Content Log

CMIS one year on - soon in public review

Autumn marks the new school year, business year and CMIS year

It's that time again. Autumn and the new school year and we are about to take another major step with CMIS, the Content Management Interoperability Services proposed standard at OASIS, and we will be that much closer to having CMIS become an official standard. As of today, a majority of the technical committee has voted to put the CMIS specification to public review with zero no votes.

I was recently reminded that I wrote about the public introduction of CMIS around the same time last year. This was the time that IBM, Microsoft and EMC decided it was time to announce the Content Management Interoperability Services that they started October 2006 and release it to OASIS to become an official standard. At that time Alfresco was fortunate enough to have been involved in the process for the previous year before joining the original three, along with Open Text, BEA and SAP. For the year before that, IBM, Microsoft and EMC broke away from AIIM iECM committee to speed up a process that itself had been going since Autumn 2005. Much of the groundwork was laid with iECM and the parallel, but Java-focused JSR-283 committee. All in all, this will not be a fly-by-night standard, but a standard that has been carefully deliberated, considered and grounded in real world use cases.

This last year has seen the number of vendors participating increase substantially with plenty of beneficial results. We have had a few face to face meetings that have triggered some great collaboration in a very competitive industry. The number of eyes looking at the spec has increased, but so have the minds contributing new ideas and expertise. SAP presented real world requirements that needed security in the form of ACLs, so something that we had been willing to punt on before, we added in. Microsoft, IBM, SAP and other owners of search engines participated in a working group to define APIs to get changes to a repository to keep search indexing up to date. Also, Day and Nuxeo set up an Apache project to share Java API and SPI components along with Gabriele Columbro from Alfresco and our friends at SourceSense. David Caruana, Alfresco's chief architect, contributed interfaces to handle renditions and specifically thumbnail previews.

More importantly, committee members were building real life implementations of the specification at each stage to really test its implementability and completeness. As Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft once said, "I relish the fact that CMIS is retrospective." It can work with existing repositories, not be overly prescriptive, but still describe a powerful content application platform. Regular plug-fests ensured that the systems interoperated with each other. This alone distinguishes it from all other content management standardization initiatives - real life integration matching the current state of the specification. Dave Caruana's Java test harness, now in Chemistry, provided a tool for other vendors to test the completeness of their server implementations.

Developers started creating new applications based upon the early specs, such as CMIS Spaces and CMIS Explorer, which tested its usability as a platform interface for content-centric applications. CMIS's initial focus on real-life use cases has so far paid off as the level of functionality seems to match new applications being built and existing applications integrate content management capability, such as Drupal, Joomla and Confluence have with Alfresco through CMIS. I certainly encouraged anyone who wanted to integrate with Alfresco to do so using CMIS.

Today, unless some catastrophic event occurs, CMIS will go into public review. This is the last step in OASIS before becoming an official standard. As the process is laid out, it could take a maximum of 6 months for completion of the step and CMIS becoming a standard. It also means that only typos and minor corrections will change in the spec, currently at version 0.7. The determination of the spec leads, David Choy from EMC as Chairman and Al Brown from IBM and Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft as Editors, has ensured that we got to this point and they have done an excellent job marshalling the process along. Everyone on the committee seems determined to see this to as speedy a completion as possible. It seems likely that CMIS will become a standard in the first quarter of 2010. I can't see anything getting in the way of this other than the US government disapproving or Google, whichever is more powerful. All the rest of the major players backing the standard. (Craig Randall, formerly of EMC Documentum, just popped up at the last call representing Adobe.)

Being the eternal optimist, I have very high hopes for CMIS, but I believe I have reason to be optimistic. I have seen it before first hand with SQL. Without vendor lock-in, it will now be possible to build content-rich applications that can run against many different systems. Customers will be able to move content from repository to another. It will be much easier to find stuff in random repositories without having to build multiple connectors. As the breadth of applications and utilities becomes available against these repositories, usage and deployment of content repositories will become more widespread and grow a much bigger pie for all vendors. As Alan Pelz-Sharpe reports in CMS Watch, CMIS is already gaining traction in 15% of AIIM members before it has reached standard status.

I'm really looking forward to this new year!

Professional Open Source Software

I am constantly asked about why we put our software out as open source. Is it some sort of altruism? Communism? People who have worked with proprietary platforms may not be familiar with open source and its implications or the advantages or disadvantages for the products they are using or for the users’ organizations.

