JBoss World 08

As a sponsor of JBoss World this year, we’ve had a chance to talk with many JBoss users — both new and old. The conference is focused on a few major themes:

- Next Generation Web Applications with JBoss Seam, Richfaces, AJAX, Facelets, Portal, and more.
- Integration and SOA with JBoss’s new SOA platform that includes JBoss jBPM, ESB, and Rules
- Core technologies such as EJB3, Hibernate, and Cache
- Security and Management of large-scale, enterprise deployments

This is the largest JBoss World event yet, with almost 800 attendees. In our booth we’ve been showing off new web applications built with JBoss Seam/Facelets backed by the Alfresco content management platform and jBPM. Definitely a lot of excitement about using these technologies for next generation Enterprise 2.0 applications.

New White Paper on Open Source Document Management

Our latest white paper on Open Source Document Management is now available.

Register for it here.

In it, we talk about how open source ECM and portal software can help with fundamental document management requirements including:

• Rules based repository that can replace shared network drives
• Effective search and retrieval
• Standards based interfaces, including WebDAV, FTP, CIFS
• Library services
• Forums and other ways to facilitate team collaboration beyond email
• Workflow
• Scanning and document imaging support
• Records management
• Security

A Simple Intro to Alfresco’s WCM API

Starting to look at Alfresco 2.0 for Web Content Management? Interested in learning a little bit about what’s under the hood?

You may find our recent Technical Note useful: “Alfresco By Example – A Simple Introduction to Alfresco’s WCM API”

Feel free to download the package (as a zip file) from here. All source code is GNU GPL.

Here’s the intro:

We provide a few simple working examples that illustrate the use of new APIs included in the Web Content Management (WCM) module in Alfresco 2.0. Our purpose is to demonstrate a small portion of Alfresco’s underlying capability that will be useful to developers who are just starting to use (or starting to evaluate) Alfresco for dynamic web site content management and content delivery. We assume the reader has some familiarity with Alfresco 2.0 and its WCM features; for those who do not, we recommend reading Alfresco’s WCM Tutorial first.

Continue reading here.

New White Paper – Open Source Records and Email Management

Our latest white paper is available here

A sneak peek:

As Records Management continues to migrate onto the desktops of business users across the enterprise, and as new laws and regulations stipulate how content should be stored, classified, and destroyed, organizations have become caught in a profound business transformation.

Records Managers and IT personnel struggle to meet the day-to-day needs of rank and file employees creating and sharing content while dealing with highlevel challenges such as compliance, e-business initiatives, and knowledge sharing.

Legislation demands that enterprises manage the proper control, classification, storage, auditing, and disposition of records. General business users, however, prefer to continue their reliance on shared file systems and e-mail to productively manage and share content.

Adding to these problems is that up to now, traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems have been costly to implement and difficult to use. Enterprises of all types – from government agencies and financial institutions to insurance and healthcare companies – can benefit from a robust yet simplified approach to records management.

Alfresco moves to GPL

We get lots of questions regarding Alfresco’s move from the Mozilla Public License (plus Attribution) to the GNU GPL.

First off, what is the difference between MPL and GPL?

Well, a primary difference is in the reciprocity requirements. The GPL requires that any derivative work of the original software program be licensed under GPL, whereas the MPL requires only that modifications to one of the files containing Original Code or previous Modifications or a new file containing Original Code or previous Modifications must be released under MPL.

In other words, if GPL code resides anywhere within your end software solution/product (i.e., is compiled in), the entire software code base must be licensed under GPL. In contrast, you may combine/compile MPL code with closed-source code as long as your closed-source code does not mix with the MPL code at the file level.

The bottom line: any OEM or end-user who wants to build a solution using Alfresco Community (GPL) must also release their entire software source code base under GPL. Alfresco provides an exception to this if it involves software licensed under an OSI approved license by virtue of Alfresco’s Free/Libre Open Source Software Exception.

If you are an OEM or end-user who wants to ensure that your modifications, extensions, and customizations to Alfresco remain closed, well that’s where Alfresco’s Enterprise license comes in — it waives the reciprocity requirements of the GPL. This dual-licensing approach to open source software is very common (e.g., MySQL)

So now there are two (independent) reasons to purchase Alfresco Enterprise:

1) Support – to get responsive support and consulting help from Alfresco and their certified partners like Rivet Logic

2) GPL Waiver

Other thoughts:

• Alfresco is now truly open source as defined by OSI and free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation (“free” as in “free speech”).
• And as a result, Alfresco’s community should grow much larger. According to John Newton (Alfresco’s Chairman and CTO), this effect has been immediate.
• Look for more Alfresco integrations with other open source projects.

