page and you can collaborate with others to get one started.

Screencasts highlight upcoming Alfresco Share features

[UPDATE: Due to the popularity of this post, Thorsten had to relocate his screencasts to this page, so I’ve removed the individual links and added a link to the entire collection. I’m also adding bullets for two new features he recorded screencasts for since the original post]

I came across this today via Twitter. Thorsten Schminkel (@schminkel) has posted a collection of screencasts that highlight new Alfresco Share features currently checked in to Alfresco Community head. Each is about a minute or less–just enough to get the gist of the following features:

  • Trashcan
  • In-place file name editor
  • Video preview
  • Manage system users
  • Change logo
  • Image preview dashlet
  • Drag-and-drop import
  • User-defined document library sorting
  • Like counter
  • Email notification configuration
  • User import via CSV

The latest official release of Alfresco Community is 3.4.d. Last month Alfresco released a preview release called 3.4.e meant to give everyone a first look at the new Activiti integration. None of the features Thorsten shows in these screencasts are available yet in an official release. Look for an official Community release to happen in late Summer or early Fall with an Enterprise release by the end of the year. If you can’t wait, you can do what Thorsten did: Check out the latest Community code from subversion, build it, and have fun playing with these and other new features.

Alternatively, functionally similar versions of some of these features have already been implemented by members of the community for versions of Alfresco in use today:

Thanks for doing those screencasts, Thorsten, and let me know if you create any more so we can add them to the list.

Alfresco DevCon 2010 presentations now available

I’ve uploaded most of the presentations from Alfresco DevCon 2010 to SlideShare. The easiest way to get to them is to use the DevCon 2010 tag.

You may be thinking, “Damn, the conference was seven months ago, why do I care?” and to that I have two responses. First, sorry. We’ll do better this year. Second, the collection includes some really helpful resources on a variety of topics. I think every one of them could help someone out there on projects today.

Here are some of my favorites:

Okay, that’s half of the sessions, but it is hard to narrow them down. Anyway, take a look and favorite the ones you really like. Also, if you are planning on attending DevCon this year, feel free to give me feedback like, “More sessions like this would be great,” or “Maybe not so much of this one this year”. That will help me plan the conference tracks and content.