Archive for April, 2006
As the sun sets on my (lucky?) 13th week at Alfresco, I find myself reflecting on what has been and what will be. Things have been going phenomenally well here, and I must confess that I haven’t been this busy since the early days of my first startup, Epicentric. The best part is that I haven’t had this much fun in a very long time. I’m gratified to publicly say that I LOVE MY JOB!
The last few years I had grown very disappointed (and perhaps embittered) by my previous employers’ inability to fully integrate the different ECM products they had acquired over the years. They suffered from what I call the “too many repositories” problem; a situation where every technology they bought, although based on a seemingly common platform (Java/J2EE) had its own repository and offered a varied mix of APIs that proved a challenge to integrate. To this, we add a growing list of dissatisfied customers, some of which are being forced to upgrade to a completely new architecture of the because the version they were currently using was being retired. I honestly felt guilty having to sit in front of these customers and tell them they would most likely have to engage in very expensive professional services (conveniently provided by my former employer) to “successfully” accomplish an upgrade/migration. Considering these customers paid anything between $300,000 and $2,000,000 in licenses (not including 20% in maintenance), one would expect a little more, wouldn’t you?
Why am I sharing all this? The answer is rather simple; I feel Alfresco is different. The product benefits from a modern architecture developed by a group of brilliant people who have been through this before and understand what the customer pain points are. Also, Alfresco is designed with the intent of obviating the need for different (and incompatible) repositories.
I’ve lost count of the number of customers and prospects who have complimented our product and the way we do business. That’s really the best part! It is truly refreshing to work in such a transparent way. No secrets, no hiding the facts, it’s all out there. My job is to listen to our customers and work with them to determine if Alfresco is well suited to solve their problems.
Of course, there’s always the possibility things might change, but I highly doubt it. Although we’re here to make money, we’re also committed to the success of our customers and partners. Open source affords us a means to trim the fat off the “traditional” enterprise software model and focus on delivering a solution that works. This may sound like a bunch of marketing baloney, but I speak from the heart. I’m glad I can once again look at my customers straight in the eye comforted in the fact that I have nothing to hide.
To my friends and former colleagues in the”other” ECM companies, I have to say “You don’t know what you’re missing!”
Your thoughts and comments are always welcome.
April 19th, 2006
Sadly, I really don’t have much to report on the conference. I willingly allowed myself to be imprisioned in the Alfresco booth while the rest of the guys went off to meet and talk and well… you get the gist. 
Anyway, some things did catch my attention and they’ve made me think of a few topics to discuss. I’ll list them today and write about them in the next week or so:
- Virtualization and Appliances: The next big thing to hit the Linux world (and the rest for that matter) is CPU support for virtualization. This will make it easier for the hypervisors to manage virtual machines. This along with an apparent boom in the appliance space makes for what I consider to be a very interesting topic for discussion.
- When do you cut and run from a proprietary investment? An email crossed my desk not too long ago that made me wonder just that. If an enterprise has made a significant investment in a technology that has met with adoption issues or other resistance, should they work it out or cut their losses? It makes me think of gambling in Las Vegas… I and many people I know, have been in the situation (i.e. “trap”) where you’ve lost all you intended to play with, yet the temptation is there to go to the ATM and get more cash to try to recoup. Definitely worthy of some exploration.
- Importing into Alfresco: This would fall under the “Hints & Tips” category. I’ve had quite a few customers ask me about how to import users and content into Alfresco. I’ll write up a few tips for making the process as painless as possible.
On a separate note, I just had an amazing lobster dinner with a friend at The Barking Crab here in Boston… I highly recommend it!
Please feel free to email me or leave comments on other topics I could talk about.Now, I’ve got to get up nice-n-early to grab a flight back to SFO…
Until then, I bid you farewell…
April 6th, 2006
Day 1 of LinuxWorld is almost over and I’ve been busy at the Alfresco booth giving demos and talking myself hoarse. I’m with Ian Howells, our Chief Marketing Officer who has already given two interviews to some publications. The big adventure of the day came when the Unisys booth caught on fire. News.com has the details, but basically faulty wiring caused a small fire, the alarms went off and they turned on the ventilation fans to expell the smoky air. Not a big deal, but slightly humorous at the same time.
Sadly, I’ve been unable to take a good look around, but I hope to do a little browsing tomorrow to see what the other exhibitors are doing. In the meantime please enjoy this shot of our modest booth and the ever svelte Dr. Ian Howells.
April 4th, 2006
In his blog posting of March 29th titled “Making Enterprise Content Management Easier“, John Newton, Alfresco’s CTO and co-founder noted:
End users, especially high-paid end users, refuse to use enterprise content management. Instead they just put documents on shared file drives and send out emails to their colleagues on where they can that information. Can you blame them?
