The 2010 Bossies (Best of Open Source Software) awards were announced last week, and among the winners is the open source search technology Apache Solr. This prestigious award recognizes the best open source software for businesses every year, identifying the “most promising and cost-effective products available to IT organizations”. Being recognized alongside other highly-acclaimed products like Alfresco, Drupal and WordPress only signifies Solr’s maturity as an enterprise-class platform.

As the amount of digital content continues to increase during the daily operations of an organization, it becomes evermore important to implement an effective enterprise search tool to sort through and find relevant content. Over the past few years, Apache Lucene and Solr has taken the enterprise search industry by storm as it continues to gain visibility for its highly-scalable and robust search platform. It’s now being downloaded thousands of times per day, with over 4,000 enterprise customers, which include AT&T, Macy’s, and Verizon.

“With its recognition as the best of open source for 2010, it’s no surprise to us that Solr has emerged as a disruptive catalyst to mission-critical data-driven applications across the marketplace,” said Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination. “The community’s virtuous cycle of adoption and innovation deserves tremendous credit for this achievement, and so we offer our congratulations for this well-deserved recognition. Thousands of companies are gaining competitive advantage from the use of this innovative software, and this award further confirms that diverse and widespread adoption of Solr open source enterprise search is well established.”

As a Lucid Imagination partner and a long time integrator of Lucene and Solr search technologies, Rivet Logic is excited for the Solr community for this accomplishment.

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

We recently released a new case study, Team Beachbody: A Large-Scale Social Community Platform Built on the Open Source Liferay Portal, which highlights how Rivet Logic utilized Liferay Portal to build a revenue-generating social network for Product Partners and the business benefits derived from the solution.

Product Partners, LLC, an exercise and nutrition market leader, launched the Team Beachbody program as a membership-based online support community that offers a wide array of fitness programs. In order to generate revenue growth, Product Partners decided to harness the existing community around its products and combine it with the power of social networking to turn the site into a revenue generating resource. By offering active community members a percentage of sales of Beachbody products that they refer to new members, it encourages increased community participation.

Liferay Portal was selected as the development platform for its flexibility and scalability to cater to evolving business requirements and future growth, as well as its low total cost of ownership. Rivet Logic was chosen as the system integrator to implement the solution, and in particular, the WOWY SuperGym application, a featured element of the overall Team Beachbody experience. The WOWY SuperGym application has resulted in stronger customer loyalty and recurring revenue opportunities through a set of social collaboration features that encourage use and membership retention.

Click here to download the full case study.

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.

AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management), released its “State of the ECM Industry 2010″ report yesterday. This report, underwritten by Rivet Logic, surveyed over 750 members of the AIIM community and yields some interesting facts about ECM, and in particular, open source ECM.

The study revealed that open source ECM solutions are only used by 6% of organizations, along with 3% for WCM and 2% for portals. But the good news is that an additional 9% plan to adopt open source for ECM, WCM or portals within the next 2 years. Most respondents also have an open mind on open source usage, with 64% saying that they would consider it mainly due to its cost benefits.

The report also covers other ECM-related topics including ECM business drivers, SharePoint, and Enterprise 2.0.

To download a full copy of the report, click here.

2010 is off to an exiting start for Rivet Logic so far with lots of stuff going on. Here’s what’s been keeping us busy recently….

A couple weeks ago, we officially released the JSP and Spring MVC versions of Crafter rivet, the open source Web content delivery framework we originally launched back in September of 2009. As part of our continuing commitment towards the open source community, we decided to build and expand upon the existing feature set of Crafter, to accommodate both JSP and Spring MVC based Web applications.

Last week marked our official launch of our near-shore software development facility down in Costa Rica. Although the Costa Rica center has been in operation since last year, it has only recently expanded to make near-shore services readily available to our customers.

Today, we’ll be participating as a panelist on open source CMS for a local DC WCM Meetup group meeting. The meeting is open to all, so if you’re in the area, swing by!

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.

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 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.