Word is that over 90 companies will be attending next week’s Alfresco Community Conference in San Jose. Along with many others, we’ll be there demonstrating a few real-world examples of Alfresco implementations.

Should be a great show.

As a sponsor of JBoss World this year, we’ve had a chance to talk with many JBoss users — both new and old. The conference is focused on a few major themes:

- Next Generation Web Applications with JBoss Seam, Richfaces, AJAX, Facelets, Portal, and more.
- Integration and SOA with JBoss’s new SOA platform that includes JBoss jBPM, ESB, and Rules
- Core technologies such as EJB3, Hibernate, and Cache
- Security and Management of large-scale, enterprise deployments

This is the largest JBoss World event yet, with almost 800 attendees. In our booth we’ve been showing off new web applications built with JBoss Seam/Facelets backed by the Alfresco content management platform and jBPM. Definitely a lot of excitement about using these technologies for next generation Enterprise 2.0 applications.

We are honored to be selected as a JBoss Innovation Award Winner for our work with Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions using a healthy combination of JBoss and Alfresco to reinvigorate kaptest.com.

Working with the outstanding team at Kaplan, we used the JBoss Application Framework (including JBoss Seam) and the Alfresco Web Content Management platform to dramatically improve web operations, increase website performance, and decrease cost.

 Read more about it here.

At today’s Alfresco conference in New York, Alfresco’s CEO John Powell mentioned that there are now over 29,000 working installations/deployments of Alfresco around the world (50 countries, 20 languages).

It took IBM/Filenet over 25 years  to get close to this number of installations, whereas Alfresco has done it in 2 years.

What an awesome testament to the power of open source.

Our latest white paper on Open Source Document Management is now available.

Register for it here.

In it, we talk about how open source ECM and portal software can help with fundamental document management requirements including:

• Rules based repository that can replace shared network drives
• Effective search and retrieval
• Standards based interfaces, including WebDAV, FTP, CIFS
• Library services
• Forums and other ways to facilitate team collaboration beyond email
• Workflow
• Scanning and document imaging support
• Records management
• Security

Starting to look at Alfresco 2.0 for Web Content Management? Interested in learning a little bit about what’s under the hood?

You may find our recent Technical Note useful: “Alfresco By Example - A Simple Introduction to Alfresco’s WCM API”

Feel free to download the package (as a zip file) from here. All source code is GNU GPL.

Here’s the intro:

We provide a few simple working examples that illustrate the use of new APIs included in the Web Content Management (WCM) module in Alfresco 2.0. Our purpose is to demonstrate a small portion of Alfresco’s underlying capability that will be useful to developers who are just starting to use (or starting to evaluate) Alfresco for dynamic web site content management and content delivery. We assume the reader has some familiarity with Alfresco 2.0 and its WCM features; for those who do not, we recommend reading Alfresco’s WCM Tutorial first.

Continue reading here.

Our latest white paper is available here

A sneak peek:

As Records Management continues to migrate onto the desktops of business users across the enterprise, and as new laws and regulations stipulate how content should be stored, classified, and destroyed, organizations have become caught in a profound business transformation.

Records Managers and IT personnel struggle to meet the day-to-day needs of rank and file employees creating and sharing content while dealing with highlevel challenges such as compliance, e-business initiatives, and knowledge sharing.

Legislation demands that enterprises manage the proper control, classification, storage, auditing, and disposition of records. General business users, however, prefer to continue their reliance on shared file systems and e-mail to productively manage and share content.

Adding to these problems is that up to now, traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems have been costly to implement and difficult to use. Enterprises of all types – from government agencies and financial institutions to insurance and healthcare companies – can benefit from a robust yet simplified approach to records management.

We get lots of questions regarding Alfresco’s move from the Mozilla Public License (plus Attribution) to the GNU GPL.

First off, what is the difference between MPL and GPL?

