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.
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!
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.
Alfresco recently became the first open source product to demonstrate DoD 5015.2 compliance, which outlines mandatory baseline functional requirements for Records Management (RM).
Achieving this certification opens new doors for Alfresco in the government sector as many government organizations can only acquire products that meet this compliance. Although Alfresco has always had RM capabilities, it wasn’t until recently with its Community 3.2 release that it started working towards the DoD 5015.2 certification.
At the upcoming Alfresco Meetup in Washington D.C., John Newton - Alfresco founder - will be sharing details of Alfresco’s new RM module. And of course, Rivet Logic will be participating as a sponsor.
After countless hours of development, many real-world deployments, and a few internal name changes, Rivet Logic officially launches the Crafter rivet to help with enterprise WCM implementations.
Crafter rivet is a high performance, yet flexible, content delivery framework that consumes web content that’s published from Alfresco WCM and delivers them to a variety of presentation-tier frameworks and technologies for building content-rich Web applications.
We first started development of Crafter rivet back in 2007, when we worked with Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions on their kaptest.com implementation. This successful implementation won Rivet Logic and Kaplan the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award in 2008. Since then, we’ve continued to develop Crafter rivet and to utilize it on several customer projects. Based on this success, we’ve decided to contribute back to the open source community as an open source project.
We will continue to invest in its development, and we expect to use Crafter rivet as a basis for many of our future WCM implementations. The response from some of our most recent customers has been outstanding – we have projects underway across a variety of vertical markets, and spanning several different technology stacks. For example, we are currently helping different clients implement ColdFusion, PHP, Seam, Surf, Grails and Portal front-ends for their Alfresco WCM solutions.
Last week was Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. We participated as a sponsor of JBoss World and also gave a few presentations during the breakout sessions. Below are some highlights from our trip:
JBoss World at the downtown Chicago Hilton:
Our booth at the partner pavilion:
Museum of Science & Industry party:
Closing ceremony:
Although we didn’t walk away with the overall JBoss Innovator of the Year Award, we still have our category award for Optimized Systems to display in our trophy case….
Last year, Rivet Logic won the 2008 JBoss Innovator of the Year Award with our Kaplan implementation utilizing Alfresco and JBoss. Can we do it again this year?
JBoss notified us earlier this month of the terrific news that we had been selected as the category winner for the 2009 JBoss Innovation Awards for Optimized Systems for an Alfresco/JBoss implementation we performed for Harvard Business Publishing. But can we repeat what we did last year and take the overall Innovator of the Year Award again? The judge of that will be left up to the voters, so place your vote for Rivet Logic!!
The winner for the 2009 Innovator of the Year Award will be announced at this year’s JBoss World held in Chicago from September 1 - 4. We will be participating, so if you find yourself there, drop by and say hi!!
It was announced earlier this week at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention that major groups have teamed up to form Open Source For America, a coalition of industry leaders, non-government groups and academic/research institutions organized to serve as a centralized advocate to encourage the use of open source in the federal government.
“The mission of Open Source for America is to serve as a centralized advocate and to encourage broader U.S. Federal Government support of and participation in free and open source software. Specifically, Open Source for America will: help effect change in policies and practices to allow the Federal Government to better utilize these technologies; help coordinate these communities to collaborate with the federal government on technology requirements; and raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders about the values and implications of open source software. “
The founding members include prominent open source organizations such as Red Hat, Sun, Mozilla and Alfresco, and non open source giants such as Google and Oracle.
It’s evident that the open source movement has come a long way over the past few years as it slowly crept its way into enterprises, and are now tackling the monstrous federal government.
This time open source isn’t alone. Backed by over 70 groups and powerhouses like Google, Oracle and Red Hat, open source is ready to take on the challenge. It’s no question that the federal government is traditionally known to be a slow moving mammoth in adopting new technologies, and especially resistant when it comes to open source software. What OSA will hopefully accomplish is to debunk those myths about OSS, and highlight the advantages.
Who knows, the federal government might be ready for a change after all. The 2008 Democratic National Convention already made the plunge by opting for an open source CMS, Silver Stripe. And with
all the changes the Obama administration is bringing, the federal government may be taking a step back from its set old ways and view open source with an open mind.
Today eXo Platform, a leading European open source company, announced the merger of its eXo Portal project with JBoss Portal to create an open source portal platform.
The goal of the new project is to forge a strong portal solution by bringing together the technical strengths of the two projects through the open source community.
According to eXo Platform CEO, Benjamin Mestrallet, “What has always been a challenge for any portal community or vendor is providing the right balance of robust infrastructure and engaging usability features. This collaborative project will strive to strike that balance and will work to create an enterprise-grade, open source alternative to expensive, bloated closed source portals.”
“The eXo portal has some impressive functionality in terms of ease of use, UI flexibility and straightforward management administration; JBoss.org’s current portal project has a robust engine, performance and security features, combined this collaboration project will help drive portal capabilities forward,” said Dr. Mark Little, Sr. Director of Engineering, Middleware at Red Hat.
What does this new portal product mean for other open source portal platforms like Liferay and Plone? Should they be worried? They may want to keep an eye out as eXo is contributing a new project to the JBoss community, eXo JCR, which is a “robust cluster-ready Java Content Repository that is standards based and a key component for the project”. Could this be seen a threat to other portal platforms which lacks the robust content management features that eXo JCR will bring?
It would be interesting to see how the new JBoss eXo portal platform fares with enterprises in their choice of portal and collaboration software.
