We just published a new case study on one of our projects in the public education sector. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) does great work for advancing public education goals at the US Federal and State levels, and open source portals and content management from Liferay and Alfresco help them collaborate, find, and share critical information in support of many of their projects.

Learn more from our new Case Study: CCSSO Increases Project Efficiency Through Open Source Content Management and Collaboration.

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

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.

We’ll be presenting an architectural overview of the Alfresco open source ECM platform at an Alfresco community event sponsored by one of our clients — the Christian Science Monitor.

Here’s an outline of our presentation:

Alfresco ECM: Repository Architecture Overview

Alfresco has quickly become the leading Open Source Enterprise Content Management repository, with the emphasis on “Enterprise”. Underlying Alfresco is a solid, SOA-based architecture that is central to its continued evolution and success. This talk will highlight the salient characteristics of Alfresco’s architecture and its numerous services and APIs. A quick example of a real-world, large scale enterprise deployment scenario concludes the talk.

Talk By:
Sumer Jabri
Principal Architect, Rivet Logic Corporation
Alfresco Architect, and Author and Trainer for Alfresco’s Certified Developer’s Training Course
_________________

We’ll post the presentation later in the week.  If you’re in the New England area and interested in attending, click here for more details about the event.

Such is the topic at the New New Internet Conference here in Northern Virginia this week.  (Interesting name for a conference, considering some would argue that there’s really nothing new with so called Web 2.0 technologies.)

ZDNet summarizes some of the topics under discussion, where it’s noted that: “Technologies such as AJAX-style Web development, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and blogs are being used within businesses, typically in small-scale or experimental deployments. The social aspects of wikis, tagging and Web-enabled social networking can also improve collaboration among workers..”

It remains to be seen how pervasive these technologies become within enterprises, but a few things seem certain to me:

1.  Most companies and government organizations can benefit from more interaction with their customers, and interactive web technologies (Ajax, RSS, Blogs, Wikis) provide a great vehicle for doing so.  Thus, look for most corporate web sites to be retooled over the next several years to incorporate aspects of Web 2.0

2.  Most organizations can benefit from better internal communication and collaboration, and these technologies certainly help.  Watch for most company intranets and portals to incorporate Web 2.0 elements too.

3.  Much more content will be generated from enterprise Web 2.0 deployments, and at much faster rates, so content management systems must either accommodate this trend or become irrelevant.  My bet is that new open source ECM tools will do a better job than older proprietary ECM suites will.

Unstructured information represents 80% of the content within today’s enterprises and government organizations, and the amount of it is growing rapidly. The reasons for controlling and managing this information are myriad, ranging from employee productivity to consistent branding to customer service to legal compliance.

The components of “enterprise content management” that address these areas include document management, records management, image management, web content management, digital asset management, email management, collaboration, and a few others. The broad range of these technical areas have helped put the “enterprise” into ECM. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that an entire enterprise can benefit from ECM.

Due to the high cost of traditional ECM software, its rollout across a typical enterprise has been stunted. Generally, we find that ECM technology is utilized by only 20% of an enterprise.

So we have a large gap: 100% of employees generate/update/utilize enterprise content, but ECM technologies reach only 20% of those employees. A majority of enterprise content is thus unmanaged, negatively impacting productivity, customer loyalty, compliance, etc.

Enter open source, with its fundamental cost advantages.

But can an open source approach really address the broad range of “enterprise” content management? To date, most open source content management software has focused on web content — leading examples include Joomla, eZ publish, Plone, Drupal, and Typo3 (relatedy, almost a quarter of the web is powered by an open source cms). And a few, including Alfresco and Magnolia, provide robust collaborative document management capabilities.

But until just a few days ago, it was near impossible to craft open source solutions for records management, business process management, and scanned document image management.

Enter Alfresco’s preview release of version 1.4, which includes basic support for records management:

Alfresco Launches First Open Source Records Management Solution

and for business process management, complex workflow, and scanned document management:

Alfresco Extends Leadership With Production Ready Open Source Business Process Management

Bottom line: an open source approach to full “E”CM is looking more and more feasible.

We’re putting the finishing touches on the course material for the next certified Alfresco for Developers training class at our place later this month (Sept 26-28).

The new material will cover how to use Alfresco’s new Development SDK, UI Dialog Wizard Framework, and Javascript support to:

- develop content rich applications on the Alfresco platform, and
- customize and extend Alfresco’s content repository and web client

More details can be found by clicking here and online registration is here:

Alfresco for Developer’s Course Registration Online

Alfresco today released a preview of the latest version of its open source ECM platform, which includes important new features for workflow and records management.

Here’s the scoop:

Alfresco Preview Release 1.4 – Business Process and Lifecycle Management

The focus of Alfresco has always been to deliver a broad-based Enterprise Content Management System. In our first major release we chose to focus on document management and collaboration since very little existed in the open source world in comparison to the commercial world. Alfresco 1.4 focuses on delivering the following:

• Business Process and Lifecycle Management
• Full Auditing
• Records Management
• Image Capture Integration
• Performance

Release 1.4 has increased functionality in the areas of:

• Scalability – Large repository optimization
• Administration – Personal administration dashboard
• Standards – ODF and RSS
• Customization – JavaScript custom actions, URL “REST” style architecture
• Team Collaboration – Space Notes, Team Email, Workflow Task Management Dashboard
• Integrated Workflow – jBPM integration
• User Interface – MyAlfresco dashboard, Custom Space Portal View
• Records Management
• Image Capture Integration

