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):
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
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
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:
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!
Alfresco recently became the first open source product to demonstrate DoD 5015.2 compliance, which outlines mandatory baseline functional requirements for Records Management (RM).
Achieving this certification opens new doors for Alfresco in the government sector as many government organizations can only acquire products that meet this compliance. Although Alfresco has always had RM capabilities, it wasn’t until recently with its Community 3.2 release that it started working towards the DoD 5015.2 certification.
At the upcoming Alfresco Meetup in Washington D.C., John Newton - Alfresco founder - will be sharing details of Alfresco’s new RM module. And of course, Rivet Logic will be participating as a sponsor.
To register for the event, click here.
Last week was Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. We participated as a sponsor of JBoss World and also gave a few presentations during the breakout sessions. Below are some highlights from our trip:
JBoss World at the downtown Chicago Hilton:
Our booth at the partner pavilion:
Museum of Science & Industry party:
Closing ceremony:
Although we didn’t walk away with the overall JBoss Innovator of the Year Award, we still have our category award for Optimized Systems to display in our trophy case….
Until next year!!
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.
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.