A great move in all respects.

Alfresco 2.0 Enterprise Released

Following on the heals of the 2.0 Community release a few weeks ago, Alfresco released the certified edition (Enterprise) for customers and partners last week. Highlights include:

• Open search–standards-based search across multiple Alfresco content repositories and other RSS or Atom repositories including blogs and wikis;
• Web content management production release–simple and rapid import of existing Web sites with support for any content authoring or Web development tool;
• Alfresco Module Packaging (AMP)–complete content solutions to share globally across all repositories, includes code, content model, content and folder structures; and
• AMP-enabled records management–develop and consistently distribute records management policies according to corporate rules through AMP.

One other important point is that Alfresco is now licensed under GPL, which is a change from the previous Mozilla + Attribution license. More on this in another post.

We’ve been using the WCM feature set since the Preview release a few months ago, and have a few client projects underway with it that are going very well.

They’ve done a great job particularly with multi-user authoring and version control (via sandboxed development), in-context preview (for Tomcat driven sites and static sites), XML/XForms-based content modeling and web content authoring, built-in templating (XSLT, XSL-FO, Freemarker), and complex workflow.

Deployment to QA/Staging and/or Production servers requires some manual effort or customization as of now (e.g., rsync using the shared network drive interface).  And there’s a long list of features that are still in development (as always , but overall the initial Alfresco WCM release is a powerful platform for managing both static and dynamic web sites, ranging from small static sites up to very large, enterprise wide sites (we’re working on both types).  And the latter is really where Alfresco distinguishes itself.

In contrast to most open source web CMS tools today, Alfresco is architected from the ground up to scale-out to support very large web sites and their associated production processes.

Alfresco Meet-up in Boston on March 12 2007

We’ll be presenting an architectural overview of the Alfresco open source ECM platform at an Alfresco community event sponsored by one of our clients — the Christian Science Monitor.

Here’s an outline of our presentation:

Alfresco ECM: Repository Architecture Overview

Alfresco has quickly become the leading Open Source Enterprise Content Management repository, with the emphasis on “Enterprise”. Underlying Alfresco is a solid, SOA-based architecture that is central to its continued evolution and success. This talk will highlight the salient characteristics of Alfresco’s architecture and its numerous services and APIs. A quick example of a real-world, large scale enterprise deployment scenario concludes the talk.

Talk By:
Sumer Jabri
Principal Architect, Rivet Logic Corporation
Alfresco Architect, and Author and Trainer for Alfresco’s Certified Developer’s Training Course
_________________

We’ll post the presentation later in the week.  If you’re in the New England area and interested in attending, click here for more details about the event.

Web 2.0 for business

Such is the topic at the New New Internet Conference here in Northern Virginia this week.  (Interesting name for a conference, considering some would argue that there’s really nothing new with so called Web 2.0 technologies.)

ZDNet summarizes some of the topics under discussion, where it’s noted that: “Technologies such as AJAX-style Web development, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and blogs are being used within businesses, typically in small-scale or experimental deployments. The social aspects of wikis, tagging and Web-enabled social networking can also improve collaboration among workers..”

It remains to be seen how pervasive these technologies become within enterprises, but a few things seem certain to me:

1.  Most companies and government organizations can benefit from more interaction with their customers, and interactive web technologies (Ajax, RSS, Blogs, Wikis) provide a great vehicle for doing so.  Thus, look for most corporate web sites to be retooled over the next several years to incorporate aspects of Web 2.0

2.  Most organizations can benefit from better internal communication and collaboration, and these technologies certainly help.  Watch for most company intranets and portals to incorporate Web 2.0 elements too.

3.  Much more content will be generated from enterprise Web 2.0 deployments, and at much faster rates, so content management systems must either accommodate this trend or become irrelevant.  My bet is that new open source ECM tools will do a better job than older proprietary ECM suites will.

Alfresco 1.4 Preview Released Today

Alfresco today released a preview of the latest version of its open source ECM platform, which includes important new features for workflow and records management.

