We just wrapped the 1st day at Alfresco DevCon in San Diego, and what a day! So if you missed, here are some of the highlights…
To give you some perspective in the overall setup of the event, I have to start saying that the conference is looking amazing… Level Up is the theme this year and it plays with the game concept, that is so appealing to the new generation without leaving the Atari generation behind. The displays, materials are colorful and engaging, inviting the crowd to a very live and upbeat conference. At registration, you were invited to “Get your flair on” with some cool buttons like “We’re hiring”, ”Hire me”, “Me+Alfresco=Inovation”, “LifeRay” ,”Cloud” and others. The topics in the buttons were great conversation starters. The venue couldn’t be more perfect… 
The Hard Rock Cafe is located in the heart of the historic district in San Diego and I’d say it was the right place and has that edgy feeling that I think the organizers were seeking.
By 7:30 am a large crowd was already gathering at the Break Room where all the partners had their tables setup, for breakfast. Conversations started early and it was great to see some familiar faces and a lot of new ones.
As promised by Jeff Potts in his last post here, the keynotes started at 8:20 sharp. The introduction in a video game style caught the audience attention right away. It was interesting that each Keynote presenter got a videogame-like introduction.
Jeff Potts, the Chief Community Officer and the organizer of the event, began the keynotes talking about what to expect for the next 2 days and highlighted some of the actions Alfresco has been taking to engage the community. He shared the mission of the Alfresco Community and called the audience to LEVEL UP their community involvement with some ideas in how they could get engaged. From simple things like, responding to a topic in the forums to write a blog post or article, from attending an event to conducting a webinar, he offered many suggestions.
John Newton, the CTO of Alfresco was next, with an Atari introduction. He started talking about his beginnings and shared pictures of the first group working at Documentum in Business suits, when was time to talk to investors and in Mexican hats when was time to do actual work. He promised to wear the hat and the same shirt tomorrow, so I will be there to take a picture if he does.
Next, he presented a brief history about Alfresco and how things evolved in the past 6 years, sharing that Alfresco has now more 3 million downloads, about 200 employees and more than 200 partners worldwide. The company has been growing steadily and according to John Newton, is the largest private, pure-play open source software company in the world.
One interesting point Jonh Newton did during his keynote was about “Open Source acting like a Luxury Brand“. According to him, Open Source is edgy, young, aspirational and responsible. Very different from the traditional, Boring (at this point, he showed a picture of a company called Boring Business System), ECM companies.
He also shared some cool insights and numbers. Like:
25% of applications are being created by citizen developers – Gartner.
92% of Fortune 1000 are testing or deploying iPads –Tim Cook, Apple 10/4
After sharing that information, he pointed to the changes that needed to be done, focusing on the consumer creating what he called “consumerization of IT“. Content is becoming more and more important, but the way we are consuming this information is changing. Social Media is taking a very important role in how people are accessing and sharing content.
John Newton briefly talked about Alfresco 4, that was recently released. Here are some of the new enhancements that are packed in this new version :
- Alfresco has become more social and connected to all the applications we love like Twitter,Facebook, Flick, YouTube. The content can be published to these channels from within Alfresco.
- A new user interface that is using HTML resources to be cross platform and make it easier to the final user.
- Cloud Scale and Performance enhancements with the introduction of Apache SOLR
- Activiti Workflow
- Alfresco Mobile with apps for iPad and iPhone
- New ways to extend share
- WCM as a Collaborative and Social platform
Some of the sessions at DevCon will detail these new functionalities and enhancements. Attendees will have an opportunity to dig into what is more important or more interesting to them.
“The future is here, is just not evenly distributed yet” Charles Gibson
To align the product strategy with the new users and the new ways to consume information, John Newton shared his vision about what Alfresco will be focusing in the next 12 months. He showed data from Gartner saying that Cloud is the CIO highest priority. He also illustrated with a cartoon the concept of “Cook, Dine and Snack” showing that users are Preparing the documents using laptops (Cook), Consume Content in a Tablet (Dine) and Snack on information on mobile devices. He finalized his presentation talking about a very important piece in this equation, a Citizen Developer Platform and simple API that will allow those developers to support the needs of the new enterprise.
