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.
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.
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.
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 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….
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.
The annual AIIM Expo & Conference is less than a week away, and this year, Rivet Logic will be an active participant. Not only will we be exhibiting on the show floor, we will also be hosting a seminar and cocktail reception.
The reception will be held on Wednesday, April 1st, at 5pm at the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott adjoining the Philadelphia Convention Center where the AIIM Expo will be held.
The topic of the seminar will be Open Source ECM in Action, an opportunity for attendees to learn from our real-world experiences implementing Alfresco across a wide range of vertical markets & application areas, including a case study from the pharmaceutical industry.
To top off the free food, drinks, and engaging topic, we will also be raffling off a Kindle!
