Today is a big day at Alfresco, as we have officially launched Alfresco Enterprise 4.  Here is some of the early coverage:

InfoWorld: Alfresco 4 heads for the cloud
In anticipation of offering its open-source content management software as a service, Alfresco has upgraded its namesake product to work with multiple clients and to interact with a wider range of form factors, the company announced Thursday… more

CMSWire: Alfresco Enterprise 4: Cloud Connected Content Management
We said earlier in the week that we couldn’t talk about Alfresco 4 until today. Well, it’s today now and we can talk a little bit about this latest release, although only a little bit because it really is enormous… more

OSTATIC: Alfresco Embraces SaaS and the Cloud with it’s new CMS Platform
In a big endorsement of the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model, enteprise content management system (CMS) maker Alfresco is embracing cloud- and mobile-based usage of its platform with its new Alfresco 4 release… more

ReadWriteWeb: Alfresco Makes its CMS More Social
Today, Alfresco today launches its Enterprise v4, perhaps the biggest update since they began operations. The new software comes with mobile and tablet apps, business app integrations and is loaded with social features that help users share, comment on and collaborate on content… more

If you’ve been working with Alfresco for a while you know that there are actually two repository implementations in the product. The original repository implementation is usually called “the repository” or sometimes “the DM repository”. The other repository implementation is called “AVM” which stands for Alternative Versioning Model. It was created to support a Web Content Management solution that included features such as web author sandboxes, a virtualization server, XForms, XSLT transformations, and a repository-to-file system deployment service.

Unfortunately, the “two repositories” issue caused confusion and frustration amongst customers, implementers, and engineers. When deciding how to use Alfresco you were forced to make a choice between using one repository or the other and the functionality between the two differed. The conflicting repositories were also a pain to maintain from an engineering perspective. When the original creators of the AVM left Alfresco a couple of years ago, so too went the passion for maintaining that part of the product. Combined with shifting market dynamics in the WCM space, the AVM repository subsequently languished, and never achieved its full potential.

Alfresco has since added web content features and functionality to the platform that do not require the AVM repository. The transfer and replication service can now be used to move repository content to the file system. The form service makes it easy to configure forms for non-technical users. And the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) API makes it easy to perform CRUD functions against content in the repository using any front-end portal, presentation framework, or programming language that makes sense for a given solution. Drupal is a common choice for this, and is something we use for several sites at Alfresco. Liferay is another popular choice. And for web applications based on Spring, Alfresco provides a sample web application called Web Quick Start that can be used as-is or modified for an end-to-end Web Content Management solution.

The time and attention the AVM demands of the support team and engineering team has become too much–simply put, the cost to maintain and support AVM outweigh the revenue it generates. Therefore, we are announcing that we are no longer selling support subscriptions for AVM to new customers. If you are using AVM today and you are a paying customer, you will be supported on Alfresco Enterprise 4 and earlier versions until the version you are on reaches its end-of-life. We will not be supporting AVM at all in Alfresco 5.

How this Change Affects the Community

We realize there are people in the community using AVM. Obviously, you are free to continue doing so. But you should not expect any AVM-related fixes or updates to be added to the Community code line by the Engineering team going forward. And, when Community versions of Alfresco 5 begin shipping, you should not expect the AVM repository implementation to be included in the core.

A large percentage of our Enterprise customers use Community before purchasing a support subscription. We do not want new Community users to be confused by the availability of the AVM download. It might mistakenly give the impression that Alfresco will provide commercial support for the AVM if they use it in Community and then upgrade to Enterprise. Therefore, effective immediately, we are disabling the AVM download from the Community download page.

Technical members of the community will be quick to point out that the AVM software is tightly coupled with the rest of the platform. When you download the AVM from the Community download page you are actually only downloading an XML configuration file that “enables” the AVM functionality already present in the core. Over time, we will be removing the AVM-related code from the core, so by Alfresco 5, it is highly likely that the platform will not contain any AVM-related code.

There may be developers in the community who are interested in maintaining the AVM code as an ongoing project. This would involve separating out the AVM-related code from the rest of the platform and then packaging it as an add-on. This would be a big task, but if there are developers passionate enough to own this project and move it forward, we would be happy to work with you to make that happen. Please contact me directly if you want to take this on.

I hope this has shed some light on the thinking behind our decision to no longer support AVM for new customers and has given you a rough timeframe for when the AVM will be sunset completely. If you have any questions or thoughts on this, please feel free to add your comments below.