 

Image under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share-Alike License

Much of the early development of what is now known as open source started with the GNU project by Richard Stallman in the early 1980s to create development tools that emulated Unix, but did not require a license from AT&T or any payment to anyone for that matter. Stallman labeled this “Free Software” and felt that the freedom to use this software was paramount. This early development culminated in the mid-1990s in the creation of a completely open and free Unix-based operating system called Linux by Linus Torvalds under the same license terms as GNU. Torvalds designed Linux to be open and to allow other hackers to contribute to it.

In 1999 at the inspiration of Eric Raymond and his book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and through the organization of Tim O’Reilly, the community of developers and hackers who had created this free and open software decided to call the movement “Open Source”. Raymond’s and others’ reasoned that “Open Source” would be clearer to the potential users of the software and less threatening to businesses. This change was also timed to coincide with the release of the Netscape browser and the creation of the Mozilla Foundation.

Not long after this, open source got a huge boost when IBM changed strategy of building proprietary Unix systems and decided to adopt open source and Linux as a means of competing against Sun and others in the development tools market. IBM started actively contributing to the Apache project, a collection of open source tools and the most wide used web server. By contributing to Apache, IBM did not have to reinvent tools for integrating with various web technologies and actually benefited from the development as others, just as others had benefited from the IBM’s contributions. Before long, other large vendors started actively contributing to open source.

This also set the stage for start-ups in the early part of the 2000s to create businesses based upon open source and to employ a professional open source business model. MySQL was a database system originally developed in the early 1990s and had used the GNU GPL license to distribute their software. When Martin Mickos became CEO in the 2001, he helped develop the dual license business model of distributing a GPL-version of the software and selling ordinary software licenses to those who wanted support or wanted to distribute their software without the GPL license. Shortly after this, Marc Fleury took his JBoss application server and licensed it under the more liberal LGPL or Lesser/Library GPL license. JBoss raised venture capital and started to acquire other Java-based projects. Both companies thrived in a down economy proving the value of distribution via the open source model and developing business through selling support and services.

• Open source became a change or really a revolution in business model and means of production rather than anything technological. It is underpinned by three main principles:
• Opening intellectual property and transparency spreads faster than concealing intellectual property and builds a bigger pie
• Share and share alike of intellectual property will grow that intellectual property faster
• We should all reuse other people's intellectual property and stop wasting time re-inventing the wheel

This change in business model led to a flurry of start-ups to use open source as their preferred distribution model, including Alfresco in 2005. The advantages of this approach became clear with the success of Linux, MySQL, JBoss and others. These include:

• Broad distribution of product through internet download
• The ability of users to try the product before buying, eliminating much of the sales and demand generation activities of ordinary enterprise software
• Much broader testing and code review of products in the beta and product phase of development
• Word of mouth marketing and open source meet-ups reducing the cost of marketing
• Lower cost of development through use of other open source components and contributions from the many extensions that users create
• Bug fixes from users end up fixing problems themselves

The benefits to the user and business community also became clear:

• Users were not locked into a proprietary platform and they were free to use the open source version of the product
• The vendors providing these products were the support source upon which they could rely if they needed fixes, advice, warranty or indemnity
• The open source vendors were held more accountable than the proprietary vendors since there was always the possibility to switch back to the free version
• Users could see the source code and either make the minor changes they wanted without waiting for the next release or even change wholesale parts of the product
• Because of the lower cost economics and economies of scale of open source distribution, the lower cost of product was passed on to the consumers of services
• The transparency of open source means that there is greater visibility of changes coming and what bugs already exist
• Through the community and transparency aspects of open source, the users played a more intimate role in the development of the products with a greater influence on product direction

There are lots of open source programs and projects out there and many of them are terrible. However, open source works well when software is a commodity and you cannot tell one piece of software from another - e.g. word processors, web browsers, operating systems. When software is a commodity, you are paying only for a brand where the company is getting money for no changes in the software. Professional open source works well when enterprise software is commoditized. Alfresco was created because of the increasing difficulty in differentiating one enterprise content management system from another.

Open source development is painted as chaotic and unreliable by proprietary, but in reality it is generally just as controlled as any other project. There are project leads that make decisions and no more than a handful of people developing it. Sometimes these developers can come from more than one company. This is made easier because there are no secrets or intellectual property to hide. However, the project leads have the final decision on what goes in or out. There can, however, be many times more testing involved than ordinary software. In most successful open source projects, you can have hundreds of people downloading the software and testing it out and sometimes even providing fixes because they could see and fix the source code.

