Today eXo Platform, a leading European open source company, announced the merger of its eXo Portal project with JBoss Portal to create an open source portal platform.

The goal of the new project is to forge a strong portal solution by bringing together the technical strengths of the two projects through the open source community.

According to eXo Platform CEO, Benjamin Mestrallet, “What has always been a challenge for any portal community or vendor is providing the right balance of robust infrastructure and engaging usability features. This collaborative project will strive to strike that balance and will work to create an enterprise-grade, open source alternative to expensive, bloated closed source portals.”

“The eXo portal has some impressive functionality in terms of ease of use, UI flexibility and straightforward management administration; JBoss.org’s current portal project has a robust engine, performance and security features, combined this collaboration project will help drive portal capabilities forward,” said Dr. Mark Little, Sr. Director of Engineering, Middleware at Red Hat.

What does this new portal product mean for other open source portal platforms like Liferay and Plone? Should they be worried? They may want to keep an eye out as eXo is contributing a new project to the JBoss community, eXo JCR, which is a “robust cluster-ready Java Content Repository that is standards based and a key component for the project”. Could this be seen a threat to other portal platforms which lacks the robust content management features that eXo JCR will bring?

It would be interesting to see how the new JBoss eXo portal platform fares with enterprises in their choice of portal and collaboration software.

Tomorrow (Friday June 5th, 2009) at 12pm EST I have the pleasure of presenting and leading a discussion for the bi-weekly Alfresco Tech Talk Live hosted by Dr. Yong Qu of Alfresco.

We’ll be exploring how Alfresco Share, with some basic modifications, can be leveraged to create a collaborative authoring and management environment for your enterprise content. Join us tomorrow for a demonstration and open discussion as we explore this interesting subject.

To attend, please visit http://alfresco.acrobat.com/live and enter the meeting room as a Guest.

This year, Rivet Logic will be hosting Liferay’s first ever East Coast User Conference, taking place on 5/21, at our training facilities in Reston, VA. It would be an opportunity to meet some of the faces behind Liferay in person while discussing the product’s future as well as best practices.

The agenda includes keynote speakers and both technical and business tracks to cover a variety of topics. Technical tracks include “Liferay Solutions, SaaS Style” and “Social Networking with Liferay, ICEfaces, and Vizster”, while business tracks include “Enterprise Collaboration: Overcoming Issues with Big Implementations” and “Fostering Open Source Adoption Within Reluctant Enterprises”.

We are pleased to host this event and look forward to further involvement with future Liferay events.

Last week I attended the Alfresco community meetup in New York City. The turn out was impressive. Nancy Garrity (Alfresco Community Manager) told me that the event was completely “sold-out” and that there was not enough room for everyone that wanted to come. I was sorry to hear that we were not able have everyone there that wanted to be there but it’s really great that there is so much interest in Alfresco.

The session got underway with Ian Howells, Alfresco’s Chief Marketing Officer, who reviewed the trends in favor of open source ECM, not the least of which is the accelerating demand driven by the global recession.

Michael “Uzi” Uzquiano, Product Manager for Alfresco WCM and Alfresco Network, then laid out a roadmap for Alfresco WCM, Surf and Alfresco Network. Some key highlights were:

• Repository harmonization. Alfresco provides two distinct content stores: the Web Content Management (WCM) repository, and the Document Management (DM) repository. Alfresco is bringing these two stores together at the API level and then consolidating many of the core capabilities.

• Clustering for the WCM repository (not just DM) is under development.

• New Forms Service: Alfresco WCM has long had a capability for defining forms. A user can install an XSD in the Data Dictionary. The XSD is then translated in to a Web form that provides a friendly user interface for reading, modifying, and storing XML. The DM repo does not have such a feature. Instead, within DM property sheets map to the underlying content model. Many users have requested both capabilities be available uniformly for both DM and WCM. Alfresco is responding to these requests with the new service. The new Forms Service will have a much more powerful persistence capability. I asked to find out if customers who already have XSD form definitions in play would need to change to a different format. I was told that these customers should be safe.

• Spring Webflow integration with Surf: Spring Webflow is the project in the Spring Portfolio that focuses on providing the infrastructure for building and running rich, Java-based web applications.