Well, a primary difference is in the reciprocity requirements. The GPL requires that any derivative work of the original software program be licensed under GPL, whereas the MPL requires only that modifications to one of the files containing Original Code or previous Modifications or a new file containing Original Code or previous Modifications must be released under MPL.

In other words, if GPL code resides anywhere within your end software solution/product (i.e., is compiled in), the entire software code base must be licensed under GPL. In contrast, you may combine/compile MPL code with closed-source code as long as your closed-source code does not mix with the MPL code at the file level.

The bottom line: any OEM or end-user who wants to build a solution using Alfresco Community (GPL) must also release their entire software source code base under GPL. Alfresco provides an exception to this if it involves software licensed under an OSI approved license by virtue of Alfresco’s Free/Libre Open Source Software Exception.

If you are an OEM or end-user who wants to ensure that your modifications, extensions, and customizations to Alfresco remain closed, well that’s where Alfresco’s Enterprise license comes in — it waives the reciprocity requirements of the GPL. This dual-licensing approach to open source software is very common (e.g., MySQL)

So now there are two (independent) reasons to purchase Alfresco Enterprise:

1) Support - to get responsive support and consulting help from Alfresco and their certified partners like Rivet Logic

2) GPL Waiver

Other thoughts:

• Alfresco is now truly open source as defined by OSI and free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation (”free” as in “free speech”).
• And as a result, Alfresco’s community should grow much larger. According to John Newton (Alfresco’s Chairman and CTO), this effect has been immediate.
• Look for more Alfresco integrations with other open source projects.

A great move in all respects.

Had a great time this week meeting and talking with several Alfresco users and partners and industry analysts at the Alfresco Meetup hosted by The Christian Science Monitor in Boston.

Organized by Russ Danner of The Monitor (well done Russ!), the discussion included formal presentations and q&a, informal discussions over lunch, and a roundtable of hot topics. The roundtable discussion included the pros & cons of Alfresco’s various APIs (Foundation vs. JCR vs. Web Services), architectural deployment options and the need for more specific concrete examples from real-world deployments, thoughts about example applications that could illustrate the power of Alfresco’s capabilities, and ideas for fostering more dialogue within the Alfresco community.

Sumer presented an architectural overview of Alfresco’s repository, and his presentation is attached here.

Here’s Russ Danner talking about open source community:

And here’s Sumer discussing Alfresco internals:

Following on the heals of the 2.0 Community release a few weeks ago, Alfresco released the certified edition (Enterprise) for customers and partners last week. Highlights include:

• Open search–standards-based search across multiple Alfresco content repositories and other RSS or Atom repositories including blogs and wikis;
• Web content management production release–simple and rapid import of existing Web sites with support for any content authoring or Web development tool;
• Alfresco Module Packaging (AMP)–complete content solutions to share globally across all repositories, includes code, content model, content and folder structures; and
• AMP-enabled records management–develop and consistently distribute records management policies according to corporate rules through AMP.

One other important point is that Alfresco is now licensed under GPL, which is a change from the previous Mozilla + Attribution license. More on this in another post.

We’ve been using the WCM feature set since the Preview release a few months ago, and have a few client projects underway with it that are going very well.

They’ve done a great job particularly with multi-user authoring and version control (via sandboxed development), in-context preview (for Tomcat driven sites and static sites), XML/XForms-based content modeling and web content authoring, built-in templating (XSLT, XSL-FO, Freemarker), and complex workflow.

Deployment to QA/Staging and/or Production servers requires some manual effort or customization as of now (e.g., rsync using the shared network drive interface).  And there’s a long list of features that are still in development (as always :), but overall the initial Alfresco WCM release is a powerful platform for managing both static and dynamic web sites, ranging from small static sites up to very large, enterprise wide sites (we’re working on both types).  And the latter is really where Alfresco distinguishes itself.

In contrast to most open source web CMS tools today, Alfresco is architected from the ground up to scale-out to support very large web sites and their associated production processes.