Alfresco Developer Conference

Okay, potential DevCon 2012 speakers, it is time to submit your proposal. You have until May 19 to do it and that will be here before you know it, so don’t procrastinate.

Before you submit your proposal, keep a few things in mind…

DevCon 2012 will feature more types of sessions than ever before

In addition to traditional conference sessions and panel discussions, we will be adding Birds-of-a-Feather sessions and Lightning Talks. A Birds-of-a-Feather session is not a traditional talk, but rather a topic. Put two people together interested in the same topic and you’ve got birds-of-a-feather. If enough people are interested, we might do lunch tables divided by BoF topic.

Got something you want to tell the rest of us about, but that doesn’t warrant a full-blown presentation? A lightning talk is for you. We’ll make a decision on the time limit later, but it is likely going to be in the neighborhood of 5 to 10 minutes per presenter, strictly enforced. We may also decide to ban slides and demos.

Please do NOT submit a session proposal for Birds-of-a-Feather topics or for Lightning Talks. We will organize these much closer to (and even at) the event.

Give the Crowd What they Want

If you need some inspiration, I’ve created a forum topic where community members will hopefully suggest sessions they would like to see. If you can’t or don’t want to present, but you have an idea for a session, post a reply to that thread. And if you see a hot session idea that you know something about, jump on it!

Find a Niche

To give you an idea of the types of sessions we’re looking for, all sessions should be able to fit into one of several categories, which I’ll describe below. I don’t want to call these “tracks” just yet–they are more like “buckets” at this point. I want to make sure we have good coverage of all of these areas.

Mobile. Alfresco, to go. These sessions are about developing mobile applications on top of the Alfresco platform including the Alfresco iOS app, the Alfresco Android app, or custom mobile applications. Sessions in this category shouldn’t limit themselves to SDK-level discussions–they could also include examples of how mobile rollouts were improved by leveraging Alfresco technology.

Cloud. Got your head in the clouds? Share your experience running Alfresco on both private and public cloud infrastructure. How does infrastructure like Amazon EC2, S3, and VMWare affect your implementation? Alfresco will provide an in-depth look at Hybrid Cloud Synchronization. And we will unveil the latest news and share lessons learned around our own cloud-based platform.

Web Content Services. This category is for discussing Web Content Management solutions built on top of the Alfresco repository. Built a system that leverages Drupal, Crafter, Liferay, or Alfresco Web Quick Start? Give us the details. Have you taken advantage of Alfresco’s social publishing framework? What did you build? Why did you pick the front-end that you did? What would you do differently? Did you move off of an AVM-based solution? How did that go?

Getting Started with Alfresco. We’ve got a broad and sometimes complex platform. Sessions in this category flatten the learning curve for newcomers who want to learn how to set up an Alfresco development environment, what the Alfresco extension points are, which API to use, how to write web scripts, content modeling basics, and how to do basic configuration of the user interface. Attendees come to this talk to find out what their next steps should be. Experienced speakers share what they wish they would have known when they were starting out.

Core Repository. Front-end? Who cares. No one in this category, where it is all about the core repo. Whether it is understanding the details behind Alfresco’s core services, like actions, behaviors, transformers, metadata extractors, file protocols, and security, learning how to scale out the search engine using Solr, or evaluating strategies and tools for bulk content migration, talks in this category dive into what makes Alfresco, Alfresco.

Share Customization. Talks in this group help attendees understand how to trick out their Share installation with custom code. This is all about tips-and-tricks for learning how to take Share to the next level by leveraging Surf, YUI, and your creativity. Attendees will take away development approaches, debugging tools, and pointers to great examples.

Installation, Administration, & Tuning. Learn how to install Alfresco the Right Way. And once it is installed, understand tools, tips, and techniques that can keep the platform healthy and performing at its peak. Alfresco will share results from recent benchmarking exercises. And let’s not forget about upgrades.

