KMWorld, the leading information provider serving the knowlege, document, and content management systems market, is featuring their “Top 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” list in its March 2010 issue. This year, Rivet Logic was selected again, for the second consecutive year, to be part of this prestigious list.

“The firms on this list are true solution providers that are dedicated to understanding what their customers need and delivering elegant technology for the requirements of the knowledge economy.”

We’re excited and honored that the industry is recognizing our efforts in driving successful open source software adoption. Over the past year, as we’ve continued to grow as an organization, we’ve also seen a positive response from organizations as the interest and awareness of open source software continues to increase in the arena of content management and collaboration.

This year, BIZcon Europe 2010, hosted by Ricston, will be held in Malta on March 4th and 5th. BIZcon is all about informing business leaders about significant trends and developments in business, and interestingly, the theme this year will be “Understanding and Leveraging Open Source”.

While many business executives are familiar with the term open source, not many have a clear understanding of how open source can be used and integrated into their organization’s environment, and more importantly, the value that can be gained compared to traditional proprietary solutions. As open source continues to gain traction, it’s important to keep business executives informed so that open source can be effectively incorporated into their strategy and leveraged to deliver bottom line results.

The agenda includes presentations from various business executives and leaders in open source, including Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung.

One of my favorite new features of Alfresco 3.2 is the concept of subsystems. Alfresco defines a subsystem as:

A configurable module responsible for a sub-part of Alfresco functionality. Typically, a subsystem wraps an optional functional area such as IMAP binding, or one with several alternative implementations, such as authentication.

In essence it’s like having mini child servers, each with its own Spring application context which makes configurability a lot more intuitive.

My first encounter with Alfresco’s subsystems was due to an AWPr jira issue that someone raised saying that STAr doesn’t work with Alfresco 3.2 because they “changed” the way authentication components are chained. To be honest my first reaction was “Oh no! More re-factoring!”. But then when I looked into how the Authentication Subsystem works it was clear that this new direction is better and allows for easier extensibility.

Remember how painful it was to chaining multiple LDAPs? Now it’s as simple as adding the following to your global properties file:

authentication.chain=ldap1:ldap,ldap2:ldap

then you create the following file/folder structure:

$TOMCAT_HOME/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/
Authentication/ldap/ldap1/ldap-authentication.properties

and

$TOMCAT_HOME/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/
Authentication/ldap/ldap2/ldap-authentication.properties

So what about custom authentication components like STAr? Piece of cake. All that needs to be done is create the following file/folder structure:

$TOMCAT_HOME/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/
Authentication/star/star-authentication-context.xml

star-authentication-context.xml would basically contain the definition of the authentication component and authentication service with very minor differences from what it looked like in Alfresco 3.1. I documented the exact syntax on STAr’s wiki page.

The final step would be to modify alfresco-global.properties to add STAr to the authentication chain like so:

authentication.chain=alfrescoNtlm1:alfrescoNtlm,star1:star

It seems though that Alfresco 3.2r2 has a bug where it doesn’t pick up authentication subsystem entries from the extension folder on the shared classpath. So I had to release a new version of STAr (1.2.0) where the -context.xml file is in the STAr AMP and ultimately ends up inside alfresco.war. When Alfresco fixes this bug then STAr 1.1.0 will be sufficient.

To learn more about Alfresco’s subsystems and how to configure authentication components visit the following links:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Subsystems
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Authentication_Subsystems

Alfresco is running a 20-city Lunch & Learn series to review the new Enterprise 3.2 release, along with implementation best practices and solution demos.

Rivet Logic will be hosting the Washington DC, Orlando, and Boston Lunch & Learns over the next couple of weeks.

Click here to learn more and to register. We hope to see you there!

Open source licensing, community and contribution are important topics. This week there were a number of interesting blog posts and tweets on the subject which might be summarized by a tweet from Matt Asay (#mjasay)

@maslett moral of story? platforms flourish on permissive licensing. GPL is a capitalist’s best friend. Apache/EPL are a community’s

Related blogs (along with several others):

• A good post from Matthew Aslett of 451 Group
• http://www.sonatype.com/people/2010/01/why-we-chose-the-gpl-for-nexus/
• Permissive or Reciprocal? Choosing the Right License by Joe Brockmeier

I agree, license and copyright are factors in creating and fostering communities but I don’t think it’s the most important set of factors. License and community, while related are very much separate issues. Open source tends to fetish license and thus it’s over-emphasized in conversations where it at best a contributing factor.

