Alfresco Developer Conference

Alfresco DevCon 2011 Session List

[UPDATED: I've made some small tweaks to the session list since originally posted. --JTP]

First, let me thank everyone who submitted session proposals, both externally and internally. There were a lot of great ideas and some hard decisions had to be made. The good news is, the session list has been finalized and I think you’ll agree this is shaping up to be one heck of a conference, regardless of which city you attend.

Actually, I could use your help with something. I’d like some sense for which will be the most heavily-attended sessions. Can you take a minute to review the session list for your city below, then tell me which ones interest you most by taking this tiny survey?

Here is the list of Alfresco DevCon 2011 sessions, by city, by track:

SAN DIEGO

Opening Keynote, Jeff Potts, John Powell, John Newton, Mike Farman
Alfresco Panel Discussion, John Powell, John Newton, Todd Barr, Jeff Potts, Paul Holmes-Higgin, Mike Farman, David Gildeh, Barry Duplantis, et al

Alfresco as a Platform

Actions & Behaviors, Peter Monks (Alfresco)
Alfresco iOS Mobile Application Details and Design, Ryan McVeigh & Gi Lee (Zia)
Building Alfresco Prototypes in a Few Hours, Jean-Christophe Kermagoret (SIDE Labs)
CMIS – What’s coming next?, Ryan McVeigh (Zia)
CMIS in the Real World, Gab Columbro (Alfresco)
Metadata Extractors and Content Transformers, Nick Burch (Alfresco)
Forms Config, Customization, & Extension, Erik Winlof (Alfresco)
Jive & Other integrations, Jared Ottley (Alfresco)
Moving from Lucene to Alfresco FTS, Andy Hind (Alfresco)
Social Enterprise Integration, John Giffin (Zia)
Spring Web Scripts and Spring Surf, David Draper (Alfresco)
Understanding the SOLR Integration, Andy Hind (Alfresco)
What to Expect from Alfresco Cloud, David Gildeh (Alfresco)

Best Practices

Performance Tuning, Gab Columbro (Alfresco)
Support’s Most Common Questions, Speaker TBA (Alfresco)
Taking Your Bulk Content Ingestions to the Next Level, Peter Monks (Alfresco)
Application Lifecycle Management, Gab Columbro (Alfresco)
Repository Customization Best Practices, Jared Ottley & Richard McKnight (Alfresco)
Share Customization Best Practices, Will Abson (Alfresco)

BPM

Introduction to Advanced Workflows, Nick Smith (Alfresco)
Advanced Workflow Deep Dive, Nick Smith & Frederik Heremans (Alfresco)
Migration from jBPM to Activiti, Frederik Heremans (Alfresco)

Building WCM Solutions

Alfresco Services for WCM, Brian Remmington (Alfresco)
WCM Solutions with Liferay and Alfresco, Speaker TBA (Liferay)
WCM Solutions with Drupal and Alfresco, Speaker TBA (Appnovation)
Crafter Studio: Extending Alfresco for Next Generation WCM, Russ Danner (Rivet Logic)
A Tale of Two WQS Implementations, Michael McCarthy (Tribloom)

Case Studies

ACHP – Putting Content on the Map, Dimy Jeannot & Colin Stephenson (Armedia)
New York Philharmonic, Ray Wijangco (TSG) & Mitch Brodsky (New York Philharmonic)
Assisting Special Needs Children with the Power of Open Source!, Ray Wijangco (TSG)
Automating Business Processes in Denver: A Technical Case Study, Eric Harper (Zia) & Paul Lungu (City of Denver)

Customizing Alfresco

Creating HTML5 Apps with Alfresco & SproutCore, Seth Kellas & Jennifer Murdza (Rothbury Software)
Document Management with Share, Richard McKnight (Alfresco)
New Social Dashlets in Share Extras, Will Abson (Alfresco)
New Document Library Extension Points in Share, Mike Hatfield (Alfresco)
New Client Config & Extension Points in Share, David Draper (Alfresco)
Spring Config for Alfresco Developers, Hitesh Lad (Sony Pictures)

LONDON

Opening Keynote, Jeff Potts, John Powell, John Newton, Mike Farman
Alfresco Panel Discussion, John Powell, John Newton, Paul Holmes-Higgin, Todd Barr, Jeff Potts, Mike Farman, David Gildeh, Barry Duplantis, et al

