Alfresco Community News

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.

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

Community Meetings

It was a great pleasure to meet so many of you in person at our Community Meetings in Washington, DC and Munich earlier this month.  I think I can speak for all of the “Alfrescans” in attendance when I say that we thoroughly enjoyed giving you a first-hand look at our new products and features. For those of you who were not able to attend, you can find the presentations in the Content Community and more photos on Facebook.

CMIS

On September 10th, Alfresco along with other leading ECM vendors (IBM, EMC, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and OpenText) announced the submission to OASIS of a draft specification for content management interoperability (CMIS).

The proposed specification defines a common set of APIs that will allow developers to write once and deploy against any CMIS-compliant content repository. You can read more on the wiki,  or download Labs 3 now to try it out.

CodeCamps

Over the past year we’ve held a few barcamps where community members had the chance to share experiences and best practices with each other. With the release of Surf we’ve decided to take barcamps to the next level by including some intense coding time so that community members can ramp up quickly on the new web development platform.

Together with some of our partners, we will be hosting codecamps throughout the US and Europe.  Look for the first one on November 10th in New York City led by Jeff Potts from Optaros.  Next up is December 12th in Washington, DC , this one sponsored by our friends at RivetLogic. Check the forums and Facebook for registration information later this month.

And by the way, you can pre-order Jeff Pott’s book, Alfresco Developer Guide. I’m told that he snuck in some Surf content just before his deadline.

Samples, Starter Aps and Other Developer Resources

We’ve been steadily adding resources to the Developer Toolbox space in the Content Community including a new space just for Share dashlet examples.

You can also check out Dr. Yong Qu’s blog for some cool new Surf examples. He has a getting started example that adds a “hello world” dashlet to Share. In a more advanced example, he shows how to access the Yahoo weather service to display the local weather forecast as a Share dashlet.

Surf Hits the Blogoshpere

Don’t just take it from us, read what Jeff Potts has to say in his blog Surfing in D.C. with Alfresco’s New Web Application Framework and Russ Danner in his blog Alfresco SURF: The next wave in enterprise WCM.

Time on Your Hands?

Now for those with a lot of time on your hands: you can read an interview of Alfresco’s Community Manager (me) on Jean Marie Pascal’s blog. You may want to caffeinate first