Troubleshooting. What do you do when something inevitably goes wrong? Talks in this category provide attendees with useful advice for finding the source of their problems, answers to common problems, or tips on how to make it easier for others (like Alfresco Support) to lend a hand.

Case Studies. These talks are about lessons learned during Alfresco projects. They are typically non-technical, focusing instead on the business problem and how the project was executed to solve that business problem. Obviously, there may be some light technical discussion pertaining to technology trade-offs, selections, or high-level architecture. These talks might help those evaluating Alfresco or people looking to broaden the use of Alfresco in their organization.

Records Management, Imaging, & Archiving. Learn about the new features and functionality found in Alfresco Records Management 2.0. Discuss related technologies such as XAM and content storage policies. As Alfresco repositories get larger, what are valid approaches to things like archival?

Workflow, Process, & Productivity. Content and the people who create it don’t sit still. Alfresco’s embedded workflow engines facilitate business processes around content with the goal of improving productivity. This category features sessions on Activiti, rules engine integration, and how people can achieve greater productivity by leveraging Alfresco technology.

The Alfresco Community. We’ve got a global community that spans every industry, skill-level, and interest area. This category is for talks about our community. Typically a roundtable discussion format, attendees should come to these sessions prepared to share ideas on how to keep our community growing and moving in the right direction.

Consider DevCon’s diverse audience

In addition to the content of your talk, you should also consider who you are speaking to. DevCon is attended by a diverse group of individuals who play a variety of roles on Alfresco-related projects. As you put together your abstract, and later, your session content, it will help if you focus on your target audience. Are you talking to project managers? Technical Architects? Developers? What kind of developer? Knowing this will help you write better content and it will help attendees figure out if your session is a good match for what they are looking for.

Now Get To It

There is some fine print on the proposal form about how not everyone who proposes will get selected and some other stuff, but I think you get the picture. I’m looking forward to the very hard task of sorting through your ideas and programming another awesome conference for you.

Okay, I goofed. The original date for DevCon 2012 in Berlin conflicted with DMS Expo, a large and popular Enterprise Content Management and Document Management conference in Stuttgart. Obviously, having both conferences at the same time would be challenging for some of our attendees, partners, and potential DevCon sponsors, so we are moving the Berlin date to November 5, 6, & 7.

UPDATE: Changed Berlin date to November 5-7.

I’m pleased to announce that Alfresco DevCon, our annual conference for all things Alfresco, will be taking place this Fall in Berlin and San Jose!

This year, EMEA is up first. From November 5-7 we’ll be at the beautiful Berlin Hilton in the historic Gendarmenmarkt, at the very heart of the city.

The following week, the Americas get their chance. DevCon will be at the San Jose Marriott and Convention Center from November 13-15 in downtown San Jose, the hub of Silicon Valley.

Regardless of the city you choose to attend, you can look forward to:

• Compressed training courses delivered by certified trainers;
• Technical sessions from engineers and community members on a variety of topics, from Mobile to Cloud and everything in-between;
• Case studies and lessons learned from real customers and practitioners;
• 1-on-1s with Alfresco engineers;
• Stimulating conversation in the Exhibition Hall;
• Plenty of opportunities to network and socialize.

Just like last year, the first day will be an optional Training Day followed by two days for the main conference.

Are you thinking about presenting? That’s great! I expect to open the call for papers within the next two weeks, so start getting your ideas together. The competition will be fierce again this year, so be sure to bring your A-game!

100% of last year’s attendees in both cities found the event useful–you will too. Registration should go live some time next month, so stay tuned.

We had a wonderful event in London. Everyone that attended both agrees: The two cities and venues were very different, but the Alfresco vibe of openness, collaboration, and innovation was going strong at both DevCon events.

If you missed a session in either location, we now have the DevCon presentations uploaded to SlideShare, so check them out.

If you are looking for London wrap-up posts, Day 1 and Day 2 are both covered on socialcontent.com.