In order to make this process work, somebody must pay for it. Usually an open source company is in markets directly adjacent to the software, such as system integration. By supporting Linux, IBM makes its money by selling hardware that runs Linux and selling consulting services to build solutions for customers. IBM has a huge patent portfolio, but they make twice as much money selling hardware and services around open source than they make from licenses from their patents.

More recently, projects that had been purely community-driven are seeing the opportunity to create a professional open source company that is closely associated with the project. A couple of years ago, Dries Buytaert got funding for Acquia to create professional services around Drupal, the open source web content management project that he started in 2001. Recently, some of the core committers of the Lucene and Solr projects have created Lucid Imagination to provide support and enterprise features on top of those two open source projects. The demand was there in much the same way that previous professional open source project have seen for support, bug fixes and features. They also have fit into categories that are consolidating and commoditizing.

Alfresco Software makes money by selling technical support on the Alfresco system. Not everyone wants or needs support, but it isn’t necessary for everyone to want it. With over a million downloads, a small percentage of users who need support in a product environment, especially in the Global 2000, are sufficient to support the community, the project and the company. By participating in the $4 billion enterprise content management market, Alfresco has sufficient scale to continue growing and service the open source community and product.

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New Alfresco 3.2 was designed for the Great Recession

Back at the height of the market downturn in October, we looked at how Alfresco should address the rapidly changing economic situation. Rather than being pessimistic, we believed that this was a real opportunity for us. Times like these wipe the decks clean and provide openings for companies that provide value for money and can replace existing older technologies. This is the fourth recession in my career and what past experience has shown is that management and IT are under pressure to do more with less, cut costs, make remaining people more productive, and implement new technology if there is a clear zero-sum gain in cost reduction. Regulation also always comes after the disaster hits, but the new regulatory regime must be addressed with fewer resources. It seemed like a perfect time to be in open source!

Today we are releasing Alfresco Community Edition 3.2 and it really is an ECM designed for the Credit Crunch. We have been expanding the capabilities that generally been out of reach of anyone who could not afford a traditional ECM system, but who can now use one to reduce costs, improve productivity, reduce long-term costs of development of content applications or prove compliance. This release tackles  records management capabilities, handling and archiving of emails, mobile access for the worker on the go, the latest and greatest implementation of CMIS, and new extranet collaboration capabilities. All of these are targeted at what we felt would be important factors in a lean economic environment. All are also available as open source to help reduce the cost of managing content in enterprises struggling to do more with fewer resources.

New records management capabilities are very important for us, because this is the platform with which we will be going to the US government to certify for DoD 5015.2, but also because it provides a level of control that any organization facing regulatory requirements will find useful, such as life cycle management, retention policies, review process and disclosure and transparency controls. Built upon the new Share and SURF platforms these records management capabilities are the basis for a new records management application that is planned for certification at the end of September. To support this, we have added a new interactive forms system based upon the Yahoo YUI Ajax library and now allows both types and aspects to be applied and used in Share, including new records or regulatory metadata. By basing these capabilities on Share, we get a lot of the benefits of Share, including in browser viewing without downloading the record, URL-addressability of records information, and collaborative capabilities such as commenting, tagging and discussions. A new import and export capability is designed to simplify archiving records sets and import them to separate records repositories if necessary. A new records life cycle management automatically handles the physical storage of records to offline or tertiary storage. This is also the first records management system designed to be queryable by the proposed OASIS CMIS standard.

New records capabilities are destined for DoD 5015.2 certification

Related to and required by records management is a new ability to manage and archive emails using the IMAP email protocol. Virtually any email client can access, archive and categorize documents, records, attachments and other content with no plug-in required, because the Alfresco repository supports the IMAP protocol natively just as it does CIFS, WebDAV and NFS. This email integration is designed for two purposes. The first is for archiving and managing email, especially records. This interface allows you to manage email according to your organizational policies. If the policy is to archive everything and figure out organization later, the Alfresco rules can accept all content and can invoke rules to help organize, classify and apply the appropriate retention policies. However, if it is important for users to help classify the email as records, then users can drag and drop emails into the appropriate repository folders within their standard email client.