I have been working in the ECM industry for over twenty years and during this time I have seen many different methods used by companies trying to to justify their investment in deploying an ECM solution. These approaches have taken various forms and I think can be classified as having a  high, medium or low impact when it comes to improving a companies bottom-line or profitability. Three examples for justifying ECM spending include:

• Worker Productivity – The theory goes that ECM can make knowledge workers more productive by providing better search and collaboration tools. Companies try to put a value on this by claiming to save each person 10 minutess per day. If the company has 10,000 employees that’s equal to over 1,600 hours saved each day. Multiply that by an average hourly rate per employee and you have made a saving. This is a very risky, low impact approach. In reality it is hard to show how this time saving actually equates to improvements in the bottom-line. What is to stop the employees just having another coffee break or spending that 10mins on Facebook?
• Space Saving – For some the removal of paper records from offices can be a significant saving. Replacing filing cabinets with desk space in very expensive property can remove the need to add additional office space or allow continued growth in existing properties. This approach will have medium impact and will depend on the office location, capacity  and rental costs. These are real savings and can be seen on the balance sheet
• Business Process – This is the most valuable ROI. If you can show that ECM will make a core business process more efficient, i.e. bringing a new product to market faster, you can tie ECM deployment to improved revenue growth. The early days of Documentum was a good example of this. Back in the early 1990’s we focused on the New Drug Application (NDA) process within the pharmaceutical industry. If you can get a new drug approved sooner you can start selling it sooner resulting in more time to recoup profits before the patent runs out. In this case ECM has a significant value and can be directly linked to improvements in the bottom line and enhancing a companies profitability.

So there are multiple ways of justifying the investment in ECM, the actual approach used will vary by company with most business cases using a combination of all of the above. But it is widely accepted that most companies can benefit from the use of ECM. So once you realise that you need ECM how do you establish the best system for your needs?

To help identify the value of Alfresco over other, more traditional, ECM solutions I have been working with Forrester Research. Alfresco commissioned Forrester Research to carry out a study to establish the Total Economic Impact of deploying Alfresco. The study did not try to justify the benefit of generic ECM (as per the approaches above) but rather the value of deploying an open source Alfresco solution.

Forrester interviewed a number of existing Alfresco customers to understand why they selected Alfresco and then quantify the benefits that these companies saw by adopting Alfresco. The results of the survey showed that companies deploying an Alfresco solution could see significant benefits over deploying one of the more traditional ECM solutions. And of course these benefits were in addition to the other benefits outlined above. The study showed that companies deploying Alfresco:

• Avoided software license costs
• Reduced maintenance costs
• Lowered developer expenses
• Achieved an ROI of 53%
• Realised payback 10 months after go live
• and Saved over $1.3million over a 3 year period

Deploying ECM provides great benefits for companies, but companies that deploy Alfresco get even greater benefit. To find out more download a copy of the report here

To help launch the study, join me on a special webinar this Wednesday, February 1, 2012 with Forrester analysts Stephen Powers and Sebastian Selhorst. The Webinar will include industry trends and the state of content management today as well as key findings on Alfresco and customer insights.

When: Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Where: Online Webinar with Forrester, 8am PST, 11am EST, 4pm GMT, 5pm CET

You can register here - hope you can join us!

Over the weekend, TechCrunch’s Leena Rao posted an article about how Box’s CEO Aaron Levie sees a big opportunity in cloud storage for the federal government.  Well, I’m happy to report back from the front lines that, yes, indeed there is a big opportunity.  But the opportunity is for much more than simple cloud storage.  It’s for content-rich apps built on open platforms, spanning bothpublic and private clouds, that help government agencies better serve their constituents.  And for the second year in a row, Alfresco is hosting hundreds of government customers, partners and agency representatives at its Content.gov event in DC on January 24th.

Whereas last year’s focus was on the rapid adoption of open source content solutions (like Alfresco) in government, this year’s conversations are stretching to mobile and cloud. Almost half of Alfresco’s global downloads are now governments, NGOs or educational institutions – and this year, more than ever, the interest has been on mobile access to content, hybrid-cloud deployments and content-rich web apps – a far cry from standard document and records management (although the basics of DM & RM are now table stakes in any content platform fit for government use).

