Seth Gottlieb of Enter Content Here posted this blog on Alfresco, its new Facebook integration capability and what that demonstrates about Alfresco and it’s vision for ECM. Alfresco is integrating deeply with Facebook for social networking capabilities which from my perspective is consistent with their strategy of “oem”ing capabilities from the open source and open standards community that solve contextual problems and are best developed by engineers who are focused directly on that problem, for example, JBPM business process engine, MediaWiki engine integration, javascript engine integration etc
Seth remarks:
“Alfresco's strategy is to integrate with best of breed applications. You look at their website and they use MediaWiki for their wiki, WordPress for blogs, and Baynote for search. All the open standards and APIs give you great tools to do these integrations. I used to think of this as Alfresco talking the ECM talk but not walking the walk. Now I get that they see the old ECM vision as being as outdated as I do.”
Alfresco's implementation is based on more than a dozen complementary open source products. One of the attractive aspects of Alfresco as a company in my view has always been its discipline when it comes to focusing on core capabilities rather than getting bogged down creating proprietary implementations of contextual capabilities. The key to this strategy is making it happen in such a way that the architecture is consistent and the platform feels and acts like a single product. That is to say the functionality and APIs feel natural and related rather than bolted on. Following this strategy enables Alfresco to focus its innovation and engineering mindshare and energy on what is core to Alfresco: repository and ECM vision.
Early on this month at the first Alfresco community summit(s) (held in NYC and Paris, presentations here) we got our first taste of what Alfresco is focusing on as "core" both in terms of repository and in terms of its vision for enterprise grade content management.
On the repository front Alfresco is looking to continue improve on its enterprise capabilities:
- Scalable, fast, clusterable
- Federated view of repositories
- Web caching and clustering
- Multi-tenant hosting
- High availability
- Linear performance regardless of size
- Implementation of enterprise standards and infrastructure (BPM etc)
- Plug-in architecture
Also worth mentioning is the intention to consolidate the repository technologies that currently exist in the product. Alfresco DM (Document Management) and WCM (Web Content Management) are built on two different repository approaches. The plan is to define the superset of these two functionalities then harmonize and eventually homogenize the platform.
Alfresco brings a fresh perspective on the vision for Enterprise Content Management. Many ECM providers are focused on are focused only on the traditional ECM feature set: Collaboration, PBM, Portal, BI, Search. However, as Seth pointed out, Alfresco feels the future of ECM is in Enterprise Social Computing enabled by an open stack, open standards, enterprise grade high performance, and integration both inside and outside the firewall. What is Enterprise Social Computing and how is that different? The technology isn't all that different but mindset is entirely different. Where the technology does differ, it is in the fact that it is often "open", either the code is available or it is based on standards. The product's technical feature set is different in that in addition to the traditional ECM feature set, it includes capabilities for extending beyond it's own application space and beyond the firewall. However, the real change is in the frame of mind. It's a new focus on distribution, community, and collaboration over control. The power of transparency is evident in both the code and and this new vision of what ECM; what means, how we are supposed to interact with our content and with each other.