Uzi laid out a timeline for future Alfresco releases:

1. v3.2 Labs targeted for June

2. v3.2 Enterprise targeted for September 2009

3. v3.3 in early 2010

4. v4.0 later in 2010

In addition to Uzi’s presentation, a number of other presentations and demos were also given. I particularly liked the customer case study given by the Warren country Correction Center. They process a large volume of inmates in and out of the facility. Each time an inmate is processed in or out of the correction center a large volume of paper work is generated which must be stored for long periods of time. Warren country is now well on their way to eliminating the need to store large volumes of content in physical file cabinets. They have implemented an Alfresco based solution for archival and retrieval of inmate data. Electronic storage of the inmate information allows the correction center to quickly search and retrieve important information on inmate background, health, behavior and other important documents for both operational and legal functions.

Other demonstrations included
• Scanning best practices and an Alfresco-integrated Kofax demonstration.
• A walkthrough of Alfresco Share
• Digital tampering protection through an integration with Surety’s Absolute Proof.
• IMAP demonstration that allows your email bin and folders directly with Alfresco.
• A demonstration of a Flex UI for Alfresco.

I gave a presentation entitled “Leveraging Alfresco Share for Enterprise Content”. At Rivet Logic, we get a lot of requests for solutions to help authors manage deep, inter-related content types that need to ultimately be published to numerous channels, including the Web. In addition to the publishing requirements, enterprise class assets usually benefit from an authoring environment that includes social and collaborative capabilities like those found in Alfresco Share. To address this, we demonstrated a number of best practices and design patterns for managing enterprise content with an authoring environment plugged in to Alfresco Share combined with an instant Web preview capability. Based on the feedback, the approach seemed well received. Like many of our customers, members of the Alfresco community are quite interested in collaborative authoring environments for enterprise class content.

It was great to meet with everyone who was able to attend. These types of events are vital for the community. It’s a perfect time to give Alfresco feedback and for the customers and community to meet one another.

Alfresco is hosting a community meetup on Tuesday (details here) at which Rivet Logic will explore through a simple demonstration how the Alfresco repository, Share and WCM can be used in concert with one another to create a superior authoring and management solution for multi-channel enterprise content.

The introduction of Alfresco 3.0 Enterprise, Share, along with the work taking place for Alfresco WCM and Web Studio, a realm of opportunities have become readily accessible including the platform’s ability to facilitate not just workflow and concurrent editing but also first-class collaboration (including discussions, blogs, calendaring etc) around content that is intended for many consumption channels be it Web, wire feeds, PDF, print and so on.

Come to the meetup — and while you’re there check out this demonstration!

At Rivet Logic Corporation I’ve been tasked many times to expose Alfresco features through a JSR-168/286 portlet hosted in JBoss Portal or Liferay Portal. Easy right? Not really, and here’s why:

Today Alfresco provides us with a couple of ways to do this:

1. Write a portlet and use Alfresco’s Web services API to expose the Enterprise Content Management (ECMS) features
2. Use Alfresco’s out-of-the-box Web script portlet to expose an Alfresco Web script

The first approach works but in many cases requires that you develop custom Alfresco actions since the Web services API does not cover the full feature set of AFS (Alfresco Foundation Services).

The second approach provides us with more AFS coverage but has one restriction that is not easy to work with. It requires that all of Alfresco be deployed inside the portal as a portlet application. So if you needed to deploy JBoss Portal running an Alfresco Web script portlet that exposes the MySpaces Web script, the deployment would look like this:

The problem with this approach is that it introduces scalability constraints. Namely, if you need to scale the portal you are forced to scale Alfresco with it and vice versa.

For the Web services approach we have an alternative thanks to our Remote Alfresco API rivet (RAAr). With RAAr we are able to make use of Web frameworks like JBoss Seam backed by rich UI component libraries like RichFaces to develop JSR 168/286 portlets that expose most if not all of the AFS features using a Java-based API that uses RESTful communication to provide a secure and scalable interface to Alfresco. One example of a document library portlet that we created using this approach is shown below:

On the other hand, if you need to go with the Web script approach you’re pretty much out of luck unless you’re willing to go with the deployment architecture shown above. The fact that there was no single solution for this problem was all the motivation I needed to create AWPr (Alfresco Web Script Portlet rivet). With this portlet we will be able to have a better deployment architecture that could be represented by the following diagram:

Here the portal and the ECMS are in two separate tiers and can be managed or maintained as such. This not only allows for better flexibility when scaling becomes necessary, it also allows the portal to expose Web scripts that are hosted in different geographic locations.

