Alfresco recently launched the Alfresco Community Committer Program (ACCP), which is designed to promote and encourage open source contributions to the Alfresco platform through a structured process.

Software contributions accepted into ACCP will include any and all software extensions, language packs, plug-ins, and integrations, which enhance Alfresco’s core capabilities, meet a specified set of standards and attain voting approval by the ACCP Committee.

While there has always been developer contributions to the Alfresco platform, the ACCP now presents a better way to organize the contributions that will ultimately benefit all Alfresco Community and Enterprise users.

To show our continued commitment towards open source and Alfresco, Mike Vertal and Russ Danner from Rivet Logic are both on the ACCP founding committee. We’re excited to see this new program start and how the extensions contributed by the community can further enhance the Alfresco platform and benefit the overall community.

For more information on the ACCP, please visit: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Accp

The topic of Liferay and Alfresco integration continues to be popular among portal developers and what we’ve seen is that in the last year both products have matured in important ways to enable better integration. This evolution also opens the door for more possibilities. And as we all know, with more options there is more confusion. From my readings on the Liferay and Alfresco forums I observe that there are two main issues that puzzle people when they’re thinking about integrating Liferay and Alfresco:
What are the different possible ways for me to integrate the two products?
Which approach should I use?

To help answer these questions I thought it might be useful to list what the current options for integration are as well as a brief description of the architectural implications of each.

Note that the type of integration I’m referring to here is between Liferay Portal and Alfresco’s Document Management (DM) repository, and not the Web Content Management (WCM) repository.

Option #1: Using the Web script Container
With this approach you would basically deploy Alfresco’s Web script container into Liferay as a portlet application. Your Web scripts would be deployed along with the container and will be fully executed within the Liferay Portal context. What’s new here is that authentication between the Web scripts running in the container and the Alfresco repository will be taken care of automatically. This is nice since it alleviates the need to deploy the entire Alfresco WAR file into the portal as was the case with Alfresco versions prior to 3.2.

That said you should keep in mind that (for now) to accomplish this you would need to deploy the Alfresco Share WAR file in its entirety into the Liferay portal. It should be mentioned though that according to Luis Sala’s blog post about the subject this is expected to change with the reduction of the needed WAR file’s footprint. Also, the portlet still needs some work to make it configurable from the Liferay Portal UI using portlet preferences — but I gather that this will be implemented eventually as well.

Option #2: Alfresco Web script Portlet rivet
Another option is Rivet Logic’s Alfresco Web script Portlet rivet (AWPr). This portlet is pretty much an Alfresco Web script proxy. With the help of a custom Alfresco authentication component known as STAr (Secure Token Authentication rivet), an AWPr portlet instance will use a series of Java HTTP Client calls to RESTfully and securely retrieve the rendered contents of a single Web script, proxy the contents so that all URLs are valid portal URLs (e.g. action URLs, serve resource URLs for downloads, etc.), and render the updated content in the portlet’s render phase.

AWPr has a very small footprint and thus can safely be used heavily on one Liferay portal page; meaning that a single portal page can have multiple instances of AWPr each configured to proxy a different Web script without much performance impact on the Liferay instance. Keep in mind that it is a proxy so the content is being transferred from Alfresco to Liferay and then from Liferay to the client browser, which might have some cost implications if bandwidth is not cheap and the Web script generated markup is large.

Options #3: Custom Portlet Development
For those of us who need to build their own custom portlets and need to have access to the Alfresco DM repository APIs from within their portlet code in order to perform certain ECMS functionality, there are a number of options.

CMIS
Recently, Alfresco, IBM, Microsoft, Documentum and others announced the submission of a new content management standard proposal called “CMIS” or “Content Management Interoperability Service” and on May 1st, 2010, the OASIS standards body approved CMIS v1.0 as an official OASIS Specification.

Alfresco has released a full implementation of CMIS v1.0, which includes support for both RESTful AtomPub and Web Services bindings. This basically allows Liferay portlet developers to use either one of those interfaces to communicate directly with the Alfresco repository (and any other content management system that supports the CMIS specification). More details on Alfresco’s CMIS support may be found at: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS

RAAr
Another recently available option is presented by Rivet Logic’s Remote Alfresco API rivet (also referred to as RAAr). This API is a Java API that uses REST calls to communicate with a remote Alfresco repository. The advantage of this approach is that it provides all the pros of Alfresco’s Web services API but does not carry the burden of the SOAP stack — thus making it an attractive option for Java portlet developers.

RAAr is open source and is currently maintained by Rivet Logic Corporation. It provides most (if not all) of the Alfresco Foundation Service methods and can basically be used to do anything that the Alfresco web client can do.

More information about RAAr can be found at: http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/RAAr

Custom API
Even though it doesn’t really make much sense to do this I’m including this option just to be thorough. The idea here is that if you want to develop against Alfresoc’s REST API but want to abstract it using your own API you can do so. The problem with this approach is that depending on the problem you’re trying to solve you’ll eventually end up writing a CMIS API if you want to be platform independent (mostly) or RAAr if you want to access Alfresco’s service layer APIs remotely. So unless you have a legitimate reason to go down this road it’s most probably going to be better for you in the long run to stick with CMIS or RAAr.

This pretty much covers the options available for integrating Liferay with Alfresco’s DM repository. To know which options suites you best, you should weigh the features and drawbacks of each until you find a good fit, and with enough projects, making the right choice will start to become more obvious.

Alfresco is kicking off another “Lunch and Learn” event series this summer, and Rivet Logic will be hosting the New York and Raleigh events. The Lunch and learn series will take place in 25 cities across the US, Canada and Peru starting July 13, and will be produced by Alfresco partners.

The Lunch & Learn seminar series is designed to educate and inform organizations evaluating ECM solutions and discuss how businesses are benefiting from an open source platform like Alfresco.

Topics of focus include:

• Cost saving benefits of Alfresco compared to proprietary systems like Documentum, Open Text and SharePoint
• Real-world case studies of how organizations using Alfresco are seeing results
• Alfresco product demos

This will be a terrific opportunity for attendees to talk to Alfresco experts and hear first hand about the cost-saving benefits of Alfresco.

For more information and to register, click here.

Rivet Logic recently released the newly updated Remote Alfresco API rivet (RAAr) to support the latest Alfresco releases. RAAr was first released to the Alfresco community back in October of 2008, and provides an abstraction layer for remote communication with Alfresco ECM.

RAAr provides a simple, Java-based local library that may be used by one or more content rich applications and allows these applications to interface to Alfresco (including multiple Alfresco repositories from the same application). RAAr’s lower layers handle communication to remote Alfresco instances over ReSTful calls to Alfresco that get mapped to calls to the Alfresco Foundation Services (AFS) API.

RAAr’s Java library is backed by an Alfresco Web Script-based Java services that marshal/unmarshal calls and direct them to AFS. RAAr takes care of marshaling/unmarshaling of parameters and handles connection management to multiple-Alfresco instances. Furthermore, RAAr provides more coarse-grained calls for better remoting to enhance performance.

This new version of RAAr will support the latest Alfresco 3.1.x and 3.2.x releases.

RAAr is a free and open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.0. For more information, please visit http://www.rivetlogic.com/Forge/Rivets/Remote_Alfresco_API_Rivet.

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

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!