We just completed the first phase of a major open source content management implementation for Harvard Business Publishing. Using leading open source software that included Alfresco and JBoss, we helped launch two new sites — the online edition of Harvard Business Review at hbr.org, and Harvard Business Digital at harvardbusiness.org.

In a note to their visitors, Eric Hellweg, Editorial Managing Editor of HarvardBusiness.org, highlighted some of the new site features:

“At HarvardBusiness.org, here are some of the new elements:

A sharper focus on the topics you care most about. You’ve told us a lot in the last couple years and have helped us hone our editorial focus on the topics of most interest to you. You’ll find expanded coverage in the core areas of Leadership, Strategy, Innovation, and a new section we’re calling “You at Work,” that will help you advance your ideas, your career, and your team.

Easier navigation through our full range of product offerings. We’ve organized the site with a more intuitive layout so that you will be able to see more of what we are creating on a daily basis. The new design makes it easier to access all of our offerings at Harvard Business Publishing including books, expert voices, interactive tools, case studies, video interviews, and podcasts.

Faster and more comprehensive search. Our new search functionality should allow you to find what you want a lot faster and more intuitively than before. By placing the search field front and center with an additional drop down menu we’ve streamlined the ability to narrow your search, eliminating a couple clicks.

Richer graphics. We’ve created room for richer graphics on the site that we hope will bring out the human element found in most management ideas.

Here’s what’s new at HBR.org:

Easier, faster access to more content. The “shuffle deck” navigation and “Current Issue” index front and center on the home page should make it easier to navigate the site and discover the content that’s most useful to you. Improved search functionality and new article collections will make it easier to tap into HBR’s 2,500 + digital article archive and new interactive elements.

More up-to-date content. You’ll see more timely and frequent updates to the site that will help you apply HBR concepts to your daily business and management challenges. Regular perspectives from the HBR Editors’ Blog, podcasts, and videos will help you stay current–even when you’re short on time.

New features to help you use HBR ideas more effectively. In the redesigned article pages, you’ll find In Brief summaries that help you grasp key ideas quickly and apply them in your own company or career. Interactive tools and video interviews give additional perspective and guidance.”

In the months ahead, we plan on rolling out additional improvements to both HarvardBusiness.org and HBR.org. These will include a streamlined shopping and checkout process, a further enhanced search, community offerings, and more.

Another major victory for enterprise-grade, commercial open source software.

We just helped launch a cool new Facebook application, Connected Weddings. Check it out at apps.facebook.com/connectedweds

A few months ago we first announced the start of this project, which was partially funded by a grant to our client (New Gravity Ventures) from the Facebook Fund.

Leveraging open source software from the likes of Alfresco, JBoss, and Ingres, Connected Weddings offers engaged couples on Facebook:

- Free Personal Wedding Website
- Seating chart that uses your Facebook Friend List!
- To-do list with over 150 of predefined tasks
- Gowns, tips, articles and much more

In addition to the Facebook version, there’s also an iPhone edition as well.

Learn more from our recently published Case Study: ConnectedWeddings: A first-of-its-kind
Alfresco-based application for Facebook

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.

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.

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.