Open Source Talk

This is the first in a series of podcasts discussing the key areas of content management and will focus on document management. In this podcast Alfresco staff writer, Hayley Powell, interviews me asking the following questions:

1. Firstly I have to ask why does document management have such strange terms?
2. What are the major trends in document management today?
3. What is the cost to a business of poor document management?
4. So can you relate to me typical things that document management does that most users who use a shared drive can relate to?
5. Documents have more than just content what about things such as properties in Office documents?
6. You raised two common issues - search and when you find document versions. What about search?
7. So the obvious next question is search and versions together. What are the typical problems here?
8. Obviously some documents have to be secure and some are public. What about security?
9. Things like press releases are initially private and then public. How is that managed?
10. How do you manage a released document and prevent it from being changed?
11. So when you bring these things together what do you have?
12. Given that approach to document management how does Alfresco approach it?
13. Can you discuss rules more?
14. Can you discuss Alfresco’s approach to Search?
15. The web is not one website so how does Alfresco search over multiple sites?
16. What client software do you use to access Alfresco?
17. You mentioned the lifecycle of a document. How does Alfresco manage simple workflow?
18. What is new that will make it even simpler for Office users?

A Whitepaper on this subject is available in the Content Community where this is also a recorded webinar and demonstration on this subject. You can access this at:

http://www.alfresco.com/community/register/?source=community

The software mentioned in this podcast can be downloaded at:

http://www.alfresco.com/products/ecm/enttrial/

Good Listening

ian

 Really Simple Document Management [21:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1547)

In my blog I wrote an article titled “It’s a Consumer-Driven, Distributed, Federated, Heterogeneous World (for Content)” and about the need for OpenSearch. (Scroll down to the bottom of the blog to play the podcast)
In this I highlighted an Accenture study that found:

The web is not one website and corporate content is not one repository - It’s a Distributed Content World

• 45% said gathering information about what other parts of the company is doing is a big challenge
• 57% said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing their jobs

It’s a Federated World. To analyze a competitor you need to search across internal repositories and external repositories. These may be content management systems, blogs, wikis - It’s a Heterogeneous World

• 31% said that competitor information is hard to get

Given this scenario the only option is to use standards to search across these repositories and OpenSearch is the ideal standard being used by companies such as:

• Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Technorati, Creative Commons and many more

In this interview we discuss:

• The need for distributed, federated search
• What is OpenSearch
• Why Alfresco chose to use OpenSearch
• OpenSearch and the Alfresco repository
• OpenSearch and the Alfresco client
• Future plans around OpenSearch
• How to find out more information

Some useful links are:

David Caruana has written an excellent blog on Alfresco OpenSearch.

John Newton has also written an excellent blog on Open Search.
Alfresco 2.0 can be downloaded at

http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads/

and read about in the Wiki at

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/OpenSearch

Enjoy listening

ian

 Alfresco OpenSearch [15:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2016)