To make this possible I leveraged a custom authentication component that we wrote called STAr (Secure Token Authentication rivet) that could be plugged into an Alfresco authentication chain. With this in place the portlet can carry the user credentials from the portal to Alfresco, authenticate the user in Alfresco and retrieve a ticket that can be used during all subsequent interactions between the end-user, the portlet and ultimately the Alfresco Web script itself.

We recently released the first public version of AWPr under the GNU Affero General Public License.

The release includes two example Web scripts that, when installed and configured correctly in your portal (e.g. Liferay Portal), will look like this:

If you would like to know more about AWPr you can visit its wiki pages at the following location: http://wiki.rivetlogic.org/display/AWPr/Home

The annual AIIM Expo & Conference is less than a week away, and this year, Rivet Logic will be an active participant. Not only will we be exhibiting on the show floor, we will also be hosting a seminar and cocktail reception.

The reception will be held on Wednesday, April 1st, at 5pm at the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott adjoining the Philadelphia Convention Center where the AIIM Expo will be held.

The topic of the seminar will be Open Source ECM in Action, an opportunity for attendees to learn from our real-world experiences implementing Alfresco across a wide range of vertical markets & application areas, including a case study from the pharmaceutical industry.

To top off the free food, drinks, and engaging topic, we will also be raffling off a Kindle!

For full event details and to register, please visit
www.rivetlogic.com/reg/mar09/aiim-expo.

And if you’re planning to attend the AIIM Expo, don’t forget to come visit us at Booth #524 or our virtual booth!

We hope to see you there!

Last week, Red Hat launched their third annual Innovation Awards, which will be presented at the 2009 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World held in Chicago later this year in September.

“The Innovation Awards were created to honor individuals and companies who have forged new ground to demonstrate innovative solutions through the use of Red Hat and JBoss products and technologies.”

There are a total of six categories, including Management Excellence, Optimized Solutions, Superior Alternatives, Extensive Ecosystem, Carved out Costs, and Outstanding Open Source Architecture.

“Five categories will each recognize two winning submissions, one from Red Hat and one from JBoss, and the Outstanding Open Source Architecture category will recognize one winner who is deploying both Red Hat and JBoss solutions. From these category winners, a Red Hat Innovator of the Year and a JBoss Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting and announced at the awards ceremony.”

Last year, Rivet Logic was honored with the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award for our Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions implementation, www.kaptest.com.

We look forward to participating in the Innovation Awards again this year!

KMWorld, the leading information provider serving the knowlege, document, and content management systems market, has selected Rivet Logic in their list of “100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” for 2009.

The announcement was made yesterday by Hugh McKellar, editor in chief of KMWorld.

“We have always maintained that knowledge management is an attitude, not a specific application—a commitment to taking full advantage of all the information at an organization’s disposal and delivering it to the appropriate constituencies to facilitate decision-making at every possible level…

…We believe that each of the companies listed embodies as part of its culture the agility and limber execution of its mission… they embrace a spirit of innovation and adaptability. They each embody the resiliency and wisdom to identify and act upon their own areas requiring improvement and, more importantly, those of their customers.”

We’re honored to receive this prestigious recognition. As leaders in the open source enterprise content management and collaboration market, we will continue to strive to deliver bottom-line results for our customers.

In this down economy, enterprises everywhere are looking for new opportunities to cut costs. Why use expensive, proprietary ECM applications and infrastructure when commercial open source alternatives offers dramatically reduced costs, mitigate risk, without compromising on performance availability and supportability?

Join us as Rivet Logic and Ingres Corporation co-host a webcast this Wednesday, March 4th, to see how transitioning to an open source infrastructure with products like Alfresco, Red Hat, and Ingres could benefit your organization as we draw on real-world examples.

Click here to register for this webcast.