Alfresco Community News

One of the primary benefits of open source software over closed-source vendors is the degree of transparency. Open source roadmaps are developed with input from this community. Closed-source vendors, on the other hand, will typically protect their roadmaps as fiercely as they protect their “intellectual property”.

At Alfresco we publish our roadmap on the community-editable wiki, we also get input in the forums and at our community meetups. Granted, not everyone needs to know on a instantaneous basis what new features or bug fixes have been checked into the Alfresco SVN HEAD but some do.

For a few weeks now, that hard-core segment of our community has been able to get tweets every time a checkin occurs to the HEAD. Just follow alfrescoeng to get the updates. You can then download the nightly builds to try out the new stuff.

The integration between our SVN system that makes these automated tweets possible elevates our ability to be transparent to a new level. We hope the community enjoys the new service.

You can also follow Alfrescans who twitter individually.

When I was running the Documentum Developer Program, customers used to tell me that one of the main reasons that they came to the annual developer conference (DevCon) was the access it provided to the engineers. Instead of holding the conference across the bay in much more tourist-friendly San Francisco, I made our attendees trek over to Pleasanton so that all of our engineers could attend. No travel approval needed.

Application developers make their living by providing business solutions based on a software platform. Having come out of the consulting ranks myself, I knew first hand that the chance to speak one-on-one with the engineers was a rare but special opportunity. This is especially true with closed-source software vendors because the underlying workings of the software platform are hidden from view.

At Alfresco, we value transparency. For a small company with an aggressive release schedule, we also offer an extraordinary level of access. Here are some ways to interact with our engineers, our field technical staff and our co-founder and CTO:

• Forums: About a year ago, we started a program where posters could award points to people who answered their questions. Take a look at the members page and you’ll see that the top spots are Alfresco engineers and consultants. They are a dedicated group.
• Twitter: If you are a reader of this blog then you already know that I am a huge Twitter fan. Post a question as a tweet and you are likely to be answered by John Newton, Alfresco CTO, Dave Caruana, Alfresco Chief Architect, or any number of Alfrescans. You can find the list of twittering Alfrescans, here.
• Tech Talk Live: Every other Friday, Yong Qu, our top field guru leads a live session with guest presenters. There is always time at the end of the hour to ask questions, any questions so if you are stuck and need help, here is your chance.
• Meetups: Each spring and fall we hit the road and this year is no exception. We’ll talk about our roadmap, demo the new stuff, hear from a community member or two and usually and even share a beer at the end of the day.

So now for the pitch: we are available to you, we are easy to find, no travel involved and we are usually pretty agreeable. We have a handful of dedicated engineers and a community of more than 90,000 members. The only way this works is as a two-way street. Answer questions on the forums, tweet to share your thoughts, attend a meetup or even consider presenting.

The title to the blog probably won’t do much for my SEO rank but it’s Friday, it has been a long week and that song is stuck in my head.

Follow me on Twitter.

The Brits are nothing if not polite but even so there were more than a couple snickers last December when I mentioned to the Alfresco management team that we had just hosted our first twebinar.

By that time, I was already deep into what could only be described as a Twitter fever. Some people may consider the sound that the TweetDeck makes each time a new tweet arrives as shrill or even startling, but it had become part of the fabric of my everyday life.

For the first couple weeks whenever I heard that sound, I couldn’t help but stop what I was doing and read each tweet.  If there was a link, I visited each link. Maybe the isolation of working from home intensified my fascination with Twitter.  It provides a substitute for those casual conversations you have with colleagues.

Since then I’ve learned to filter the tweet stream, especially important now that I follow more than 300 people. I keep a global search on topics that interest me like alfresco, cmis, ecm and open source.

As the Alfresco Community Manager, my role is to connect like-minded members, remove obstacles, provide useful resources and in general, keep things moving in the right direction.  How do I do this? First, I need to have a deep understanding of the challenges community members face, what is working and what is not working.

Until recently, I’ve relied on community members to email me or post their input on the forums. While I still encourage this, I’ve come to consider these as low impact forms of communication. Email is a one-to-one transaction; the forums are better but are still closed circuits.

Twitter, on the other hand, allows us to interact in an open, transparent fashion and the conversation is amplified by our network of followers and by our followers retweeting the message.

It is easy to write a tweet, there is no expectation of a response and the tone is typically positive. With Twitter, you can just put it out there and see what happens. Good, bad or indifferent, these tweets allow me to discover what I need to know and to keep current as things change, as they do all of the time.

In addition, I’ve made several new connections through Twitter including a partner who is active in Brazil. She has offered to help organize a Brazil meetup and to moderate the new Brazil forums.  I’ve been able to share community news, spotlight some of our top achievers and to provide links to resources.