Alfresco as a Platform

Actions & Behaviors, Roy Wetherall (Alfresco)
Alfresco iOS Mobile Application Details and Design, Speaker TBA (Alfresco)
Building Alfresco Prototypes in a Few Hours, Jean-Christophe Kermagoret (SIDE Labs)
CMIS – What’s coming next?, Florian Mueller (Alfresco)
CMIS in the Real World, Gab Columbro (Alfresco)
Metadata Extractors and Content Transformers, Jared Ottley (Alfresco)
Forms Config, Customization, & Extension, Gavin Cornwell (Alfresco)
Jive & Other integrations, Jared Ottley (Alfresco)
Moving from Lucene to Alfresco FTS, Andy Hind (Alfresco)
Spring Web Scripts and Spring Surf, Kevin Roast (Alfresco)
Understanding the SOLR Integration, Andy Hind (Alfresco)
Using Enterprise Content in Grails, Robin Bramley (Ixxus)
What to Expect from Alfresco Cloud, David Gildeh (Alfresco)

Best Practices

Performance Tuning, Gab Columbro (Alfresco)
Support’s Most Common Questions, Speaker TBA (Alfresco)
Taking Your Bulk Content Ingestions to the Next Level, Jared Ottley (Alfresco)
Application Lifecycle Management, Gab Columbro (Alfresco)
Repository Customization Best Practices, Jared Ottley & Richard McKnight (Alfresco)
Share Customization Best Practices, Will Abson (Alfresco)
Global Federation and Search, Robin Bramley (Ixxus)

BPM

Introduction to Advanced Workflows, Gavin Cornwell (Alfresco)
Advanced Workflow Deep Dive, Nick Smith & Frederik Heremans (Alfresco)
Migration from jBPM to Activiti, Frederik Heremans (Alfresco)

Building WCM Solutions

Alfresco Services for WCM, Brian Remmington (Alfresco)
WCM Solutions with Liferay and Alfresco, Speaker TBA (Liferay)

WCM Solutions with Drupal and Alfresco, Speaker TBA

Crafter Studio: Extending Alfresco for Next Generation WCM, Russ Danner (Rivet Logic)
Surfing with CMIS, Ben Dougherty (Ixxus)

Case Studies

Using Alfresco and Orbeon to implement an eGovernment Portal, Oksana Kurysheva (VDEL)
Structured Content Authoring and Publishing through Alfresco and Componize, Colin Stephenson (Armedia)

Customizing Alfresco

Alfresco the Clojure Way, Carlo Sciolla (Backbase)
Customizing the Upload File(s) dialog in Alfresco Share, Martin Bergljung (Ixxus)
Document Management with Share, Richard McKnight (Alfresco)
Integrating Alfresco with Publishing Tools, Chris Hudson (Ixxus)
New Document Library Extension Points in Share, Mike Hatfield (Alfresco)
New Client Config & Extension Points in Share, David Draper (Alfresco)
Tackling a Complex User Interface, Ashley Ward (Surevine)
What’s Coming in Records Management, Roy Wetherall (Alfresco)

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Teaser Video

Here’s a link to the teaser video that went out with the recently-sent DevCon email blast.

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Call for speakers deadline extended

Today was supposed to be the last day for submitting session abstracts, but a couple of people have asked for extensions and I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to get their proposals in, so you now have until 12:00 PM CST this Wednesday, August 24th.

I’ve seen a lot of good submissions so far. There’s no way we will be able to fit everyone in. One friendly tip for those of you still polishing yours up: If your talk sounds like a pure product pitch, it’s going to the bottom of the list. If you are a solution provider, it is obviously okay to talk about your solution, but no one wants to sit in a room and listen to you read your marketing material. We’re developers. Show us how you built the solution. Tell us about the aspects of the solution you were able to improve. Take us through the decision-making process–what technical options did you consider before you settled on an approach. If you’re giving a case study, tell us about the pain the customer was feeling and how the solution addressed it. The bottom-line is that you need to be giving the attendees something useful they can immediately apply to their projects, even if they don’t end up downloading your solution.

With that said, we definitely have plenty of room for sponsors to share their wares in our exhibition hall. That’s a perfect place for product pitches. If you’d like information on sponsoring DevCon, take a look at the “Sponsors” tab on the registration site (San Diego, London).

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Registration now open!

I am pleased to announce that registration for Alfresco DevCon 2011 is now open! Better get in there and sign up while you can!

Alfresco DevCon 2011 Americas

Alfresco DevCon 2011 EMEA & APAC

Still on the fence (or just looking for a laugh)? The “Should You Attend Alfresco DevCon 2011″ flowchart stands ready to help you decide.

I’ve seen several great speaking proposals so far. The deadline on submissions is next week so please get those in if you haven’t already.

If you have submitted an abstract, you’ve seen the session track list. If not, check it out:

  • Alfresco as a Platform
  • Best Practices
  • Customizing Alfresco
  • Case Studies
  • BPM
  • Building WCM Solutions with Alfresco

Across each of those tracks we’re going to have technical sessions of varying difficulty levels covering everything from the fundamentals to the newest innovations to the platform such as Activiti, Solr, and Share Extensibility. Add in the keynote from John Newton and an Engineering panel discussion and you’ve got an agenda that’s hard to beat.

