The summary from the first day can be found here: Alfresco DevCon San Diego Day 1 Summary – Level Up.
The second day of Alfresco DevCon in beautiful San Diego started with Jeff Potts making some announcements, and asking the audience to make pledges to help the community for a chance to win some of the “attitude” T-shirts. For those not familiar with the T-shirts, they have some bold messages and are the most desired wardrobe piece this season by geeks from all over the world.
These are some of the messages on the attitude T-shirts:
Attitude T-shirts
The pledges appeared quickly in the Twitter stream, with commitments to help answer questions in the forum and even find bugs in the new version and report them to Jira, what was quickly replied by the staff , challenging the attendee, saying they would have to “find it first”.
Technical Team panel discussion
Following the opening notes was the panel discussion with the Technical Leadership, moderated by Jeff Potts. Questions came from the audience and Twitter. There were inquiries from roadmap and product direction to some more technical subjects.
One person reported a difficulty to extend a specific class and asked what was the best way to report this to the technical team. There was a brief discussion about OpenOffice and the new path it is taking and how this will impact the OpenOffice shipped with Alfresco. Records Management was a hot topic with questions about the recertification of DOD 5015, and also about some functionalities that clients are wishing would be transferred to Share. One of the participants in the audience said he would like to see Alfresco extend the user administration functionality and create something like a power user. In the product direction there was a question about vertical solutions that could be built on top of Alfresco. John Newton responded that Alfresco is more focused on the horizontal market and generic solutions and wants to make it possible for partners and people from the community to create solutions for the vertical markets. He finished his response asking people or companies with solutions for verticals to consider using a type of open source license.
Jeff Potts mentioned some contributors from the community that are making their add-ons available in open source: Florian Maul, the winner of the Dashlet Challenge contest with the Gallery Plus Dashlet, which can be found at Google Code and Steve Reiner another great contributor from the community that developed some add-ons for the user interface.
The panel was a great way to show the conference attendees that Alfresco is listening. For those with more deep technical questions, the conference provided some “Office Hours” with the Alfresco Engineers. There were sign up sheets both days to request a slot to talk with a particular Engineer. I heard one case in particular, where one of the attendees said he would change almost completely the direction he was taking implementing a project after having one of those meetings. For those who came prepared and loaded with specific questions, that was a great way to take advantage of the engineers expertise.
After the panel, the attendees had to choose between three different sessions. There would be eighteen different sessions covering subjects from business to technical.
Richard McNight and Jared Ottley presented Repository Customization Best Practices where we heard again about the EVT and ZDC. EVT stands for Environment Validation Tool and ZDC stands for Zero Day Configuration. They can be found here and are invaluable to anyone that is considering installing Alfresco in a production environment. They also talked about some best practices for WebScripts, Content Model Types and gave simple tips to help the performance: instead of querying the repository every time, use JavaScript or Java to go direct to the node. Meanwhile Gab Columbro was showing some examples of CMIS in the real world. Russ Danner from RivetLogic presented Crafter Studio, a cool project started in 2009 that provides an authoring environment for WCM and is an extension of Share with capabilities including in context preview, navigation and a powerful dashboard to show the managers the flow of information.
The next set of sessions had Jeff Potts in the first room sharing some of his experience developing Share projects in the “Share Best Practices” and also showing some of the Dashlets that were part of the contest organized by Alfresco to have the community use their creativity to produce some interesting add-ons. Presenting in the second room was Ryan McVeigh, a director at Zia and also a CMIS secretary and Technical Editor. He talked about “CMIS – What’s coming Next”, where he shared some information about the developments on the CMIS front. According to his presentation every major ECM vendor implemented CMIS and there are more than 50 CMIS applications, Alfresco Mobile being one of them. For those interested in the next steps of CMIS, or where CMIS goes from here, he mentioned that the errata for the 1.0 will be out any day now, CMIS 1.1 is in the works with the technical committee and there are already ideas and issues been discussed for the version 2.0.
Aerial view from Lunch Alfresco
There was a break for lunch and we could enjoy the beautiful day in San Diego on the outdoor patio at the Hard Rock Hotel. This time, the tables were named by regions and verticals.
The idea was to have partners, attendees and engineers from the same area to exchange ideas, organize meetups and start business relationships.
After lunch, the sessions resumed and there was a lot of interest in the topic “Creating HTML5 Apps with Alfresco and SproutCore” presented by Seth Kellas and Jennifer Murdza from Rothbury. In this session we could see a different approach to bringing the content from Alfresco to mobile platforms. One of the main advantages of using SproutCore, an open source framework based on HTML5 + JavaScript , is moving the business logic to the client side, which can make the application faster and allowing developers to write the code only once for all platforms.
Mike Hatfield presented “Forms Config, Customization and Extensions” in one room, sharing some great practical tips and Jeff Potts did a demo of a Twitter and LinkedIn integrations in “What’s new in Share Extras” while demonstrating some of the social connections that can be implemented in Alfresco Share. All these add-ons can be found at Share Extras.
Do you need a break from the reading? Because we had a good one between the afternoon sessions. A large group enjoyed the “Tribloom Chill Out Zone” in the comfortable bean bags while having ice cream. Instead of choosing between the many flavors, some of us just decided to try one of each. Others just talked with Alfresco partners, exchanged business cards or took the pictures with the rock mementos in the break room. Indeed, it was a great opportunity to re-energize for the last sessions of the day.
The sessions after the break were equally interesting and it was very hard to decide which to attend. In the first room there was the energy of Gab Columbro’s session on “Performance Tuning” where he gave some tips in how to scale Alfresco. John Griffin talked about “Social Enterprise Integration” in the second room and in the third one, Mike Farman and Kevin Dorr explained the “Roadmap for Records Management”. One of the great announcements in this session was the support for physical record metadata, a long waited functionality requested by so many clients, allowing the location, size and other data to be stored in Alfresco.
The last sessions of the day had Hitesh Lad talking about “Spring Configuration for Developers” and a very interesting session with Tom Wix and Chris Turner about “Support’s Most Common Questions”. Authentication, Lucene, Java Foundation API, Upgrades, Updates and Clustering are the topics for the main questions the support team gets, and during the session, they presented the most common solutions for those problems. Another great resource that was presented many times during the conference, and again in this session, is for those looking for the latest Alfresco documents.
After two days packed with sessions, learning experiences and a lot of networking, it was time to say goodbye to the DevCon San Diego, but not before every attendee got a souvenir to remind them to “Level Up” their game.
Alfresco DevCon next stop is in London on November 9th. See you there!
{ 2 trackbacks }