And, if you want to check out some pics from both events, take a look at the San Diego set and London sets (Day 1, Reception, and Day 2) on our Flickr account.

Just a quick reminder to everyone joining us in London tomorrow for DevCon: The keynote will begin tomorrow morning at 8:30, sharp. Feel free to arrive early, pick up your badge, have some breakfast, and begin planning your day. At 8:30 I’ll kick off the keynote with a few brief comments and then we’ll move right in to the good stuff: talks from John Powell, John Newton, and Mike Farman.

The conference is at Prospero House, which is at 241 Borough High Street, which is just across the street from the Borough tube station, right next to Starbuck’s.

What a week we had in San Diego last week! I was so happy with how DevCon Americas went. Everyone I’ve talked to got a lot out of the conference, so thanks to everyone who attended, spoke, or helped organize and run the event.

The Hard Rock Hotel was a perfect venue in terms of location, size, and vibe. We did have some issues with wifi and A/V but other than that it was great. San Diego is a beautiful city. I was worried about the weather early in the week, but, as if on cue, the sun came out on Wednesday and it was just gorgeous outside. We ate lunch al fresco both days, which seemed appropriate.

We had a wonderful turnout from people all over the Americas and even some from Europe. I saw many people from the Alfresco community I’ve known for years and met lots of new faces. Our “purposeful lunches”, which assigned a topic to every lunch table, worked well–I saw lots of lively discussions happening over lunch and I know of several groups who are planning to meet again on their own as part of a local meetup.

The sessions offered something for everyone with some really cool case studies, some down-and-dirty technical sessions, and lots of useful lessons learned/best practices talks. I didn’t get to attend as many as I would have liked, but my favorites were:

• New York Philharmonic case study. In a nutshell: PHP front-end hitting SOLR fed by Alfresco. Alfresco houses scanned images of thousands of scores going way back in NY Philharmonic’s history. Have a look at the app here.
• New Client Config & Extension Points in Share. Remember when you had to perform major surgery on Share to hide parts of the UI or to add your own customizations? Some new constructs make that much easier. I almost started refactoring some of my code before the session was over.
• Share Document Library Extension Points. Document Library customizations were even more of a headache. Now simple things, like adding new properties to the document library list view, are handled through config. And if you want to do something more elaborate, like show more complex markup for a given property it is much easier to inject that without duplicating hundreds of lines of client-side JavaScript.
• Creating HTML5 Apps with Alfresco & SproutCore. I’ve only played with SproutCore on my own, hooking it up to Alfresco just to see if I could. So it was cool to see what Rothbury has done for a real project.
• Understanding the Solr Integration. I think I need to review Andy’s slides to digest this content fully, but I definitely have a much better understanding of how Solr fits in to the platform in Alfresco 4 and how customers will be able to migrate to it as it makes sense.
• Alfresco iOS Mobile Application Details and Design. It was good to see this app discussed from a technical perspective as well as understand what’s involved for people who want to contribute to the source code.

Claudia Saleh wrote more comprehensive wrap-ups on the SocialContent.com blog for Day 1 and Day 2 so check those out.

I almost forgot to mention there are a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr.

On to London!

Now that DevCon Americas is behind us it is full steam ahead for DevCon EMEA next week in London. Many of the sessions I listed above will be repeated in London. I’ve got to try to get to David’s Cloud session, the talks on Drupal, Clojure, and Grails, and a couple of the Activiti sessions at the very least, so it’s going to be another busy week as I try to fit it all in.