Following that Keynote, Mike Farman made a live Demo of Alfresco 4. No PowerPoints. Jeff Potts got in the stage with Mike, holding an iPad to do a little video of the audience. The crowd was cheerful and the purpose was to create the video and upload to YouTube using Alfresco. He presented the new user interface and some of the new functionalities, including the geo-location, that shows the content in Google Maps. He showcased a workflow live, where Jeff Potts had to approve the content and then after including some metadata the content was published to YouTube. A note to say, that as a technical person, I was very nervous to watch him do it live.. you are all techies, you know how Murphy’s law works, but the Demo went perfect, without a single glitch. Well done guys!
The video he recorded during the demo can be watched here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq-I89yhHwg
The morning was packed with a lot of information, a wonderful start for the conference. The first break was a great opportunity to meet some of the attendees and the Alfresco partners. The challenge was to decide which session to attend. There were 21 different sessions of 50 minutes each, with flavors for everybody.
From the case studies presented by clients and partners to live demos and deep technical sessions with Alfresco engineers, the first day enabled costumers and partners to have a good understanding of Alfresco.
Ryan McVeigh and Gi Lee from Zia Consulting, presented “Alfresco iOS Mobile Application Details and Design” and showed the audience the basics behind constructing the iPhone and iPad app, that is available now for free on iTunes and also shared some of the new functionalities that will be coming in the next version.
Andrew Hind presented one of the most anticipated integrations in this new version with SOLR, that is now being offered in addition to Lucene. One of the key points Andrew tried to convey was that clients have the option to continue using Lucene and have a transition period until they are ready for SOLR and there’s also an option to switch back to Lucene if needed.
When it was time for lunch, we went “Alfresco” in the area called Woodstock. The tables were organized by topics: Cloud, Records Management, Activiti and etc.. and in each table you would have an Alfresco Engineer or expert and people that were interested in the topics. A great idea to get the conversation started. Even if in the Cloud table, people were talking about the weather.
“What to Expect from Alfresco Cloud” presented by David Gildeh was one of the most commented sessions of the day. He shared some information about why the industry is going through one of the biggest fundamental shifts in its history and the reason Cloud is such a hot topic.
In 2016, Forrester projects that 63 million US workers will be working part time remotely.
According to Juniper, 130 million enterprise workers will use the mobile cloud by 2014.
It’s not about Cloud. It’s about People.
They key message was that Alfresco is in a mission to try to help companies open their content to remote workers and mobile devices and integrate with the tools people are already using in the cloud.
Moving on, if you are in the middle of one of the sessions and hear the name of Leonard Bernstein being repeated, don’t worry, you are not in the wrong place… this is one of the Case Studies presented in the first day, about the New York Phillarmonic Digital Archives. His “Ninth Score” is stored in Alfresco and has been viewed about 25,000 times. This is only one of the million artifacts from about 5 TB of data that will be stored in Alfresco as part of their project.
There were so many interesting sessions. Jared Otley presented a cool integration with Dropbox and Jive. Peter Monks presented “Taking you Bulk Content Ingestions to the next level” and shared that one customer transfered 6.6TB of content in less than three minutes using the tool. Dimy Jeannot & Colin Stephenson presented the case study of ACHP, showing content in their website in a very creative way, using maps.
To wrap up the 1st day, that was a BPM track with sessions on migration from jBPM to Activiti and two sessions on Advanced Workflows, presented by Nick Smith and Frederik Heremans. This is a huge step in the new version, integrating with the social feeds and discussions and having a new User/social Centric Task Model. All this using BPMN 2.0!
At the end of the day, we had a Party at 207, the bar at Hard Rock Hotel. With Ataris, personalized glasses and an opportunity to network, we shared stories, information from the sessions and some drinks and good food. It was the perfect ending for a great day.
Pictures from the event to follow soon on Flickr as well as a recap of Day 2. Thanks to all who attended, all presentations to be posted soon too on SlideShare.
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