Alfresco Community News

CMIS Draft Implementation Available Now:

On September 10th, Alfresco along with EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP announced the submission of CMIS, a proposed specification for interoperability among content management vendors to the standards organization, OASIS.  Alfresco’s chief architect, Dave Caruana, has been a key contributor to the draft specification and is now a member of the technical committee.

What’s more, Alfresco, by far the newcomer in the group to the ECM market, is the first and still only vendor to offer a draft implementation that developers can download and explore today. Needless to say, we are pretty excited, learn more here.

Stats:

The community continues to grow:

Community Meetings:

We have a lot to talk about at our upcoming community meetings in DC on October 9th and in Munich on October 15th. We’ll show a demo of Labs 3 support for the Microsoft SharePoint protocol where Microsoft Office users can access documents in an Alfresco repo in the same way that they access documents in a SharePoint repo.  We’ll also show a demo of our new web development platform, Surf and our collaboration client built on Surf called Share. You’ll have a chance to meet our partners, our engineers, our CTO, John Newton and each other during our networking session at the end of the day. Hope to see you there.

Extensions:

Alfresco provides a great platform to develop extensions and add-on modules. If you’ve had a chance to visit the Developer Tools area of the Content Community lately, you may have noticed that we have a growing number of starter apps and other bits of code to extend Alfresco. We’ve also just created a new forum to get your input on what extensions you’d most like to see.

New Getting Started Videos:

We are building a video library of short videos, some of the topics include:

Building web sites w/ Alfresco Web Content Management (10 mins)

Social computing in the workplace (9 mins)

Integrating with MS Office and MS Sharepoint (3 mins)

Facebook:

Don’t forget to visit us on Facebook for news, information, event notices and photos. You can find us at http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=6063383762.

With the recent release of Labs 3, the availability of the Surf development platform, the Share collaboration application and the announcement of the proposed CMIS specification, the timing for these meetings could not be better. Join us in Washington, DC on October 9th and in Munich on October 16th for an Alfresco Community Meeting, meet the team and hear all about the latest happenings.

We’ve changed the format a bit by splitting the afternoon sessions into two tracks, one for business users and one for developers. We’ve lined up a few customers for the business track who will share details about how they use Alfresco to solve a business challenge. The technical track is targeted to developers and will provide a deep dive on Surf, Share and CMIS.

The events are complimentary but capacity is limited. You can find more details and register for DC or Munich.

Don’t miss the CMIS webinar on September, 25th.  Mike Farman, Alfresco’s CMIS Product Manager will talk about the proposed specification and how you can get started playing with the APIs. For details and registration information, click here.

John Powell, Alfresco’s CEO, talks about how Google may now be more relevant than analysts like Gartner when it comes to making informed decisions on enterprise software selection. “To get information you rely on the wisdom of crowds not the high priests of complexity.”

read more | digg story

It probably comes as no surprise that the release of Alfresco Labs 3 Beta on July 31st has been the big attention grabber lately. There has been a lot happening on other fronts too and I wanted to share some of the highlights.

Stats:

Our community is growing at an amazing rate. That’s a good thing because there is strength in numbers – more members on the forums to provide peer support, more members contributing extensions, more members reporting bugs.

Community Site Prototype:

If you installed Labs 3, you may have noticed a dashlet called Alfresco Network. Click the “Join Alfresco Network” link at the bottom to get a preview of our new community site (or just visit http://network.alfresco.com).

We’ll launch the site officially in the fall but the prototype should give you an idea of what to expect. All content and services on the site will be provided through Surf components; the homepage content is already being surfaced from a repository using Surf.  If you’d like to get a feel for developing on the Surf platform, take a look at how the prototype works. Just download the HEAD from SVN, you can find the source in the extranet.war file.

If you are an Alfresco Enterprise customer, you should have received an email with a username and password for the Enterprise Network. Loggong in from the community prototype site gives you access to premium content including a knowledgebase and a call tracking system where you can connect with our Support team. Got suggestions? Email us, we’d love to hear them.

Events:

We have two Community Meetings planned for fall. The first event is scheduled for October 9th in Washington DC, the second will take place in Munich on October 16th.

We are trying something new this time around; the first half of the day will feature keynotes and product updates. In the afternoon we’ll break into two groups, one will have a business focus and the other will have a technical focus. As in the past, seating is limited and we expect to fill up early.

The barcamps that we did over the past several months were so well received that we’ve decided to take them to the next level. Our code camps will go deep on developing applications with the Surf platform.  We are planning full day events in multiple cities that include a hands-on session where you code up some Surf components, pages and mini-sites.  We haven’t settled on dates and venues yet, check back later for more details.

Forge Projects:

Have you visited the Alfresco forge lately? We now have 155 different projects. New projects in the past several weeks include a new a simplified Chinese translation of GUI messages and DoCASU, a custom user Interface for Alfresco.

Contributor of the Month, July
J.M. Pascal’s aim is to promote and teach open source technology, particularly ECM. Even though he is new to the Alfresco Community, he has already has made a big impact. Read more about J.M. and let me know if you have nominations for a future contributor of the month.

