San Jose : Alfresco Community Summit

Today Alfresco held a community summit & bar camp in San Jose, Ca. In my opinion this was the most valuable Alfresco event to date. Great Job guys.

Unfortunately I was not able to attend in person but was able to catch most of the event on line.

The event was one highlight after another. All of the speakers did really well and every presentation had something to offer. To get the presentations log on to the Alfresco content community (http://hosted4.alfresco.com/alfresco/faces/jsp/login.jsp)

John Newton (Alfresco CTO and Chairman) began by describing at a high level, the vision for Alfresco, both as a technology and as a player in the market. Alfresco is working hard to build an open source based platform for Social Computing. Social Computing is all about collaboration via social media tools both in and outside the firewall. Social computing is a growing concern in the enterprise as new generations of workforce are hired on. Each generation is more comfortable with the internet and its ever growing brand of social tools (including wikis, blogs, and platforms for social networking like Facebook and MySpace) than the generation before it. These employees are used to these tools and expect them to be available regardless of where they are working from. IT on the other hand is often responsible for security and compliance / regulatory concerns. Many IT shops initially push back on these social media tools because they lack the enterprise features that meet the requirements mandated by the regulatory groups (SOX etc.) As we move forward in this brave new world where the lines between inside and outside the firewall are blurred we'll need a platform that delivers our social tools outside our corporate walls while maintaining our ability to meet our enterprise requirements.

John explained with great clarity that in today's market there are no products with exception to Microsoft Share Point and Alfresco that fill this space. Most other relevant vendors are far too specialized or are fragmented along diverse product lines. John explained that while Share Point is able to operate in the space, it is not an ideal platform for the job and that it also comes at the high price of end-to-end vendor lock-in with Microsoft technologies. Alfresco on the other hand has been designed from the ground up on open technology specifically to fill this space.

Additionally, John spoke about plans within Alfresco to increase the level of transparency and community involvement with respect to the product road map. Alfresco plans to improve on accuracy and management of customer expectations with regard to the content and timing of releases. Alfresco has decided that delivering on time is priority #1 with respect to releases. The saying goes "on time, on budget, or at quality; pick two." In this case, quality and completeness will take a back seat to on time delivery. Concerned?! Put your mind at ease -- this makes a lot of sense. Enterprises require predictability. An inability to plan can often be crippling to a project. Knowing exactly when the next release of Alfresco will be available is absolutely critical to a healthy relationship between Alfresco and "The enterprise." It's important to know that when the product ships it will have what you need in it. Alfresco is taking steps to increase this awareness as well. They have decided to publicly prioritize the work they are and the work they are not planning on doing. This system is known as the MoSCoW system. MoSCoW stands for Must do, Should do, Could do, and Won't do. This is a wonderful addition to the product/project roadmap. Community members will know exactly when the release will take place and what they can reasonably be able to expect to be in it. Similarly you will find a list of items Alfresco "Won't do." It is just as important to understand where we are not going as it is to understand where we plan to be in the future. I am looking forward to this new level of clarity and transparency in the the road map.


From a technical perspective, web scripts continue to take center stage. Jeff Potts, Optaros principal ECM architect and Alfresco's contributor of the year gave a brief overview of Webscripts. A Web Script is the ability in Alfresco to create a RESTful service in Alfresco. Building a webscript is a really powerful and easy to do. You don't have to be a hard core programmer to do amazing things with Webscripts. If you can handle a (very) little XML, javascript and freemarker you are all set. Javascript is a really light and very easy programming language used to describe business logic, Free Marker is a simple template languag, and XML is used to describe and "bind" the service to the system.

After Jeff's introduction we saw some fantastic examples from customers, service integrators and Alfresco employees of what can be accomplished with a simple webscripts containing a few lines of "code."

Also worth mentioning is that Alfresco is currently hosting a Webscripts competition. You can find out more about it here: http://www.alfresco.com/partners/programme/webscripts/
Everyone who submits a valid web script will receive a limited edition Alfresco T-shirt. Our first place winner will receive an Apple iPod 16 GB Touch, the winner will be announced on April 4th, 2008.

For me the apex of the Webscript wonderment was the demonstration of the Dynamic website framework developed in partnership with the Alfresco sales engineers, the community and the product development team. Michael Uzquiano of Alfresco led a entertaining tour of the framework, demonstrating how simple it was to edit a dynamic website driven by Alfresco. One of the best ways to make changes to a website is to find the page and component you need to edit on your site and simply edit it directly. The website framework allows you to do just that. The framework supports the ability to enter edit mode anywhere on the site, at which point you are able to see how the page has been partitioned in to components. From that point you can add, remove or edit the individual components. All of this works seamlessly with the rest of the Alfresco WCM capabilities including sandboxing and the ability to promote / deploy your website to different environments (staging, live etc.) This is really exciting work. Michael said that we can expect to see the work he demonstrated in the the approximately a month.

Again I want to thank everyone who made this event possible -- it really was terrific!