We’ve been hard at work with Crafter Studio, an extension to our open source Crafter rivet framework, that offers a complete authoring and publishing environment for managing various types of Web and enterprise content.

Today marks the release of Crafter Studio 1.7.0, which contains a number of updates, including an Alfresco upgrade for 3.4.5E support, Preview Tools enhancements, along with a number of bug fixes.

To learn more about this release of Crafter Studio, visit our wiki at http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/Crafter/CStudio+1.7.0.

It’s that time of year again, when Alfresco enthusiasts get together to learn what’s new and network with other community members at the annual Alfresco developer conference.

This year, Alfresco DevCon Americas will be held in San Diego, CA on Oct. 26-27th, and will feature two packed days of Alfresco technical sessions delivered by some key engineers and visionaries behind the technology. The agenda includes tracks on Alfresco as a Platform, Best Practices, Customizing Alfresco, Case Studies, BPM, and Building WCM Solutions with Alfresco. The conference will also discuss all of the new features in Alfresco 4.0 - Share extensibility, Activiti, and Solr.

And of course Rivet Logic will be participating as a sponsor. We will also be presenting under the “Building WCM Solutions with Alfresco” track, on the topic of extending Alfresco for next generation WCM with our Crafter Studio extension.

For more information and to register, please visit, http://www.amiando.com/alfresco-devcon-san-diego-2011.html.

A recent CMSWire article noted that content management and social business are two very different technologies, and while vendors try to incorporate social business functionality into traditional ECM solutions, that there is no real effective way for a system to fill both shoes.

While traditional ECM systems are considered “systems of record”, social business tools are in a newer category of “systems of engagement“, and the differences between the two seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum.

“These aren’t just differences of philosophy or look and feel. They extend to the software architecture itself. CMS has its roots in transactional, database-driven systems. There are no provisions for essential social constructs such as activity streams, user profiles, social feedback and reputation mechanisms, a centralized view of community activity and collaborative messaging. These capabilities come from a bottom-up design, not just slotting in some new modules or slapping a new UI on top of an existing CMS foundation. Actually, adding social features after the fact can make matters worse, creating more walled-off information that is hard to manage and search.”

To support the argument, SharePoint was used as an example, where a user survey concluded that enhancing SharePoint for Social Business could cost between $500,000 to over $1 million, with more for ongoing maintenance, and that organizations serious about social business should consider a purpose-built tool, rather than a customized SharePoint solution.

While a lot of what this article states is true, I don’t necessarily agree with the argument that the same application can’t have both traditional ECM and social business functionality, and be able to do it well. A good example is Alfresco, which has a robust content platform for building a variety of content-rich applications, along with a social user-interface for collaboration and document management. Alfresco’s focus is on a new vision of Social Content Management, which sits at the intersection of traditional ECM and Social Software, with its own social applications to the left, and a strong content repository on the right.

And by focusing on this intersection of Social Content Management, users have the ability to discuss content, and then capture the results of that discussion inside an ECM solution in order to retain it and derive value from it.

So while ECM systems and Social Business solutions do serve very different purposes, it doesn’t mean the same technology platform can’t be used to satisfy both sides and be able to do it in a cohesive manner.

Alfresco has formed a technology partnership with Ephesoft to bring together open source document capture, enterprise content management and CMIS for intelligent PDF capture and search and workflow management.

Ephesoft’s open source cloud document capture platform enables intelligent document capture for mailroom automation solutions.

Through this partnership, enterprises can archive document metadata or kickstart document-driven business processes in their enterprise ECM through Ephesoft’s intelligence capture. Document capture will be managed through scanners, email and fax to create searchable PDFs with metadata tags. The cool part is, documents are more than just captured, but also learned, meaning Ephesoft can classify the documents and separate them from other documents while saving key data elements that enable users to send it into other business processes when needed. Beyond document capture, Ephesoft also offers scanning, classification, data extraction and document delivery.

Rivet Logic has also recently partnered with Ephesoft to provide our customers system integration services for Ephesoft.

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

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.

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.

Alfresco is kicking off 2011 strong with Content.gov, a free, special one day event in downtown Washington DC focusing on open source content management in the government and public sector agencies. The event will be held on January 20th, 2011 at the Washington Marriott at Metro Center.

There’s been a long-time conception that government agencies are slow to adopt emerging technologies including open source products. However, in recent years, open source adoption has rapidly increased in the commercial sector due to a combination of factors, from the down economy and enterprises seeking cost saving alternatives, to the maturity of open source products finally proving themselves in areas of quality, security, and flexibility. The government, while slow to follow, are now beginning to realize the true benefits of open source software.

Content.gov 2011 will feature John Newton, Alfresco CTO & Founder, as the keynote speaker, followed by customer case studies delivered by actual customers and Alfresco implementation partners.

Rivet Logic will present a customer case study featuring a guest speaker from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The presentation will cover how Rivet Logic helped NAS implement an open source Alfresco WCM solution that helped streamline operations, resulting in faster publishing cycles, increased productivity, richer site experience, and better accountability.

For more information and to register, click here.

The holidays are upon us, but that’s not slowing Alfresco, or Rivet Logic, down. Alfresco has already scheduled its first Lunch and Learn series for 2011, taking place in January and February across major cities nationwide, and Rivet Logic is participating in three of them. The topic of this Lunch and Learn? Social Content Management.

The enterprise content management (ECM) market has undeniably evolved over the years. ECM products started incorporating collaboration features (i.e. blogs, wikis, forums, shared work spaces) when Web 2.0 technologies drove organizations to adopt Enterprise 2.0 to enhance collaboration in the work place. Now, with the boom of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, enterprise content is becoming more social in nature. With millions of pieces of content being generated and circulated every day, ECM can’t stay the same.

So what does this new category of Social Content Management really mean, and how can Alfresco and Rivet Logic help? How can organizations take advantage of social business software, while still maintaining control of its content? Join us at one of the upcoming Lunch and Learn events to learn about these topics and find out why Gartner has identified Alfresco as a key player in this new space.

Rivet Logic will be hosting the following Lunch and Learn events:

Wed, Jan 19 - Los Angeles, CA
Thu, Jan 20 - Irvine, CA
Tue, Jan 25 - Raleigh, NC

To find out more and for a complete list of cities, click here.

To keep the momentum going after Lucene Revolution and to kick start our joint partner marketing efforts with Lucid Imagination, we decided to co-sponsor a webcast on leveraging search with Alfresco. The webcast was held yesterday and provided an overview of the technical approach used for Solr/Alfresco integration, including:

• How to provide accurate, targeted, real-time indexing for each page
• Full editorial control through componentized pages, for fine-grained control over different areas
• Faster, easier search customization through LucidWorks Enterprise
• Dynamic generation of website visitor experiences as seen in several public sites

The webcast also discussed the quality and scalability of Lucene/Solr and how it’s being leveraged in large-scale sites including Twitter, LinkedIn and Zappos.com. Lastly, a sneak peak of the new LucidWorks Enterprise development platform showcased some of the built-in features that makes developing search applications easier and more accessible.

The slides from the presentation are available for download here, http://bit.ly/searchalfresco.