Liferay is hosting its third annual East Coast Symposium (ECS) in the greater DC metropolitan area this year, which will take place at The National Conference Center in Leesburg, Virginia on May 10-11, 2011. Since the beginning, Rivet Logic has been actively involved when we co-hosted the first Symposium at our facilities in Reston, Virginia. Since then, ECS has grown exponentially each year, to which is now a full scale conference.

This year’s theme is The Liferay Platform, focusing on the release of Liferay Portal 6EE and its expansion, with session topics that address the expanded role of the Liferay Platform as a basis for the next generation of Web applications and services. The agenda will be filled with thought-provoking, eye-opening sessions that showcase interesting ways companies have used the Liferay Platform to meet their business needs.

Rivet Logic will be participating this year as a Diamond Sponsor and will feature a speaker presentation on how Liferay can be used to build and deploy a global intranet solution during one of sessions. In addition, we will be hosting the Education Solution Showcase, where we will demonstrate a uPortal to Liferay migration.

The Symposium is a great opportunity for anyone interested in or already using Liferay to learn, share knowledge, and network with like-minded individuals. For more information about the Symposium, please visit http://www.liferay.com/events/liferay-symposiums/east-coast-2011.

We hope to see you there!

We have officially moved and settled in to our new headquarter offices! The new offices are still located in Reston, VA, in fact right across the street from our old office, but has a much larger space to accommodate our growing organization. In addition to housing our growing team of software developers in the Mid-Atlantic region, the expanded space will also allow us to host larger training courses, seminars, and related open source community-related events.

Our new headquarters address is:

11410 Issac Newton Square North
Suite 2010
Reston, VA 20190

Alfresco kicked off their fiscal year with a meeting the last week of March, where Alfresco employees and partners attended two days of Alfresco-led talks on business and technical topics. The meeting centered around the message of Social Content Management, how Alfresco has progressed over the years and what the future roadmap brings.

During this conference, Rivet Logic was awarded the Alfresco 2010 North America Solution of the Year Award for our Crafter rivet open source project that has been used to successfully implement numerous, prominent, next-generation enterprise websites using Alfresco WCM.

Crafter rivet is an open source framework for building content-rich applications and provides the foundation for quickly building high-performance, flexible Web content delivery systems – delivering content that is managed by Web content management systems like Alfresco WCM.

Crafter Studio is a new extension of Crafter rivet that provides a robust content authoring environment for managing Web sites and other content-oriented Web applications. It offers in-context editing of all Web content with live preview, allowing rapid content editing, review and publishing cycles. In addition, it includes full support of Alfresco’s underlying workflow engine for content review and approval prior to publishing to production.

We are honored to be recognized for our contributions to the Alfresco community. As a long time Alfresco partner and open source advocate, we’re continuously investing our internal resources to contribute to the Alfresco and larger open source community with our forge projects.

For more information, please visit http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/Crafter/ About+Crafter+rivet and
http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/Crafter/ Crafter+Studio

Last year, a survey conducted by Accenture revealed that a majority of organizations anticipated increased investment in open source software this year. To further reinforce this notion of increasing open source software (OSS) usage, a recent survey by Gartner found that more than half of the organizations surveyed have adopted OSS solutions as part of their IT strategy. Over the past five years, each of Gartner’s OSS surveys taken have reflected an increase in the amount of OSS that makes up responding organizations’ portfolio, from less than 10% five years ago to more than an expected 30% within the next 18 months. Not surprisingly, the rate of proprietary software has decreased at about the same rate as OSS usage has increased.

Similar to the Accenture survey, which stated reasons beyond cost savings benefits that make OSS seem attractive, the Gartner survey yielded analogous responses in which respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions.

“Gaining a competitive advantage has emerged as a significant reason for adopting an OSS solution, suggesting that users are beginning to look at OSS differently — if they can customize the code to make it unique to their company, they have created a competitive advantage,” said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.

The survey also sheds light on some other aspects of how OSS is being used, including key initiatives supported by the use of OSS and how OSS components are used in conjunction with internally developed software to enhance existing systems.

The full report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=clientFriendlyUrl&id=1528219.

CMSWire’s topic of focus for this month is enterprise collaboration. It touches on a variety of important topics that organizations should consider before implementing an enterprise collaboration tool.