This year’s Content.gov speakers include:

Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Strategist at Red Hat Public Sector
Kane McLean, Steering Committee at Mil-OSS
Steve Davis, President of FederalConference.com
John Newton, co-founder and CTO of Alfresco
Mike Waldrop, Director of Solution Engineer at Alfresco
Dr. David Prezant, FDNY Chief Medical Officer

Steve Davis from FederalConference.com, for example, will be discussing how the U.S. Army Strong Bonds program worked with Alfresco partner Armedia to build a task and case management solution on top of Alfresco technology.  Dr. David Prezant, the Chief Medical Officer of FDNY, will be talking about ClaimConnect.us – a project with Alfresco partner ImageWork.  Along with these powerful case studies, Alfresco will be showing sneak peaks of Alfresco Enterprise 4 (coming in early Feb), Alfresco in the cloud (in private beta) and Alfresco Mobile (already available in the app store).  Hope to see you there!

Today, Alfresco has announced that Alfresco Mobile 1.2 (for iPhone and iPad) is available immediately in the app store.  Feel free to read the press release and go ahead and download the new apps.  But let me sum this news up for your:  Alfresco Mobile is the FIRST mobile enterprise content app with the ability to edit office documents on the fly and “save back” your changes to the repository as a new version.  All with a few simple clicks.  Documentum doesn’t have this.  OpenText doesn’t have this.  Box.net doesn’t have this.  In fact, nobody else has it.

In order to get this done, we worked closely with our partner Quickoffice, the company behind the leading mobile office productivity apps in the Apple App Store (#1 all time paid business apps).  Here’s how it works:  when you open the Alfresco mobile app and find the document you want to edit, you simply click “open in” Quickoffice.  Your document opens up in Quickoffice, where you can make changes like you would in any other productivity app.  Then, when you are finished, you click “Save Back” to Alfresco.  Your document re-opens automatically in Alfresco and magically saves itself as a minor version (1.1, for example) back into Alfresco.  As always, you can revert back to the previous version if you ever need to.

Basically, with Alfresco Mobile 1.2 and Quickoffice, I can now directly edit documents that I have permission to in the repository, saving me time and useless steps (download, check-out, etc.).

Oh, and one more thing:  Alfresco Mobile 1.2 now supports multiple Alfresco repositories right from the user interface… including the (almost here!) Alfresco Cloud.  Special thanks, as always, to our mobile development partner and Alfresco Platinum Partner Zia Consulting for their partnership on Alfresco Mobile.

We had an incredible Day 1 at Alfresco DevCon London that ended with a reception at Vinopolis. On Day 2 the attendees were up early and ready for the sessions and sponsors hit the ground running with demos of creative solutions in the exhibit hall.

In thinking back about DevCon in both San Diego and London, it was clear that a lot of the value attendees derived was from interactions with Alfresco Engineers, partners, and each other. A lot of spontaneous discussions between members of the community, clients, partners and Alfresco engineers developed during breakfast and continued throughout the day. That kind of interaction is precisely what DevCon is for, and, just like in San Diego, London was the place to be to discuss technical issues around the platform with key stakeholders. Key topics for Day 2 included CMIS, Mobile, Best Practices, and Integrations.

Break Room with Partners and Attendees

One thing that was hard to miss was the prevalence of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. For example, in Mike Hatfield’s and Marc Dubresson’s talk on “Alfresco iOS  Mobile Details and Design“, Mike Hatfield detailed which features used CMIS and which used RESTful API. For instance, Search and Upload use CMIS while Activities Feed, Like a Document and Comment use the RESTful API. The Alfresco mobile app was developed in partnership with Zia Consulting and is available in the App Store for iPhone and iPad. During the presentation

Break Room with Partners and Attendees

Marc Dubresson talked about the Alfresco Mobile Roadmap, which included Mobile being an important piece in the Alfresco Cloud that will be launched this year. He also mentioned a new feature that would give the app the ability to access Multiple Repositories and integrate with some other productivity apps.

There was a lot of interest from the audience and some questions regarding the plans for having Android applications. That was expected, since the audience was polled about their mobile devices and the majority of attendees from Europe owned an Android Phone. Alfresco is ready to build an Android Application, but there is definitely feedback from the community that needs to be factored in before that happens.

The new version of Alfresco Mobile (1.1) was recently released with some improvements and new features like:

- Content activity feed with direct link to updated documents

- Uploading of documents

- Capture and upload of video and audio recordings

- Display of sites by favorites, member sites or all sites

- Search for specific sites

Marc Dubresson announced that all the presentations from Alfresco DevCon were available in the sample repository that comes configured by default with the app. They have also since been uploaded to SlideShare.