Here’s the scoop:

Alfresco Preview Release 1.4 – Business Process and Lifecycle Management

The focus of Alfresco has always been to deliver a broad-based Enterprise Content Management System. In our first major release we chose to focus on document management and collaboration since very little existed in the open source world in comparison to the commercial world. Alfresco 1.4 focuses on delivering the following:

• Business Process and Lifecycle Management
• Full Auditing
• Records Management
• Image Capture Integration
• Performance

Release 1.4 has increased functionality in the areas of:

• Scalability – Large repository optimization
• Administration – Personal administration dashboard
• Standards – ODF and RSS
• Customization – JavaScript custom actions, URL “REST” style architecture
• Team Collaboration – Space Notes, Team Email, Workflow Task Management Dashboard
• Integrated Workflow – jBPM integration
• User Interface – MyAlfresco dashboard, Custom Space Portal View
• Records Management
• Image Capture Integration

Scalability

• Large Repository Optimization in multi-million document/asset environments
• Load Optimization
• Folder Management for large numbers of documents
• Lucene Index Optimization, Query Optimization

Administration

• Personal Administration Dashboard – Start Screen, Update password, name and email
• Rules Management – Ordering, ignore inherited and disable

Standards Support

• Open Document Format (ODF) – ODF Virtual File System
• RSS – Drag-and-Drop RSS

Customization

Custom Actions – JavaScript support for custom actions with

• Simple menu integration
• URL Access to all Actions – “REST” style architecture
• Extended JavaScript capabilities – Including checkin/out, transformation, template rendering

Content Contribution

• CIFS and FTP Performance – Unique name optimization moved to database

Team Collaboration

• Email Space Team – Simple Team email distribution
• Space Note – Custom View Space Description

Integrated Workflow

• jBPM Integration – Complex workflow support. JavaScript action integration for lifecycle management support
• Integrated MyTasks View – Dynamic data collection
• Full Audit Control

User Interface

• MyAlfresco Personal Dashboard – Wizard support to personalize default view though selection of Dashboard components
• Dashboard Component Support – Freemarker, JSP and URL
• Custom View – Custom Space Portal view

Records Management

Alfresco has added a number of features to manage electronic records to the basic repository functionality. Our intention is to get to the DOD 5015.2 certification later 2006/early 2007. 1.4 adds some critical features:

• Extended Rule Activation – Schedule, content and metadata change based activation. Important for managing retention dates and managing document lifecycles
• Retention and Archival Policies – Soft delete and purge
• DOD 5015.2 Type Definitions
• Fileplan Support – Fileplan, file name and the management of records categories is supported through JavaScript
• Full Auditing – Audit of every service invocation to a database table with dashboard access. E.g. Execute Action, Checkout, Rename, Enable Rule, Create Authentication, Set Permission

Image Capture Integration

• Kofax Integration – Kofax release script support

Other Features

• AJAX Infrastructure and examples

 

Download Alfresco

• Download Alfresco 1.4 Preview Release
  

Please note that downloads may not be available on all Sourceforge mirror sites immediately. Alfresco Customers recieve immediate access to downloads via the customer portal.

 

Fast Facts

Operating System

• Linux
• MacOS
• Unix
• Windows

Database

• Any Database Supported by Hibernate including:
• MySQL
• Oracle
• SQL Server

Application Server

• JBoss Application Server
• Apache Tomcat
• J2SE 5.0 (JRE 5.0)

Browser

• Firefox
• Internet Explorer

Portal

• JBoss Portal
• Liferay Portal
• JSR-168

Languages

• Wide variety including:
• Chinese
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Russian
• Spanish

Technologies Used

• Java
• Spring Aspect-Oriented Framework
• ACEGI – Aspect-Oriented Security Framework
• MyFaces JSF Implementation
• Hibernate ORM Persistence
• Lucene Text Search Engine
• JLAN
• JBoss Application Server
• JBoss Portal
• JBoss jBPM
• POI File Format Conversion
• PDFBox – PDF Conversion
• OpenOffice
• MySQL

Supported Interfaces

• CIFS/SMB Microsoft File Share Protocol
• JSR-168 Portlet Specification
• JSR-127 Java Server Faces
• FTP
• WebDAV
• Web Services

Open source services: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

Matt Asay suggests in this Infoworld post that open source service vendors should pick their battles, and focus on a particular set of open source projects/packages.

We couldn’t agree more. (And Matt mentions us as one of the successful companies doing so!)

Of course, this is just fundamental business strategy that applies to companies of all types — open source or not. “Differentiate or die” applies to everyone in the marketplace.

How does this drive our business strategy?

1. Select the best in class open source projects in the domain areas in which we have experience.

2. Invest a tremendous amount of energy in deeply understanding the selected technologies, and in applying them to solve real world business problems. This includes partnering closely with the open source technology vendors and projects, and contributing to their communities in numerous ways.

3. Find voids in the marketplace and transform our open source technology investments into market leading, clearly differentiated services and solutions.

4. Deliver tangible value to our customers using our differentiated expertise.

5. Wash, rinse, and repeat.