One point that struck me as particularly interesting is that collaboration starts offline with the people and not with the technology platform. It seems like this is an important factor that can easily be overlooked by many organizations during the process of determining a collaboration solution. As the article indicates, it’s important for an organization to realize its own work place culture and select tools that build on what they already do. For example, a wiki solution may be a better fit for a small team of collaborators than a full enterprise collaboration platform, which may be overkill. In essence, “this existing culture should be thought of as a blueprint for a collaboration system”.

Along similar lines, it’s also important for an organization to determine what they want to achieve with enterprise collaboration before implementing a solution. Collaboration requirements for a departmental team may be different than enterprise-wide collaboration goals. The technology will always be readily available, but without the proper analysis, a solution may not be implemented in the most optimal way to achieve the desired results.

With that being said, there are a multitude of collaboration solutions available. CMSWire names a few major players in the open source enterprise collaboration space that are worth considering. Not surprisingly, Alfresco Share and Liferay Social Office were both on that list. While Alfresco Share is highlighted as a SharePoint agitator that appeals to both users and IT administrators, Liferay Social Office is commended for its product maturity and robust collaboration features.

Every year, KMWorld comes out with its “Top 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” list, and for the third consecutive year, Rivet Logic has earned a spot on this prestigious list.

“As is the case with each of the companies, inclusion is based on the breath and impact of their innovations and on the value they provide to the entire constituency chain. Any list such as this is a work in progress, and so it is with this one. We’re always on the lookout for groundbreaking new solutions or elegant modifications to existing ones.”

The knowledge management industry is constantly evolving and we are honored to be recognized again for our innovative solutions that help drive successful open source adoption. Other companies on this list include Alfresco and Lucid Imagination, among others.

The complete list is available here.

The HTML5 standard brings endless possibilities to the future of Web applications. By enabling desktop-like features, the Web can finally achieve a new level of rich user experiences. SproutCore is an open-source HTML5 application framework for building responsive, desktop-caliber apps in any modern Web browser without plugins.

What’s the motivation behind the SproutCore project? This new digital age goes beyond PCs and into mobile devices, iPads, and tablet computers. So what’s the best way to make data commonly accessible from these devices? By developing Web applications that can be accessed from anywhere, on any device. This is where SproutCore comes in, to enable development of rich cloud applications with dynamic UIs.

In fact, Apple’s MobileMe, amongst other apps, are currently using the SproutCore framework. Charles Jolley, creator of SproutCore, helped lead that effort at Apple before leaving last year to start his own company. His new startup, Strobe Inc., will focus on “helping companies bring great native-style app experiences to mobile device,” with the center of the company being SproutCore.

What does this new company mean for SproutCore? In Charles’ own words:

“First, SproutCore is now and will always be totally free and open source. I think this business of charging for a commercial license is not an effective way to grow a project. Sure you make a little cash, but at what expense to the community? My goal is to make SproutCore and all of the developer tools that surround it totally free to everyone. All I ask is that you participate in the community somehow to make things a little better for those who come after you.

Second, now that I am no longer held back by big-company legal restrictions, I am going to be much more involved with the platform.

My goal is that by the end of the year, any average developer can pick up SproutCore, build, and deploy a basic app without feeling lost. This is open source and I can’t usually guarantee timelines but at least now we can do what we need to make it happen.

Finally, I started working in SproutCore almost 5 years ago because I believe the future of software development lies in native-style apps in the web browser. It is the platform of the future and when that shift change happens, I want to be there with the technology. Now, I believe that time is almost finally upon us.”

For a sneak peek of what might be in store for the future of Web apps, take a look at the NPR demo built with SproutCore Touch, the first edition of SproutCore that includes complete touch support for touch events and hardware acceleration on the iPad and iPhone. But the beauty of it lies in that apps built with SproutCore Touch can run on both touch devices and desktop computers.

Currently, Strobe Inc. is focused on the digital publishing vertical, however, the possibilities are endless.

Yesterday we had our joint webinar with Alfresco showcasing our Confluence Alfresco Integration rivet (CAIr) and how it can be used as part of an organization’s content management strategy.

The webinar discusses current industry trends such as the rise in social software as enterprises are realizing the value they bring, the shift in ECM from Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement, and why a marriage of both systems is necessary to deliver effective content management and collaboration.