Another session where CMIS was prevalent was “WCM Solutions using Drupal and Alfresco” presented by Richard McKnight and Ian Norton. They used a conversational style to discuss how to use Drupal to build your WCM with Alfresco in the back end. In many cases, CMIS is the API that lets the Drupal front-end share content with the Alfresco back-end.

Robin Bramley, an experienced engineer who wrote numerous articles about Grails and has been developing applications for Alfresco since version 0.6, hit CMIS pretty heavy in his presentation, “Using Enterprise Content in Grails“. He showed how to leverage CMIS to build Document Management and Web Content Management applications with Grails and Alfresco.

While CMIS was baked in to many talks, some focused on CMIS exclusively. On day two there were two sessions dedicated to the subject: “CMIS in the Real World” presented by Gab Columbro and “CMIS  What’s Coming Next“, presented by Jeff Potts. Gab Columbro showed some examples of how CMIS can be used to build applications to access the repository or to establish a communication between repositories, which can help when you are migrating legacy content. He also talked about how important OpenCMIS is to Alfresco and how it is being used in the iOS apps and other integrations. Jeff covered what’s coming in the CMIS 1.1 specification and what’s changed in Alfresco 4 regarding CMIS.

Best Practices talks are always popular with DevCon attendees and Day Two didn’t disappoint.

Gab Columbro presented a session about “Alfresco Tuning”, which drew a lot of attention. His most talked-about slide was, “Tips you MUST know to scale Alfresco”. In that slide he listed the following actions:

Other noteworthy best practices talks included Gavin Cornwell on how to configure, customize and extend Forms in Share, Martin Bergljung on how to customize the Upload File Dialog, Ashley Ward talking about how to tackle a Complex User Interface, and Richard McKnight and Jared Ottley on Repository Customization Best Practices.

Integrations are also a popular topic. Chris Hudson spoke about “Integrating Alfresco with Publishing Tools“, which covered some publishing challenges and how they used Alfresco to build a Publishing Platform to help solve those problems. He also demonstrated an integration with Adobe InDesign.

Oksana Kurysheva and Alexey Ermakov shared how they solved a problem converting existing paper forms in a small government site in Russia, and also how they implemented workflows to act on the submitted forms. One of the main problems they faced was the need for visual form authoring tools, so the government employees could create and edit the forms definitions themselves. As a solution, they integrated Alfresco with Orbeon Forms, an Open Source forms application based in Xforms and Ajax.

The last session of the day was the Conference Wrap-Up and Panel Discussion with Alfresco Technical Leadership. Jeff Potts started by asking the community to make some pledges. Right away the Twitter stream got some members of the community pledging to answer questions in the forums, contribute code, and even included a pledge to support two students writing a Bachelor or Master Thesis around Alfresco in 2012.

Panel Discussion

During the Panel Discussion, the attendees and Twitter followers came up with some really interesting questions. The questions ran the gamut. Some were about when features would be added. Others were about when things might go away, like this one, “When is Alfresco Explorer going to die?”, to which John Newton and Mark Farman replied that this is not happening anytime soon because of the number of implementations still using Alfresco Explorer. For the question about “When partners will get their own line of support channel”, the answer was to get your Engineers and Developers certified and that will give you a shortcut through support.

Some existential questions, like “What’s the biggest mistake or regret since Alfresco creation in 2006″, got many of the panel participants talking about how they wish they had done some things sooner. Answering the question, “What is the thing you are really proud of?”, Alfresco CTO, John Newton, replied that he is really proud of the great community that supports Alfresco. Paul Hampton mentioned the Engineering team and all the talent they have at Alfresco.

Hopefully, this post has given you some idea of the flavor of the conference. I think some of the tweets that were being sent as the conference wrapped up speak for themselves:

It was great seeing everyone in London. See you next year!

Alfresco DevCon 2011 kicked off in San Diego at the end of October. If you missed that event, you can read the recap here: Day one and Day two. The next stop was in United Kingdom, where Alfresco is headquartered. London was the city chosen so Alfresco engineers, partners, community members, current and future clients from all over the world could Level Up their game, learning more about Alfresco and hearing the latest developments in the platform.

If in San Diego the main language one could hear was English with occasional British accent, Spanish and Portuguese. In London we had more variety…English from US and UK, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese from Portugal and Brazil, Russian and others languages I did not recognize…showing me really how global Alfresco has become.

