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.

Webinar: Developer’s Intro to Alfresco, Part One

I’m doing a one-hour webinar with Alfresco today at 12:00 Eastern. This is part one in a three-part series that introduces the Alfresco platform from a developer perspective. Learn more at Alfresco’s events page.

Update: You can catch the playback if you want. We did the webinar in two separate chunks. The first was a pre-recorded presentation and demo. The second was live Q&A.

I’ll post the date and registration info for the second part soon.

Alfresco-Drupal integration through CMIS

As I’ve mentioned here and on twitter, we posted our Alfresco-Drupal integration on Drupal.org on Friday. I did a short write-up on it over at Optaros.com that gives the why and the what so I’ll not repeat it here.

We split the integration into two modules: CMIS API has nothing Alfresco-specific–it just knows how to make RESTful CMIS calls to an arbitrary CMIS repository. The Alfresco CMIS module has the Alfresco-specific logic. You need both to make the integration work. If you’ve got Alfresco 3 (Enterprise or Labs) you don’t need to do anything to your Alfresco install to enable the integration because it’s already CMIS compliant.

There is still a lot of work to do on this integration. For example, right now we’re only moving plain text content back-and-forth between Drupal and Alfresco. And we use a “single account” approach so that to Alfresco, every request appears to come from one user instead of passing through the authenticated Drupal credentials. But this is an imporant integration to us so I expect it to evolve substantially in the coming months.

I got good feedback on the recent screencasts I put together for Share (Part 1, Part 2) so if I get some time this week I’ll do one that gives a quick tour of the Drupal integration.

Alfresco Share Screencast Part Two

My colleague, John Eckman, has posted the second part of the Alfresco Share screencast at Optaros Labs. In this screencast I show how a couple of examples of custom share components. One is a team bookmarks component and the other is a status/microblogging component. These components were built with Surf and should work in any Surf-based web site. Obviously, that includes Share but could be other Surf sites that you build. We will make both components available as open source.

New Optaros Screencast: Alfresco Share Part One

My Optaros colleague, John Eckman, has been asking me to do this for some time so I finally caved and knocked it out. It’s a 12-minute screencast that shows the basics of Alfresco Share, an open source team collaboration tool which Alfresco markets as an alternative to Microsoft Sharepoint.

There’s also a “Part Two” which John will post on Optaros Labs next week that shows a couple of the custom Share components we developed. One is a Facebook-like “status” component and the other is a “team bookmarks” component. I’ll post the link when it’s up.

Share is pretty cool both from a functional perspective and with respect to the underlying technology. Share is built on Alfresco Surf plus a ton of YUI. The version I used in the screencast is 3.0.1 Enterprise.

Are you in Dallas-Ft. Worth and interested in Alfresco?

A few of us in the area are talking about putting together an Alfresco meet-up the first week of March. Nothing fancy (and definitely not a sales pitch). Maybe we’ll have one or two presentations from real world implementations. The goal is for everyone to learn what we’ve all been up to, share ideas, etc.

I’ve got a venue squared away and someone to foot the bill for pizza and beer. Now I need the most important ingredient: You.

So respond here with a comment or contact me directly if this is something you think you might attend. If you have a topic you want to share with the group let me know that too. We’ll finalize the agenda and logistics based on the level of interest.

Alfresco Surf Code Camp: Do-It-Yourself

Did you miss the Alfresco Surf Code Camps? I’ve got you covered. With Alfresco’s blessing (they wrote most of the content, after all) I’ve uploaded the Optaros Alfresco 3.0 Surf Code Camp instructor presentations and class labs to slideshare.net.

You might start by looking at the agenda to get an idea of the order you should progress through the lecture and labs. Then, move on to the introduction. Use the agenda to guide you through the rest.