I’m getting pretty excited and I hope you are too. I’m looking forward to seeing you in San Diego and London.

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Tell Your Story at Alfresco DevCon 2011: A Call for Papers

In my Community Vision & Plan presentation I talked about ways you can take your Alfresco community participation to the next level. One of those ways is to share your Alfresco story with others. DevCon is the perfect place to do that. So I want to invite you to come to DevCon and wow us with a kickass talk on an Alfresco-related topic.

There are some really cool things going on out there with the Alfresco platform and those stories need to be told. Maybe you’ve recently rolled out a content-centric solution on the Alfresco platform and you’ve got some great lessons learned you’d like to share. Or perhaps you’ve created a cool Alfresco add-on and you want to show it off. It could be that you’ve been working with the Alfresco platform for a while and you’re the perfect person to explain a piece of it to the rest of us. Whatever the case may be, I know I speak for the rest of the community when I say we want to hear your story.

Getting your session idea reviewed for possible inclusion is actually pretty easy. All you have to do is fill out the Alfresco DevCon Abstract Submission form by 08/22/2011. The form asks for the following:

  • Session Title
  • Session Track
  • San Diego, London, or Both
  • Technical Level (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced)
  • What You’re Going to Talk About
  • Why You’re the Best Person to Give this Talk
  • Name & Email

This is open to all members of our community, regardless of your relationship to Alfresco or the edition of the product you are using. Submissions are judged on creativity, relevance, interest-level in the topic for our audience, and speaker background.

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover during DevCon and we’re limited by space and time. I anticipate some tough decisions as we lay out the agenda. Don’t be offended if you don’t get picked. If your session does get picked, I can’t pay for your travel and living expenses, but I will comp your main conference registration fee, so that’s something. Plus, you’ll be taking your community contributions to the next level and that’s huge for both you and the community.

We set the bar high last year in terms of quality of content. If the community steps up I think we’ll do it again.

Anyway, give it some thought and then get your abstract submitted. I’m looking forward to hearing your story at DevCon 2011.

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Should You Attend Alfresco DevCon: A Flowchart

For most people, the decision as to whether or not they should attend Alfresco DevCon is an easy one, particularly for people who attended last year. For everyone else, I’ve put together this handy flowchart.

Update: For those using a device that cannot deal with Slideshare, here is the flowchart as a PNG.

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Save the date! Alfresco DevCon coming to San Diego and London this Fall!

I’m pleased to announce the cities, venues, and dates for Alfresco DevCon:

DevCon Americas 2011
When: October 25-27
Training Day: October 25
Main Conference: October 26-27
Where: Hard Rock Hotel, San Diego, USA

DevCon EMEA & APAC 2011
When: November 08-10
Training Day: November 08
Main Conference: November 09-10
Where: Prospero House, Central London, UK

If you attended last year you know that this is the premier event for digging into the details of the Alfresco platform and collaborating with others who are doing the same. As an attendee last year, I was impressed with the level of participation from Alfresco Engineers. It seemed like all of my favorite Alfresco developer rock stars were there. I had some great conversations about product direction with the Engineering leads. And I shouldn’t forget the visionary keynote by John Newton. Every time I hear John give a talk at a conference I get pumped up.

This year, I’m in charge of the event (!) and I want to make sure that DevCon is every bit as successful as it was last year, but I’m looking to take it to the next level. In fact, “Level Up!”, a gamer term, is an overall theme for the conference.

Based on feedback from last year, I think taking DevCon to the next level means:

  • Clear identification of Alfresco employees and key community contributors in attendance (who they are, what they do, etc.)
  • More presentations from the community (call for papers coming soon)
  • More opportunities for networking between attendees
  • Clearly identified “difficulty level” for each session
  • Better alignment of physical space with the size of the event

Now, based on the first night party I attended last year at DevCon, I’m afraid if we level up on that dimension we’ll all end up in jail. But, DevCon is a great time to get social with your friends from the community, so we’ll throw another awesome first night bash in both cities. The Hard Rock Hotel, our San Diego venue, sits right on the entrance to the Gaslamp Quarter, which has some great nightlife. And if you attend our event at Prospero House in London, you’ll be in the middle of the city, so the home of one of the coolest clubbing scenes in the world awaits. Just don’t forget: The second day will be as jam packed as the first and we will start without you!

Over the coming days you can watch this blog for all things DevCon. Obviously, the next announcements you’ll see are things like:

  • Online registration availability and hotel discounts
  • Call for papers
  • Call for sponsors

That’s it for now. I’m really excited about the cities and venues we’ve picked. I can’t wait to see you again at DevCon!

Level Up!

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