The Main conference room was packed waiting for the opening keynotes. Jeff Potts gave a warm welcome to all attendees, asking them to Level Up their game during the conference. He highlighted the awesome job some community members are doing around the world. There were some community rockstars present at the conference and they got a deserved round of applause from the crowd.

Community Rockstars

From Meetups to participation in forums, creating amazing solutions, sharing codes among themselves, these people represent the true spirit of an open source community. A common sentiment was the passion about the platform, sharing and learning from each other. Jeff also reminded the attendees about Hack-a-thon, a room where people could get their laptops ready with the latest Alfresco installation, setup the configuration and code! After all the announcements, which included Jeff Potts in a Mohawk it was time for the Keynotes.

John Powell, Alfresco CEO, gave an overview about the company and talked about the incredible couple of years Alfresco is having since 2005 when he found the company with John Newton. With more than 70 new employees added since last DevCon, from all around the world, the Alfresco family is growing and so is  its business. The company added five hundred and fifty Enterprise Customers in the last 12 months alone and that contributed to make Alfresco “the largest private, pure-play open source software company in the world”. John Powell shared some plans of expansion in India and Far East and thanked the partners for their help in taking Alfresco to new markets. He also mentioned the Online Training and Certification for Alfresco Developers, that certified a great number of people during DevCon.

- My name is Newton, John Newton.

No, he didn’t introduce himself like this, I am making it up, but I swear, John Newton, Alfresco CTO, mixed James Bond and the fall of Euro Zone in his presentation. How did he do it? I really don’t know, but it worked liked a charm. The audience, including myself, were glued to the screen waiting for the next slide and trying to figure out what Bond he would use to match his slide content.

John Newton

His presentation was divided in two parts. In the first part he was talking about new trends and how Alfresco is watching these trends to define the roadmap for the product. If I could summarize the important keywords for DevCon, they would be: Cloud, Mobile, Workflow, Integration. And Alfresco is working to combine all of them together.

Mike Farman did his live demo at Alfresco DevCon showing some of the new functionalities of Alfresco 4. Jeff Potts helped filming with his iPad the crowd at DevCon London. He uploaded to Alfresco Share, tagged, showed geolocation, workflows and published to YouTube and  twitter. Here is the video that was published from Alfresco to Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMcHyiuNxtc. Again a flawless demo, live, with no PowerPoint and no customizations. Alfresco just worked!

The first break of the day was the opportunity for people to connect with the sponsors, engineers and know the stories behind the adoption of Alfresco in other companies.

John Newton came back to stage to talk about what to expect from Alfresco in 2012. Alfresco 4 brought a lot of changes and more is  coming in the upcoming versions. One of the recurrent themes of the conference and a force in the new roadmap - Mobile, was explained in one of the slides:

Alfresco has the opportunity to enable a new era of business productivity in a tablet world…

• A powerful content platform that serves as a content-hub for the enterprise
• A set of cloud services & integrations that enables “cloud-connected-content”
• A focus on driving the new tablet content experience – with apps & open standards
• Built on a foundation of transparency, openness & innovation

After the break, the sessions were divided in three different rooms. Some of the hot topics in the first day were:

SHARE

The sessions related to Share were always well attended. Richard McKnight presented “Document Management with Share“  talking about what approach to use when you decide to design a solution using Share, some tips and best practices and he also talked about the Repository and Web Tier Extensions. Mike Hatfield did a presentation  called “Share Document Library Extensions“. He is the author of one great and very useful blogpost. You can read Mike’s blog post here: Share Document Library Extensions in V. 4.0 . It is very useful if you are a developer with examples of configuration. Dave Draper in the last session about Share from Day One had a presentation about “New Client Configuration and Extension Points in Share“. Will Abson presented “Share Customization Best Practices“. Lots of great insights for those developing for Share, like the Project Structure Recommendations.

• Separate your source from your deployment (don’t create your project inside the webapp!)
• Choose a build tool to deploy our code even when you have a simple or small projetct, because that makes the project right from the start.

Make sure you come back to get the presentation that will be available in slideshare.

CASE STUDIES

Ian Pope presented a very interesting Case Study for Travelcard and the solution for Scanning and OCR in the session “Scanning and OCR the open source way” using Ephesoft, a Java 100% web based capture solutions and Colin Stephenson presented “Structured Content Authoring and Publishing through Alfresco and Componize. ”

NEW TRENDS: CLOUD

Aligned with the Alfresco Roadmap presented earlier by John Newton, new services were starting to be unveiled. David Gildeh presented ”What to expect from Alfresco Cloud“. He explained the decision behind the move and announced the release date for Alfresco Cloud: November 28th. If you didn’t signed up yet, go now to http://alfresco.me and be one of the first to be notified when Alfresco Cloud is available.