I certainly can’t… Although some may disagree, and it’s an unscientific observation, I do believe that one of the primary causes of poor adoption of ECM among end-users is due to the very same reasons they wanted to acquire an ECM solution in the first place. In my experience working with, and selling ECM, it does appear that the workflow and procedures imposed on the content contributors and other participants by the ECM (and the group that defined said procedures) make the system cumbersome to use.
This might explain the surge in popularity of wikis and blogs, especially among small teams of tech-savvy collaborators. These systems allow for more ad-hoc collaboration and workflows that enjoy some ECM benefits such as versioning, without sacrificing flexibility. This is not what I’m going to talk about today, although perhaps I’ll re-visit this subject at a later time.
John continues:
The trick to making ECM easier is to fit within the paradigms that users feel comfortable. That means working like the tools that the users already use and may have used for years. Most users do not want to know the details of ECM and would prefer that they remain out of sight and automatic.
I want to expand on the paradigms John puts forth as means for lowering the adoption barrier among users. I encourage you to read the article, but I’ll paraphrase them here and add my own color commentary for your benefit:
- Offer File Erowser/Explorer Integration: Users are quite familiar with their filesystem and shared network drives. Let them use this as an easy means of contributing content.
- Provide Google-like Search: By now, every person with Internet access has had exposure to search engines and know how to refine their queries to obtain specific knowledge or information.
- Leverage Enterprise Portal Integration: Enterprise portals allow for the aggregation of content, application, and services to create a “dashboard” that offers users an “at-a-glance” view of information that is pertinent to them.
- Use Email to Facilitate Colaboration: Like search, email is a well-known medium for communicating with others in an ad-hoc fashion. By incorporating email, the ECM plaform can take a proactive role in encouraging content contribution and communication among collaborators. Additionally the email messages themselves can become “managed content” that can be stored in the ECM along with the documents they reference.
- Adopt RSS: RSS (”Really Simple Syndication”) offers a means by which information can be delivered to a users’ desktop or mobile device almost instantaneously.
John makes very valid points and I’m glad to see that ECM vendors (including Alfresco) have implemented some or all of these paradims within their products. I’m therefore going to take a more “futurist” path and propose that we explore how we may be able to apply some of the newer “Web 2.0″ paradigms and usage metaphors that have become quite popular on the Internet and bring them “behind the firewall” into the enterprise.
- Social Tagging (Folksonomies): This is probably the most obvious one. Sites such as del.icio.us, Technorati and many others have been applying the “wisdom of crowds” to help bring order to the volumes of knowledge on the Internet. Bringing this into the enterprise will allow knowedge workers to apply their own ad-hoc tags to managed content thereby facilitating the discovery of that information by others. This can be done in conjunction with standardized enterprise taxonomies, thereby offering the best of both worlds.
- User Ratings: Allowing users to rate content offers another level on interactivity and more importantly, it offers immediate feedback as to the value of the content in question.
- Mashups: Enterprise portals are supposed to make it possible to integrated all maner of enterprise applications to offer users a dashboard view of all the information pertinent to them. Sadly, in my experience, portals have not always lived up to this promise. Many factors have contributed to this, but looking at the typical enterprise apps, one quickly uncovers a myriad of proprietary APIs, restrictive licenses, inadequate documentation, or simply a lack of desire by the vendor to integrate into a competing product. Mashups leverage open technologies, documented integration hooks, and SOA Web Services that make it possible to bring these systems together in whole new ways. Open source technologies benefit from an almost unfair advantage over proprietary vendors in this arena, but I’m gratified to see that tings are slowly improving among the proprietary solutions. This means that we can integrate an ECM such as Alfresco into A CRM such as SugarCRM to create a whole new breed of application.
- Dynamic User Interfaces: Technologies and web development techniques, such as AJAX, are heralding the end to the “request-response” era of web applications. This promises to make web applications almost as interactive and responsive as traditional “fat client” systems. A related trend I’ve observe revolves around “widgets”, these are pluggable UI components that can provide any kind of functionality but do not require a portal framework to function. This would afford users of web-based ECM solutions a richer interaction paradigm that may overcome some adoption problems.
- Filtering: A natural consequence of having information pushed to us (such as with RSS and email), is that we’ll quickly be innundated with too much information (as if it weren’t happening already). Content filtering will be a vital tool in our arsenal to help categorize and prioritize this deluge of information so we can work more efficiently.
Some of these paradigms are still in their nascent stages, so I’m not proposing we start implementing these things right now, but as producers and consumers of content (and purveyors of ECM solutions) we should keep a close eye on these paradigms and, if they have merit, implement them sooner rather than later. With any luck, we’ll make using ECM as ubiquitous as email.
Your thoughts and notes are always welcome.
April 4th, 2006