Yes, sometimes you might see me tweet on a college basketball game, the unrelenting Chicago winter or even a TV show but I’m also finding better ways to do my job. I am a big fan of the tweet.  Comments, suggestions? You can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nancygarrity.

Next post, I’ll fill you in on how other Alfrescans are using Twitter. You can find a list of Alfresco staffers who are active on Twitter here.

CMIS is the proposed standard for content management interoperability. You can learn more about it on the Alfreso wiki. In short, this standard would allow developers to write applications that run against any CMIS-compliant content management system. It has been likened to SQL but for content management.

Oasis is the not-for-profit consortium responsible for bringing interested parties together around a proposed specification and driving it to a conclusion, if successful that means ratification of the specification. It is a laborious process and in the CMIS case, it is a model of collaboration between competing CMS vendors.

Alfresco is a voting member and was the first to offer a draft implementation. John Newton, Alfresco’s CTO and Dave Caruana, Alfresco’s Chief Architect are attending the face-to-face meeting of the technical committee this week. John is using Twitter to broadcast the proceedings, can you follow John on Twitter, http://twitter.com/johnnewton.

It’s cold, very cold and it gets dark early this time of year in Chicago. So instead of heading to the gym for spin class like I do most Wednesday evenings, I’m wimping out and catching up on my slang words. A worthy pursuit and I’ve found a good one.

The Urban Dictionary defines econnoisseur as “One who insists on the highest quality at the lowest price.” When I saw that, I immediately thought about an article that appeared this week on CMSWire, The Cost of Enterprise Content Management.

CMSWire comments on a whitepaper called Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise Content Management released by Alfresco that compares the cost of open source alternatives to proprietary solutions.  CMSWire points out that they don’t need a whitepaper from Alfresco to know that open source is less expensive.  Like they say, it’s not rocket science. What would be even more helpful, they go on to say, is a  comparison of the cost of implementing the solution itself. Fair enough.

This dismal economy is making econnoisseurs of all of us but if you are in the market for a content managment solution,  the CMSWire article makes great reading.

Follow me on Twitter.

There has been a lot of buzz lately about the promise of CMIS, the proposed standard for Content Management Interoperability Services. Earlier this week, Joomlatools and Alfresco announced an integration based on the CMIS standard that allows Alfresco repositories to back-end Joomla! web sites. Because the integration was developed using CMIS and not a proprietary API, it can be used to access content stored in an Alfresco repository or any other CMIS-compliant repository.

IT managers, technology decision makers or anyone who signs off on IT expenditures take note. CMIS allows developers to build once and deploy agaist their ECM product of choice. If you decide to swap out your repo, your investment is protected.

The Joomla!™ module for Alfresco can be downloaded from http://www.alfresco.com/products/platform/try/ . You can find the Alfresco Labs download at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Installing_Labs_3

This week I have the great fortune to escape both the Chicago cold and the most recent revelations about our Illinois elected officials, which should be shocking but sadly are not, and I am spending some time at the center of the Alfresco universe in Maidenhead, UK. Hanging out with this crowd is a sure-fire way to make you think twice about checking out those ads for brain-enhancing vitamins.

Aside from well-developed grey cells, the Alfrescans are a diverse and interesting bunch. For the holidays we asked each of them to tell us about their favorite things.

Our holiday card from all of us to you can be found here: http://poprl.com/86k

Follow me onTwitter.

If you haven’t attended a Tech Talk Live, you are missing out on a great opportunity. Every other week some of Alfresco’s best walk you through various technical topics. Today, Michael Uzquiano, the guy behind the Surf platform, demo’d Web Studio, Alfresco’s visual web development tool that will be part of Labs 3C due out in mid-December.

Tech Talk Live is a live, interactive session, you can ask questions and if you are so inclined, you can present as well. If you’ve developed something that you’d like to share with the community, contact Dr Yong Qu and he will put you on the agenda.

You can see the schedule and find links to previous talks here.

Boston is the next stop on our Surf CodeCamp express.  Join Jeff Potts from Optaros, Yong Qu from Alfresco and a handfull of community code campers on December 16th in Boston. Interest in attending these events is huge so submit your request to attend as soon as possible.

Richard Im, one of Alfresco’s technical gurus has just contributed a sample dashlet to the community that demonstrates how to add a new Share dashlet to display repository assets across multiple Share sites.  What’s more, Richard recorded a video that walks you through the code.

If you have been thinking about kicking the CMIS tires, this is a great opportunity to learn how to write a CMIS query and at the same time, enhance your Share dashboard with a new dashlet.

You can find the code and the video in our new CMIS space in the Developer Toolbox area in the Content Community.