Content Community, New Content Highlights

You may have noticed that we are building up our collection of content aimed at developers in the Content Community. Take a look in the Developer Tools space and check back often for new additions.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• Zimbra Integration - a zimlet that allows users to archive email and attachments to an Alfresco repo, attach documents from an Alfresco repo to an outgoing email as attachments and more.
• User Quota Manager  - a utility that allows Alfresco admins to limit and monitor space used
• WCM - Deployment And Delivery Overview - Short series of videos and accompanying source code covering basic WCM topics such as Web Forms, Deployment and Delivery Options
• Examples of SDK extensions - this space has several good examples of SDK extensions

By now you have most likely read several articles and blog posts on the new beta release of Alfresco Labs 3. In short, it rocks. Big time.  Okay, I’m biased — but it does. Read John Newton’s blog for details, you’ll see what I mean.

From my perspective as the community manager, what really excites me is Surf, the new web application framework.  Why? Because it allows community members to build reusable components, templates and other web site bits and share them with others.

Look for announcements soon for code camps that will be equal parts of Labs 3 technical immersion and hands-on coding where attendees will develop their own web parts using the Surf platform.  But don’t wait for the code camps, you can start building your components today.

To learn more about Surf, you can read an overview  on the wiki and get the details in the developer guide.

A limited edition Alfresco Community t-shirt is available to anyone who submits a valid Surf component. Email them to me and have fun with Alfresco Labs 3.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in the United States from recent presidential election history, it is that EVERY vote counts (think hanging chads). Don’t put it off until tomorrow, vote now! Nominate Alfresco for the 2008 Open Source CMS Award.

Summer is always a busy time and that is especially true when you have the good fortune to be part of an organization that moves at a head-spinning pace like Alfresco.  The next few months will bring some amazing new developments but for now, let’s take a brief look in the rear-view mirror.

In June we sponsored our third barcamp, this time in Munich, Germany.  Like a Chicago Cub’s game in mid-summer, it was a sell-out crowd, the fans enjoyed a beer or two and most agreed that it was a day well spent. I met some great community members, learned a lot and had a great time. Thanks to everyone who participated.

And speaking of participation, we have seen some great stats lately on the forums and wiki.  Not only is our community growing at an impressive rate but also the willingness to share knowledge and contribute back continues to result in some high-quality peer-to-peer support.

We recognized a couple high achievers this month including Adrián Efrén Jiménez Vega who not only was our Contributor of the Month for his outstanding presence on the Spanish language forum but also won the June Developer Challenge for his user quota web script. Way to go, Adrián!

The Chumby Award for Community Achievement went to Aingaran Pillai of Zaizi, a UK consulting firm specializing in the Alfresco ECM and WCM platform.  Aingaran accumulated the most points in the forums for providing helpful information.

If you haven’t visited our new Developer Toolbox space in the Content Community, please do so. If you don’t see what you need or better yet, if you have some sample code, technical tips, starter apps that you would like to contribute please email me.

Enjoy your summer.

Looking to jumpstart your learning curve on web scripts, content modeling, presentation templates and other Alfresco technical topics? Check out the new Developer Toolkit space in the Content Community. You’ll find sections for sample code, starter applications and technical tips.

If you don’t see what you are looking for, drop me an email and we will put it on our list. Better yet, if you have something that you would like to contribute, let me know and we will post it for you. (We’ll have a community upload process shortly.)

The toolbox has a large number of web scripts, both declarative and Java-backed. You’ll also see some starter applications that can be used as a learning tool or as a starting point for your own custom application. One of the starter applications is a fully functional expense reporting system that is used by our sales team to submit expense reports.

Another great opportunity to advance your Alfresco skills comes each Friday at noon EST. A group of our technical field staff host “Tech Talk Live”, attendee-driven, one-hour live sessions where you can ask questions or participate in a discussion on a relevant technical topic. Learn More …

Just a reminder, it isn’t too late to enter the Web Scripts Developer Challenge. We still have a few iPod Touch’s to give away and don’t forget that everyone who submits a valid web script gets a t-shirt.

April proved to be another busy month around the Alfresco community. One of the highlights from my vantage point was the Barcelona BarCamp on April 21st. Almost fifty community members gathered for this developer-focused event to share demos, best practices and hear talks from our engineers on a variety of topics.

There was also overflow attendance (>220) at the Community Conference, which followed on April 22nd. You can find a link to the recorded talks on our Facebook page.

The Shimano and Acquity team have been doing some great work on a digital asset management application developed with Alfresco web scripts. Tune in on May 14th, for a webinar to learn what they did and how they did it. More details here.

Alfresco’s technical field staff will answer your questions live during our new Tech Talk Live series. The first session was held on April 25th. To get the schedule and to learn how to attend a session see the wiki.

Plans are underway for the first gathering of the Alfresco New York Meetup on May 13th. If you live in the area and are interested in learning more, see the Meetup site.

The first winner in the Web Scripts Developer Challenge is already enjoying his new his Apple iPod 16GB Touch. You have four more chances to win.

We are looking for a few good people and offering a referral bonus of 1,000 British pounds (about $2,000 USD). The bonus is payable after six months and all the other usual restrictions apply. Learn more.