The labs will be a little bit more painful than they were in-person. That’s because for the in-person camps, we used a virtual machine image that had everything pre-installed. For the DIY Code Camp, you’ll need to set this up yourself. To approximate what was on the image:

  1. Install the Alfresco-Tomcat bundle.
  2. Install a second Tomcat instance. This will be your Surf tier.
  3. Build a fresh Surf war. It’s in the “web framework” project in the source code. It will produce a WAR called alfwf.war.
  4. The labs will refer to “assets.zip”. I had an assets.zip file for just about every lab. For this setup, I’ve just got one zip, which is the entire solution source available for download. So when you see that, you’ll have to pick through the solution to find the file dependencies. Sorry.

The image we used for the class ran on 3.0 Labs from head circa mid-November. I believe people have had success running on 3.0 Enterprise. I haven’t tested on Labs 3 Stable. If someone tries it please post a comment here to let us know your degree of success.

The Code Camp doesn’t cover Web Studio. I’ll leave that up to someone else–I’ll be happy to link to it.

UPDATE: Making you find your own dependencies for the labs was lame. I had a few extra minutes so I pulled them into a Code Camp Assets file organized by lab/walkthrough. Now you’ve got no excuse.

Forrester finds that integration, better interfaces key to improving WCM

Forrester’s Stephen Powers has released a report that finds that companies are still investing in WCM even in tough times. The report is a survey of 261 information and knowledge management professionals across all verticals. According to the report, released on January 12, nearly three quarters of respondents said they would do more WCM in the coming year and only about one-third said they had rolled out WCM enterprise-wide already.

So what improvements do people want out of their WCM system? The top three, according to the report, are “Integration with other enterprise applications or content repositories”, “interfaces for content contributors”, and “management of multiple sites and/or environments” which is tied for third with “workflow”.

The “workflow” one is a bit of a surprise to me. In my experience WCM workflows have been much more straightforward than workflows we’ve seen in document management or other content-centric applications. The report doesn’t include a breakdown of the incumbent WCM vendors used by the respondents, and, unfortunately, doesn’t get more specific so it is uncertain exactly what about “workflow” the respondents found lacking.

“Integration with other repositories” and “management of multiple sites” aren’t surprising. We’ve been seeing a lot of interest from clients with a “multi-site” problem. The problem might be one around operational efficiency or it can be about moving content around, finding content, or potentially reusing content across heterogeneous platforms. I think the proposed CMIS standard will help out a lot here but more vendors will have to roll out their implementation and tools based on CMIS will have to become available before we will feel the full impact.

“Better interfaces for contributors” is another one that makes sense. As technology like flash, flex, and AJAX continue to be deployed in consumer applications and across the enterprise, it is natural that users are demanding similar enhancements to their WCM systems. It seems like in a lot of cases, the original goal of WCM–“remove the webmaster bottleneck”–has failed. We’ve simply moved the work “up the stack”. Now the inefficiency is around content owners, who are largely business users, that struggle with difficult-to-use tools.

Powers tries to make the case that Enterprises “fear upgrades” citing that 57% want upgrades kept to a maximum of one-per-year. This is an important stat, particularly for open source WCM, which prides itself on being able to innovate faster than its legacy cousins. I would imagine that if upgrades were entirely painless, this number would drop significantly. Customers want to roll out new features to content contributors and content consumers–they just can’t afford to do it frequently if upgrades are huge ordeals. (I recently spoke to an enterprise that was going to pay their incumbent legacy vendor over half a million dollars in services alone just to get their installation current).

Enjoyed the Code Camp in Munich last week

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Germany last week. In addition to presenting the details around Alfresco’s web application framework, Surf, I met lots of great people, ate some outstanding food, and drank plenty of German beer. Out of the three Code Camps we conducted, this location had the most character. Check out the pics to see what I mean.

About 30 people from around Europe spent the day learning Alfresco Surf. We then finished up with a round table discussion. One of the campers, Gabriele Columbro, posted a great recap of the Code Camp if you want a taste of what we covered. Gabriele has a few screenshots of the slides. We’ll be posting all of the materials and labs in full soon.