JBoss Innovation Award Winner!

We are honored to be selected as a JBoss Innovation Award Winner for our work with Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions using a healthy combination of JBoss and Alfresco to reinvigorate kaptest.com.

Working with the outstanding team at Kaplan, we used the JBoss Application Framework (including JBoss Seam) and the Alfresco Web Content Management platform to dramatically improve web operations, increase website performance, and decrease cost.

 Read more about it here.

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.

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.