Alfresco Community News

It has been a big week for CMIS, the Content Management Interoperability Specification. Yesterday the OASIS Technical Committee voted the 0.70b version of the draft to become the official Committee Draft and approved it for submission to the OASIS public review process.

In a CMSWire article, Barb Mosher talks about the early enthusiasm for the spec:

“And according to a poll of 768 AIIM members CMIS has already gained traction in 15% of these organizations. Something, CMSWatch analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe says is a “remarkably high figure”, considering it’s not official.”

John Newton talked earlier this week in his blog about Alfresco’s commitment to CMIS, the collaboration that has advanced the spec so quickly and how he thinks CMIS will impact the industry.

Thanks to a few early adopters there are already several viable CMIS-based applications, John mentions a couple of them in his blog. As the Alfresco community manager, I’m sure several of our members are starting to think about CMIS and how to take the first step.

A good place to start is the CMIS wiki page and CMISDev.org. We are also developing some training courses, the first of which will be a CMIS overview master class at the fall meetups.

We have an intensive, hands-on CMIS training bootcamp planned for our partners this fall. In return, we are asking them to deliver a series of codecamps later this year across the U.S. and Europe.

You may have seen our new partner solution showcase. We are planning something similar for CMIS-based applications and add-ons.

Stay tuned for more details, ping me if you have a CMIS solution to share with the community and I hope to see you at a meetup.

Alfresco’s community continues to grow at a rapid rate. We now have more than 100,000 registered members or seen another way; we now have 100,000+ potential people to answer questions in the forums, contribute to the forge, speak at our regional meetups, report and fix bugs and perform other good deeds for fellow community members.

We’ve always done our best to listen to the community especially when it comes to product direction. As the community grows it becomes a bit more difficult so from time to time we are going to ask you to participate in product roadmap surveys. We are launching the first one today.

We are considering offering the ability to perform in-browser editing of office document (MS Office as well as Open Office). To do this requires the installation of a plugin.

Companies routinely install the Flash plugin, the Acrobat reader plugin, and the Java plugin; the question is will they also install an office document editor plugin? Take our brief survey and let us know what you think.

We had a tremendous turnout last week at our first Alfresco South American meetup in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Matt Asay, Micheal Uzquiano and I represented Alfresco with support from two local partners, Infused Solutions and Montreal Informatica. Despite the challenges of real-time translation (we had two excellent translators), the day was highly interactive, the group asked a lot of questions and everyone seemed to enjoy the networking session.

For those of you on this side of the equator, we are planning our fall series of US and EMEA meetups. The list of cities includes Washington, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Milan, Madrid and Frankfurt. Do you have a case study or technical demo that you would like to present? The call for speakers is open.

We have also been hearing from community members in Atlanta and Chicago who are interested in forming local Alfresco user groups. The Atlanta group has created a site on Meetup.com, you can join there and learn about upcoming meeting. Stay tuned for news on the Chicago user group. If you are interested in forming a local user group, please let me know.

There are lots of reasons why open source software as a design, development and distribution model has made great strides over recent years.  Distributed development and the ability to discover like-minded collaborators, made possible with the Internet, was a game changer that gave way to a host of lower cost, reliable alternatives to proprietary offerings. And the recent economic downturn is just another shot in the arm for lower cost options.

What an amazing feeling it must have been to be an early committer to Linux, Apache or one of the other hugely successful projects. The open source culture of coming together, working as a team and giving something of value back to the community has proven to be a powerful motivator.

Commercial open source admittedly does not have the same appeal. After all, there is a profit-seeking company involved. As the open source model has matured, the number of projects has surged and so has the competition for skilled volunteers. Getting an open source project off the ground these days has become much more challenging.

This reality was one of the drivers behind the commercial open source business model.  Alfresco like MySQL among others take a dual-license approach. For instance, Alfresco offers an open source content management community edition that is free to download and use but we charge a subscription fee for the supported enterprise edition that has added extensions and services.

Since the core-code is the same, commercial open source vendors have to go to great lengths to provide value to subscription customers. This means high-quality support, services to help make the production installation hum and additional extensions.

Enterprise subscriptions fund the continued improvements to the community edition.  That’s a huge benefit for community users. Bugs are fixed, new features are added. What’s the catch? Support is provided by the community itself.

At Alfresco, there are several ways to support the community, here are just a few:

• contribute to the core code line
• contribute a bug fix
• participate at a community meeting
• submit a project or language pack to the forge
• contribute sample code, tips or tutorials
• answer questions in the forums

Commercial open source is still open source. You can download it, use it for free and derive tremendous value from it. At some point you might find that you need a little help, this is where the community comes in.  So take a few minutes and answer a question or two in the forum.

It’s kind of like giving blood, it is just the right thing to do.

Download Alfresco 3.2 Community Edition.

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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.

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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.

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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