The webinar then covers an overview of Alfresco and Confluence as individual platforms, and how through seamless integration with CAIr, Alfresco can be used as the back-end repository for a front-end Confluence . Key features of CAIr include scalability, flexible security models, and the customizability of exposing Alfresco features through Confluence. Lastly, a live demo will follow a review of the architecture.

To view the full recorded version of the webinar, click here.

HTML5 has been generating a lot of hype lately. So what is all this hype about, and how is HTML5 different from HTML4? HTML5 introduces new elements but also drops some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01. Having been in development for the past few years, HTML5 is the cornerstone of the W3C’s open Web platform – a framework designed to support innovation and foster the full potential the Web has to offer.

HTML4, the last major iteration of the language, has been around for over a decade, and we can all agree that the Web has undergone tremendous changes during that time. What was originally used mostly for displaying static information, the Web has evolved into a dynamic environment where users are constantly exchanging information, communicating and collaborating in real-time. When multimedia was introduced to the Web, plugins had to be created to ensure proper functionality. HTML4 became a patchwork of augmentations to accommodate features of the modern Web. With the advent of social media, video chat and other interactive systems, the average daily Web usage continues to increase as more people are using the Web as a means to communicate with each other. Creating engaging, rich user experiences have become more important than ever before.

Enter HTML5. HTML5 introduces a number of new features that reflect typical usage on the modern Web. Notable features include:

• Multimedia – tags that allow multimedia to be directly embedded without any plugins
• Offline & storage – ability to store offline data for Web apps
• Semantics – a richer set of tags, along with RDFa, microdata, and microformats
• Device access – geolocation API allows Web apps to present rich, device-aware features and experiences
• 3D, graphics & effects – natively rendered visuals in the browser
• Interactivity – drag & drop and other desktop-like features

Does this mean HTML5 will kill Flash, Silverlight and the like? Probably not. But it will definitely play a helping hand when it comes to developing Web apps when mobile compatibility is a concern, now that certain plugins that aren’t supported by many smart phones are no longer needed.

In many ways, HTML5 marks the future of the internet. How will this impact content management? In this digital age, time is of the essence. Consumers want access to fresh, updated content when they need it, where they want it, whether it’s at home through a desktop or on-the-go through a mobile device. Multi-channel publishing is quickly becoming an important part of an organization’s content management objectives. HTML5 facilitates this by making it easier to display Web content in various formats. While HTML5 won’t fully mature for quiet some time, it’s exciting to see what it brings to the table and the potential to influence the future of the internet.

Last week, Alfresco announced the availability of its Enterprise 3.4 release. This significant new release delivers on Alfresco’s vision of providing the open platform for social content management by delivering both a more robust content platform for building any kind of content-rich application, along with a more social user-interface for collaboration and document management. This platform will be used by developers and companies to build applications where enterprise content is “social-ready” — or shared, collaborated on and syndicated across the web – and captured for compliance, retention and control.

To accommodate the shift from Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement, Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is built to manage content in a social world and co-exist with social business systems to help manage and retain the content created by them.

Some of the new product capabilities of the Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 release include:

• User-interface enhancements to make document management more social – Alfresco’s refreshed Share interface for collaboration and document management now includes status updates (similar to Facebook and Twitter), content activity streams and enhanced search capabilities to make content easier to find.
• Folder-based actions for simple workflow, along with advanced workflow (using jBPM) – Business users can now set-up simple document workflow, such as approvals or content transformations, inside the Share interface. For robust workflow, Alfresco Share now exposes workflows created with standards-based enterprise business process management tools.
• Distributed Content Replication – Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to support large geographically dispersed companies, reducing access time, removing single points of failure, and removing the dependency on a single system.
• Collaborative Web Authoring – Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of best practice templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines the power of Alfresco Share for web team collaboration, with powerful content process control and publishing services like office-to-web publishing.
• Integration with Enterprise Portals and Social Software – Alfresco now includes a DocLib portlet to enhance its JSR-168 support, which exposes a document library in standards-based portals like Liferay or Red Hat’s JBoss Portal. And using CMIS, Alfresco continues to integrate with Drupal, Lotus Quickr and an expanding set of social business systems.

To learn more about the Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 release, its new product features, or to download a trial, click here.