Apple, Google, Drupal, Linux, Microsoft and many, many other examples demonstrate just how little restrictive license and copyright of the core software matters to the size and contribution of the community. Permissive licenses can increase adoption as well as forks and closed derivative works, all of which cannot so simply be considered community.

Relevancy, utility, inclusion, opportunity, transparency, recognition and common vision / interests are what drive the size and output of community. It’s leadership in a project that sets the tone for the priority of these aspects. A small or under-performing community (proportionate to its potential) is more likely related to its leadership than its license.

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Related:

An incomplete identification and factoring of some areas around open source that support the ideas in this post:

Alfresco has been working on various ways to bring its enterprise content management platform into the cloud. It started with its Cloud Content Application Developer Program back in September of last year, which “provides an open source Amazon EC2-ready stack and developer kit for customers and partners to develop, deploy and monetize cloud service architecture (CSA) content applications on the EC2 platform”.

More recently, Alfresco teamed with Right Scale to offer a solution that speeds deployment time and automates scaling of Alfresco in the cloud.

As cloud computing continues to buzz in the industry and as more and more enterprises are venturing into the cloud environment, it’s no surprise that Alfresco is expanding its capabilities into that arena.

To test out Alfresco in the cloud for yourself, click here for an Alfresco Cloud trial with a full implementation of Alfresco Share running on the Amazon Cloud.

Alfresco just selected Rivet Logic as the winner of their Americas Partner of the Quarter Award.

Alfresco Partner of the Quarter, Q2 2009 - Rivet Logic

We’re truly honored to be recognized again by Alfresco for our accomplishments. Over the past year, we’ve continued to see strong demand for our Alfresco consulting services as more and more organizations are becoming more liberal towards the idea of open source. Last quarter, we kicked off several new Alfresco projects in a variety of sectors - including higher ed, media/publishing, technology and non-profit.

We look forward to continuing our work with major enterprises, and contributing back to the Alfresco community.

Join us in Waltham MA (Greater Boston area) and learn best practices for approaching and implementing projects with Alfresco ECM suite

• Determining your business use case
• Architectural best practices
• Development best practices
• Operational best practices

Our presentation was co-authored by Russ Danner of Rivet Logic, Jeff Potts of Optaros and Peter Monks of Alfresco

Where?
Rivet Logic Developer Forge, Boston
1050 Winter St
Waltham , MA
617.834.2781

When: 6:30 PM

Pizza, coffee and soda will be provided.

RSVP here to attend

At Rivet Logic we do quite a bit of work with the JBoss Seam framework, specifically with our Content Management System integration we call Crafter rivet.

Seam can be used with the Spring bean factory framework, a popular “IoC” or Inversion of Control / Dependency injection framework. Spring enables developers to create instances of java objects known as beans and then to wire them to other java objects. Most people working in J2EE today are familiar with this so I won’t spend any time going in to further detail here. Seam also supports the ability to use java annotations to declare a class as a bean and to specify how it should be wired through what they call out-jection and injection. Check out the Seam website for more details on how the Seam bi-jection mechanics work.

One question that has come up for me many times on consulting engagements is: “which approach to use, Spring or Seam bi-jection?” My experience shows me that the answer is not one or the other. Both approaches have significant benefits and can be used together to create a stronger approach than either one can provide on its own.

Here are some very simple guidelines

When to use Spring beans:

Infrastructure components and services are great candidates for Spring beans

• Such services are generally singletons within the system. Spring has excellent support for managing and wiring these objects
• Such service classes are often packaged in separate more commonly used libraries. Hard coding a bean name and wiring within the class definition or strongly coupling to Seam is less desireable.
• You want a very simple way to override the implementation at deployment time. Consider a scenario where you want to override a DAO. By managing the bean in Spring it is extremely easy to override the bean definition to use an alternate class and configuration in a given environment simply by placing an additional xml file in the classpath

When to use Seam annotations:

Domain specific components are good candidates for bi-jection.

• They are often fine grained application specific components.
• Explicitly stating how the component will be wired in the the class file has little impact on its re-usability because its scope is limited to the application at hand.
• Such components really benefit from one of Seams strongest features in its bean framework: Conversation Scoping. This is the ability to define a life-cycle which is shorter than a session. By limiting the lifetime of a object to its true life-cycle it’s possible to free memory up for other needs within the system. On large, high troughput applications the benefits here cannot be overstated.