Manage and archive emails as records or access Alfresco from your email client

The second purpose for IMAP integration is to allow users who live in email to be able to access content from the repository without leaving email. Most browsers are IMAP capable, such as my Mac Mail client, and we have done extensive testing on Microsoft Outlook. Metadata and context of content is presented to the user with Freemarker script templates, which are very easy to configure. This metadata appears as email text in folders from the repository and the actual content appears to be an attachment to the email. This makes it easy to forward or send documents as either simple attachments or who content with metadata. It is also easy to use Alfresco from devices designed specifically for email such as the Blackberry, iPhone, Palm Pre or other mobile mail devices.

Every recession seems to create a step change in technology usage and this recession is probably no different. Smart phones now outnumber the number of laptops sold and for many tasks they can be just as effective. That is why we felt that content will be increasing consumed, processed and created on these small devices. However, the smaller form factor means that you can’t just take a big app and make it smaller. With Alfresco 3.2, we have looked at the tasks that people perform today and what content management tasks they could perform on mobile devices. The result is a version of Alfresco Share designed to fit the form-factor of these new smart phones, starting first with the iPhone. According to StatCounter, between the iPhone and iTouch, Apple has approximately 37% of the mobile browser market. It is also the first ECM application designed for business processes on the go. We have focused not only on browsing and access of content, but also on the business processes by allowing users to start and track workflows and activities around content collaboration.

Alfresco Share is now designed for use on the go with the Apple iPhone

This release also has the most complete implementation of the latest release of CMIS, version 0.61 of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee, of which David Caruana and I are members. We have implemented both the REST-based Atom Pub and SOAP Web Services protocols. Dave has spent a lot of time on these capabilities and it is the future of our API. A lot of the work has gone into the new query language that provides SQL-like query capabilities along with other capabilities that had previously required using Lucene. Alfresco’s implementation of CMIS has been the basis of integrations with Joomla, Drupal, Atlassian’s Confluence, CMIS Spaces and CMIS Explorer and we expect more in the future. Dave and Gabriele Columbro are planning on contributing some our experience to the  Apache Chemistry project. Dave is hoping to contribute our CMIS client test harness, which may be used against any CMIS and currently contains over 100 tests covering all aspects of the spec including schema validation.

Some of the CMIS integrations to Alfresco include Joomla, Drupal and Confluence

Following release of Share last year and updates earlier this year, we have added a number of capabilities to support the use of Share in an extranet in order to provide content collaboration outside the enterprise firewalls or in the cloud. We have been testing scaling Share to tens of thousands of concurrent users. Since extranet use cases are more people-oriented, we have extended the contextual information available about users in the users profiles. We have also simplified the administration of users, groups and sites from a new administration framework integrated into Share. Share can also take advantage of some of the advanced metadata management capabilities of the Alfresco repository with the new forms system mentioned earlier and explicit support for types and aspects in Share. Some of the new user interface components available include Content Favorites and a new Image Gallery. This release of share is Cloud-ready for EC2 and other cloud services.

Alfresco’s Web Content Management Platform has been improved to support larger authoring and deployment environments better. A new parallel deployment engine uses multi-threaded updates to web farms for higher performance updates of web sites. A new web clustering architecture allows authoring installations to scale to more users and allows the deployed servers to also be clustered for shared services. A change to the architecture of previewing means that changes to either content or even code can be instantaneously previewed in a test environment. Improved rendering and transformation of web content provides better support for XML includes, XSL transforms and execution of Freemarker and Web Scripts in the web tier. A new pluggable deployment architecture allows you to deploy to multiple delivery environments such as to file systems, other Alfresco servers or external and web-edge delivery channels.

New WCM capabilities include better scaling of authoring environment and new parallel deployment to web farms

Sorry for the long post, but there is a lot that we have been working on while the Great Global Recession has been raging on. Our goal has been to help you cut costs of traditional ECM, improve your productivity through mobility and efficiency in handling content, address new compliance issues with the first open source records management system, help tame the great email beast, and engage your customers, partners and employees with new WCM and extranet capabilities. We also hope to future-proof your content applications by delivering the first and best with CMIS implementations as they appear from the OASIS technical committee. Last year, we showed you how we can save costs by providing apples to apples comparisons between ECM vendors using the US GSA Schedule 70 pricing. Now we hope to help you beat even those saving with new capabilities that we are releasing with the Alfresco Community 3.2 download. We hope you give it a try at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Community_Edition

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The Start of Open Source

I have been researching the origins of open source recently and realized that I had missed an important anniversary last year.

