Interview with Kevin Cochrane (Interwoven’s #4; now Alfresco’s WCM team #1)
SearchOpenSource has a great interview with Kevin Cochrane, Alfresco’s VP of Engineering, WCM (and employee #4 at Interwoven and that company’s creator of TeamSite). Kevin is a great guy and a strong asset for Afresco.
Among the gems from the interview:
What challenges do you expect, or want to tackle in this space?Cochrane: I don’t think there are so many challenges today as there are opportunities. Historically, what customers have seen from the commercial vendors are products that are very difficult to use, to install, and get up and running. With Alfresco, what we will attempt to accomplish with our platform is an extremely easy to install and run application.
We aim to make it the Web content management process as easy as saving a [Microsoft] Word document to a network drive. Our challenge is so to get up and running, but we have the opportunity to get Web content management to a place that is as easy as Alfresco has made content collaboration. As an example, when a user is done with a Word document and wants to save, they should be able to have right click and save, then have that document sent out to multiple Web properties.
And another:
Was Interwoven well-versed in open source technologies? How will working at Alfresco be a different experience in this respect?Cochrane: In my opinion no commercial vendor is as well-versed in open source software as they should be. This is not unique to Interwoven, but to the entire space. Coming from Interwoven to the open source world, it was remarkable - the level of innovation and the degree of participation in the developer community….
At Interwoven I saw the need for a clean-slate approach to enterprise content management, for leveraging new standards and technologies to build a common platform to support such key business needs as collaboration, document management and Web content management. I believe Alfresco is an exact match for the needs I see in the marketplace. The large, established vendors are not meeting the demand for easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy applications that are accessible to the average developer, departmental business manager or SMB.
At commercial, proprietary platform firms there are also very lengthy development cycles, and you have to go through the sales reps and sales engineers to get engineers to communicate. There are all these filters to get the engineers to connect. At Alfresco the wonderful thing is the engineers are on the front line and are connected with those who deploy products. They are on the product roadmap together. There’s not some project manager in an ivory tower handing down commandments on what thou shall not release.