WORKFLOW

There were three very interesting sessions, from beginner to advance so you could build your skills and learn more about Activiti. Gavin Cornwell presented “Introduction to Advanced Workflows“, Frederik Heremans had a very informative session on how to “Migrate from jBPM to Activiti” and he also joined Nick Smith to offer a session “Advanced Workflow Deep Dive“. Workflows is playing a vital role in the new releases of Alfresco and also in the cloud service offered by Alfresco.

After an amazing day of sessions and conversations with some partners, customers and engineers, it was time for Jeff and some of the staff to put back the Mohauk and lead the way to Vinopolis for a reception.

Reception at Vinopolis

You can see all the pictures from the Reception at Vinopolis here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfrescosoftware/sets/72157628094091008

Pictures of Day 1 and Day 2 of Conference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfrescosoftware/sets/72157627968798759/

All the presentations from the Conference can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/alfresco/

We had a wonderful event in London last week. 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.

Our case study series continues with a spotlight on Fatminds. An enterprise customer for over seven months, Fatminds has developed an interesting solution using Alfresco that seeks to serve the continuing education industry.

Adult students looking to continue their education are often shocked when the search process turns out to be frustrating and time-consuming. Alternatively, educators often come across challenges trying to make their content and courses available to these students.

Early in 2011, the founders of Fatminds saw an opportunity to address both of these needs by creating a comprehensive collection of education programs on the web. With advanced searching and metadata structures providing numerous preferences, Fatminds makes it easy to find quality continuing education programs in moments.

Additionally, as today’s post-secondary educators face budget and enrollment challenges, Fatminds has successfully developed a marketing platform for educators that provides a highly targeted flow of prospective students through its own consumer property at fatminds.com as well as through its secondary distribution channels.

Fatminds found Alfresco to be easy to deploy, simple to use and cost effective to maintain. Using Alfresco as its content platform, Fatminds was able to quickly develop a complex and scalable content application.  Alfresco’s professional services organization ensured that the company’s development team had the right tools and support from the beginning of the development cycle. Within six months, Fatminds delivered a production ready implementation.

The platform launched its beta version to its first customer, the University of San Francisco, in June of 2011, and anticipates having over 250 institutions on the platform by 2012.

Tejash Unadkat, the CEO and Co-Founder of Fatminds, summed it up best by saying:

“We chose Alfresco because it is the most mature and best supported open source, enterprise-class content management platform and it has exceeded all of our expectations.  Alfresco makes developing complex and scalable content applications extremely fast and easy.”

You can find the full case study here.

Our annual developer conference took place in late October in San Diego. The event was a huge success. To paraphrase how Martin Musierowicz, our VP of Americas, described it…”it was hip, fun, and highly professional”. The Hard Rock Hotel’s loungy style and pool bar terrace helped to make this technical deep dive a fun and engaging event.

It was clear that Alfresco’s DevCon was helped powered by our stellar Alfresco partners. Their content delivered great insight and discussion.

Partner expertise:

• BlueFish on development tools
• Rothbury on HTML5 and SproutCore
• Zia Consulting on mobile

Great case studies:

• Armedia
• Technology Services Group
• Zia Consulting

Integrated solutions on top of the Alfresco Platform:

• SugarCRM showcased  their online CRM tool
• Ephesoft with their mail room scanning solution
• Daeja highlighted their preview capabilities
• Ezescan showed their scanning solution
• SolutionSet previewed their connector between Jive and Alfresco

Web Content Management:

• RivetLogic presented their solution with Crafter Studio
• Tribloom showed their Web Quick Start implementations (they also provided ultra cool bean bag chairs)

The vast quantity of partner led content at DevCon this year is a clear indication of the value that partners bring to Alfresco. Thank you to all our partners that have demonstrated their commitment to Alfresco by sponsoring DevCon and used this opportunity to showcase their expertise and experience(Armedia, BlueFish, CIGNEX, Daeja, Ephesoft, Ezescan, Formtek, MicroStrategies, RivetLogic, Rothbury, SolutionSet, SugarCRM, Technology Services Group, Tribloom, Zia). If you missed the event in San Diego, hope to see you in London this week for round two of Alfresco DevCon!