Scalability

• Large Repository Optimization in multi-million document/asset environments
• Load Optimization
• Folder Management for large numbers of documents
• Lucene Index Optimization, Query Optimization

Administration

• Personal Administration Dashboard – Start Screen, Update password, name and email
• Rules Management – Ordering, ignore inherited and disable

Standards Support

• Open Document Format (ODF) – ODF Virtual File System
• RSS – Drag-and-Drop RSS

Customization

Custom Actions – JavaScript support for custom actions with

• Simple menu integration
• URL Access to all Actions – “REST” style architecture
• Extended JavaScript capabilities – Including checkin/out, transformation, template rendering

Content Contribution

• CIFS and FTP Performance – Unique name optimization moved to database

Team Collaboration

• Email Space Team – Simple Team email distribution
• Space Note – Custom View Space Description

Integrated Workflow

• jBPM Integration – Complex workflow support. JavaScript action integration for lifecycle management support
• Integrated MyTasks View – Dynamic data collection
• Full Audit Control

User Interface

• MyAlfresco Personal Dashboard – Wizard support to personalize default view though selection of Dashboard components
• Dashboard Component Support – Freemarker, JSP and URL
• Custom View – Custom Space Portal view

Records Management

Alfresco has added a number of features to manage electronic records to the basic repository functionality. Our intention is to get to the DOD 5015.2 certification later 2006/early 2007. 1.4 adds some critical features:

• Extended Rule Activation – Schedule, content and metadata change based activation. Important for managing retention dates and managing document lifecycles
• Retention and Archival Policies – Soft delete and purge
• DOD 5015.2 Type Definitions
• Fileplan Support – Fileplan, file name and the management of records categories is supported through JavaScript
• Full Auditing – Audit of every service invocation to a database table with dashboard access. E.g. Execute Action, Checkout, Rename, Enable Rule, Create Authentication, Set Permission

Image Capture Integration

• Kofax Integration – Kofax release script support

Other Features

• AJAX Infrastructure and examples

Download Alfresco

• Download Alfresco 1.4 Preview Release
  

Please note that downloads may not be available on all Sourceforge mirror sites immediately. Alfresco Customers recieve immediate access to downloads via the customer portal.

Fast Facts

Operating System

• Linux
• MacOS
• Unix
• Windows

Database

• Any Database Supported by Hibernate including:
• MySQL
• Oracle
• SQL Server

Application Server

• JBoss Application Server
• Apache Tomcat
• J2SE 5.0 (JRE 5.0)

Browser

• Firefox
• Internet Explorer

Portal

• JBoss Portal
• Liferay Portal
• JSR-168

Languages

• Wide variety including:
• Chinese
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Russian
• Spanish

Technologies Used

• Java
• Spring Aspect-Oriented Framework
• ACEGI – Aspect-Oriented Security Framework
• MyFaces JSF Implementation
• Hibernate ORM Persistence
• Lucene Text Search Engine
• JLAN
• JBoss Application Server
• JBoss Portal
• JBoss jBPM
• POI File Format Conversion
• PDFBox – PDF Conversion
• OpenOffice
• MySQL

Supported Interfaces

• CIFS/SMB Microsoft File Share Protocol
• JSR-168 Portlet Specification
• JSR-127 Java Server Faces
• FTP
• WebDAV
• Web Services

We’re looking forward to the upcoming release of the Kofax integration with Alfresco. The project is led by our friends at Aarden Ringcroft, who just gave me a demo of the latest version.

More details are on the Alfresco wiki. Here are some excerpts:

“Integrating Kofax and Alfresco provides complete Content Management support including capture, management and publishing of Content. Kofax captures content from all kinds of sources usually via scanning & OCR. The captured information is then “released” to Alfresco, for it to be managed in an ad-hoc manner or via pre-defined business processes.”

and…

“The following information will be captured via a UI Dialog allowing configuration of the Release script.

1. Alfresco Server Connection Details (username, password, repository instance)
2. Destination Alfresco Folder where Kofax captured information should be placed
3. Mapping of Kofax captured information (meta-data, tiff, ocr and pdf renditions) to Alfresco Content Model
   • Kofax Document Class -> Alfresco Content Type (Content or sub-type of Content)
   • Kofax Index Value (as extracted from document by Kofax) -> Alfresco Property (of appropriate data type)
   • Kofax Tiff, OCR or PDF document -> Alfresco Property (of binary data type)”

In other words, scan your documents, forms, etc., with one of the leading scanning platforms, automatically recognize the contents (typed characters, check marks, hand writing, etc.), assign relevant meta-data, and automatically insert the image, meta-data, and converted text into a corresponding content item within the Alfresco repository.

Once in the repository, the document and its contents are available for enterprise search using Alfresco’s built-in search engine, where searches may be performed on the full-text and/or on the meta-data fields. Other benefits of managing your scanned documents within Alfresco include: secure access, records management/archiving for compliance purposes, seamless integration with other enterprise applications (e.g., via an enterprise portal), improved workflow and business process management, among others.

Stay tuned for an upcoming webcast that we will have on this topic, including a demo of the Kofax/Alfresco integration.

“At O’Reilly, we keep our ears to the ground on promising open source projects and communities, especially ones that are ‘on trend’ with some of the big issues that we see shaping the industry,” said Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. “Alfresco is one that sits high on our list.”

Read more by clicking here.