By using a combined approach you get the reusability and flexibility of Spring framework with the performance orientation of conversation scoping and ease of development associated with Seam annotations.

Yesterday about 100 people crowded the halls of the Kellogg Conference Center in Washington DC as another round of Alfresco community summits got underway.

Bill Robinson (Alfresco, VP Sales) reported that 1% of the total Alfresco community / ecosystem base has been attending these meetings. The customer to vendor mix seemed to be about 50 / 50. As a member of Rivet Logic I now help to tip the scales on the vendor side. As a customer of Alfresco in my past life in publishing I can tell you that these events are really important for customers. The opportunity to network with other customers is unparalleled. If you can’t make it out to Atlanta or LA for the upcoming events, mark your calendar for next year. You can’t afford to miss these.

John Newton, Alfresco co-founder and CTO gave the keynote address and laid out the strategic and technical vision for the upcoming versions of Alfresco. As usual he did not disappoint. Alfresco will continue to attempt to disrupt the current ECM market with evolving open source business model and technical strategy and innovation. Of particular note:

• Alfresco will license the Webscript engine and Surf framework under an ASF (Apache Software Foundation) license. The repository and other core technology will remain under the GPL. Alfresco will retain ownership and continue to maintain these libraries.
• Alfresco will continue with ongoing activities in partnership with SpringSource (now a division of VMware) to integrate the Webscript engine and Surf in to Spring MVC.
• Some components of the platform, which are intended specifically for enterprise deployments, will only be available in the Enterprise edition of Alfresco.
• CMIS, an emerging content management standard continues along its approval process within the OASIS standards body, albeit at a slower pace mostly due to red tape. CMIS is to content repositories as SQL is to the database. In the late 80’s and early 90’s the adoption of SQL standards helped the relational database market gain widespread traction. SQL enabled third party vendors and development platforms more easily and cost effectively develop value. John Newton, a veteran of the SQL revolution, strongly believes that CMIS will have a similar effect in the content management space. CMIS will be a core component of the Alfresco architecture and strategy.
• Alfresco will be evolving its architecture to better support an ability to run in a cloud environment. Alfresco’s architecture has always contained key elements of cloud-ready software including its stateless service tier. Future enhancements will include functionality like repository sharding.
• The DM and WCM repositories will be consolidated. The AVM technology under the WCM repository will be retired in favor of a DM / CMIS based store which supports a similar feature set including snapshots, sandboxes, and a simplified layering scheme. This activity will lead to a, much needed single object model and a single set of core services for library functions, permissions, auditing and so on.
• Alfresco will focus on CMIS and WCM for 4.x.
  • Alfresco WCM focus will deepen its developer focus going forward with Spring and Eclipse integration.
  • Alfresco Runtime servers, currently based on AVM stores will be replaced with scalable CMIS runtimes.
  • Alfresco Share will continue to take on administrative functionality and should completely replace the Alfresco Explorer client by 4.x

I was able to get to the Records Management best practices break out session, which I found very informative. Strong RM capabilities and DOD 5015.2 certification have been a long time coming. Alfresco RM is implemented within Alfresco Share as a “Site type.” Users may be invited in to the RM space to become record managers and consumers. During the presentation we learned about current trends in RM and were treated to a demonstration of the RM application and the process of moving content through its lifecycle as a record from declaration to deposition.

Our CEO, Mike Vertal, outlined a large-scale records management solution that Rivet Logic has been working on with SAIC based on Alfresco, Liferay, and SAIC’s Teratext email archiving platform.

I gave a talk entitled Alfresco Best Practices, which I co-authored with Jeff Potts of Optaros and Peter Monks of Alfresco. The three of us are very excited to have had an opportunity to consolidate all of the practices, pointers and gotchas we’ve learned over the years. The presentation is aimed a variety of levels from Alfresco noobs to Alfresco experts and attempts to cover the lifecycle of a project from conception to deployment and operational aspects. It’s a lot of material to cover in 90 minutes. We invited listeners to tweet about their favorite best practices, practices they thought they could implement immediately and any areas we might have missed. The most active, productive tweeter in each section was awarded a much-coveted Alfresco Community Member t-shirt. We’ll be giving this talk in Atlanta, LA and at a number of the international meet ups – so bring your notepad and twitter account! For those who can’t make it to the events please watch and contribute online at: #alfrescobestpractices. All the material – including more detailed source material will be made available on line after the meet ups. We invite you to enhance and embellish the material. Also for those of you who run local community groups… this presentation is a great score. Download it and present it at your next meeting!