If you are joining us at Prospero House next week, here are some things you might want to know ahead of time:

• If you are attending the optional training day, make sure you’ve registered and paid (the optional training day is an additional cost, separate from the main conference) and that you have installed all pre-requisite software on your machines, including downloading some rather large files. You should have received an email with these details.
• The main conference starts on Wednesday, November 9. You can pick up your badge as early as 7:00 and then enjoy some breakfast. The keynote starts promptly at 8:30.
• Our first night party is Wednesday night at Vinopolis, a short walk from Prospero House. There should be plenty of food so I would plan on spending your entire evening with us–there is no need to have dinner elsewhere.
• Similar to last year, the Alfresco Engineering Team will be offering “Office Hours”. This is a chance for you to get some one-on-one time with an Alfresco Engineer. Sign up for a time slot on-site using the bulletin board in Illuminate (where the sponsors are).
• We are offering on-site certification testing for a separate fee. You can sign up for an on-site certification test here. I’ve heard that if you previously passed the Recognized Developer test, you should be fine, but if this is your first Alfresco cert of any kind, you might want to start studying!
• We are making a slight change in the overall schedule based on feedback from San Diego. John Newton will be giving an additional keynote on Product Roadmap the morning of the first day. We will still have a Panel Discussion on the second day, but it is moving to 17:00. We are working to get the detailed schedule added to the registration site as we speak.
• Want to get your hands dirty? Spend some time in our hack-a-thon room. If you bring your laptop, we can help you get set up with Alfresco so that you can help test Alfresco Community, help clean up the wiki, answer questions in the forum, or write some code for Share Extras or other Alfresco community projects. Stop by the Discuss room on the First Floor for more details.

That’s it for now. I look forward to seeing everyone in London next week.

I mentioned this off-hand in my last blog post but thought it was worth calling out here: The DevCon San Diego Day 1 start time is 8:20am, sharp. That’s 10 minutes earlier than what we originally published on the registration site (to be updated with the correct start time shortly). This is not a clever ploy to get you in your seats for an 8:30am start. We’re honestly starting at 8:20. For the plan-ahead and early-riser types, this is no big deal. However, if you weren’t planning on rolling out of bed until 8:15am, you probably need to make an adjustment.

Wow, I cannot believe that time has flown so fast. DevCon is next week! Things are quite busy as the final odds and ends are getting resolved heading into next week. But one thing is for sure: Excitement is mounting.

When I was on the other side of the fence working as a consultant, conferences like DevCon were always energizing. I loved listening to engineers I respected so much talk about the product I was deeply-focused on. I loved the competitiveness of working hard to put together a talk that would hopefully fill a room with more attendees than my arch-rival. And, of course, I loved just soaking up the insights from other smart people pushing the envelope of the platform.

How many conferences have you attended where that one conversation you had with an attendee or a speaker or an engineer actually paid for the trip? It happens all of the time. At Alfresco we do a lot of webinars and other online events. And we’ll be recording a few of the sessions and making those available online after the conference (along with all of the session presentations). But I think there is value in an on-site conference that you don’t get in an online event. With an on-site conference you can get away from your desk and the constant demands of your inbox and take some time to focus on the techniques and approaches you are using on your projects. Freed from the hourly stresses of your project, and flooded with cool and interesting technical topics, you’re bound to have at least one flash of insight during the conference. I hope I get to see some of those “A-ha!” moments registering on attendee faces. That’s the kind of stuff that makes the effort to put on an event like this worthwhile.

Are you showing up early? Long-time community contributor, Ray Gauss, has put together a brewery tour for Tuesday night from 6:30 to 10:30. It includes transportation, two brewery tours, light apps, and a tasting. This event is separate from the conference so there is a cost involved, but that shouldn’t stop you. San Diego has some great local craft beers, so why not sample what’s on offer with some of your fellow Alfresco community members? Sign up at eventbrite. Remember, the keynote starts at 8:20am, sharp on Wednesday morning, so sample responsibly. Just saying.

The weather forecast for San Diego next week looks fantastic. Sunshine one day and “brilliant sunshine” the next. Still, you may want to bring a light jacket or a hoodie. We’ll be dining al fresco both days.

I’m looking forward to seeing you in San Diego. If you haven’t registered there are still spots available, so go sign up.