On a very rainy day in early February 1998, a group of people very familiar with free software met at the Palo Alto home of Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute. Many in the free software movement felt that they were on the verge of something very big. Netscape had just announced that it would make its source code freely available. Influenced by an article by Eric Raymond called the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the management at Netscape came to the conclusion that this was the way to build software. Chris invited Eric, Michael Tiemann, Larry Augustin, John Hall, Todd Anderson and Sam Ockman to session to discuss the unique opportunity of publicity this would create and how best to present the free software movement to business as a whole. Chris's living room provided a venue to brainstorm on new ways to brand free software.

The heavy presence not in that room was Richard Stallman - RMS. Richard Stallman provided a Patrick Henry-like defense of free software in a "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" sort of way. Although the group agreed and aligned with the principles of free software - free to share, free to choose, free to reuse, free to distribute, RMS's uncompromising stance on the term "free software" inhibited business users from taking up free software. Although business users of free software, particularly younger, early adopters, could agree and sympathize with these principles, they were suspicious of anything free. The term was too closely related to freeware or shareware that was usually a one-man outfit that relied on the contributions of those who liked the software. Freeware did not mean that the source code was freely available, so meant that there was generally no one else to work on the product to improve or fix it. RMS felt that this called for education, not stepping away from the term free that emphasized the principles of freedom.

The concept of open and free software has actually been around as long as their have been computers. Universities, in particular, had freely shared software and collaborated between each other to create new programs and new software systems. The Unix operating system and its successor Linux owe much to this early open, collaborative and free development of software. However, up until this date, the closest thing to describe this concept, process and set of values was the Free Software Foundation and the principles listed on its web site. However, the confusion of the word "free" and stridency of the Free Software Foundation's founder, RMS, was putting off business people. All the people in the room had experienced the frustration of pushing free software. As Sam Ockman pointed out, "People are cynical; they expect higher costs of ownership with anything that is labeled as 'free.' 'If I don’t pay now, I’ll pay later,' was a common mindset I encountered from IT buyers." Even worse was "Free? That sounds like communism!" I have to admit that I fell into that camp.

The group in Palo Alto felt that presented with an opportunity as big and important as Netscape adopting an approach of free software development, they must make the most of it. They had two objectives, to help make Netscape successful in its venture into free software and how could they take advantage of the publicity surrounding this release. With the second goal in mind, they took the approach of essentially rebranding free software. Eric Raymond, who had authored an influential essay on free software, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, felt the traditional term, "free software," had been a millstone around all of their necks, and was a nonstarter as rhetoric to convince any but the hard-core believers. Michael Tiemann had been running the oldest company selling free software, Cygnus Software, and was equally frustrated. As Michael put it, "We wanted a term that was more resonant with the business benefits rather than the moral arguments."

The session was not very long, perhaps about two or three hours. Michael Tiemann advocated the "source ware". Christine Peterson, a futurist from the Foresight Institute, liked the term "Open Source". Eric Raymond carried a lot of influence in this discussion. He was the one that had helped to persuade Netscape to go with free software. He was also an articulate spokesperson for the development methodology and a self-professed extrovert. Eric liked the term "Open Source" as well and open source carried the day.

A few days later, Eric raised the call to dump "free software" and start to use "open source".  The divide between Free Software and Open Source could not be clearer. Later that month, the Open Source Initiative was formed by Eric and Bruce Perens. Bruce's definition of principles of Debian Linux were used as the guiding principles of Open Source. In April, Tim O'Reilly brought together all the influencers and thinkers of the free software movement including Linus Torvalds of Linux fame and Brian Behlendorf of Apache. As is typical of open source and legalese, the passive statement was issued that "a vote was taken" to call the movement "Open Source". Tim called his conference the Open Source Conference from there on. RMS still hung on to the importance of freedom and the term "Free Software". He also complained about being "written out of history." However, the principles had generally not changed, only the tone, just as a new ruling government would take after a revolution.

With Netscape now open source and everyone other than the Free Software Foundation using the term, open source really took off. By coinciding with the massive explosion of internet and the most widely used software of the web being the open source Apache web server, open source could only accelerate. It also didn't hurt that on May 14, 1998 that Janet Reno caught Microsoft completely off guard by filing anti-monopoly charges against Microsoft. This set a white hat / black hat positioning that continues to galvanize the open source community. Although it would take some years for Mozilla, the reformed Netscape browser, to take off with Firefox, to take off, the launch of open source certainly caught IBM's attention. A little over a year later, IBM would commission the Bowen report and decide to move their tools and Unix businesses toward open source and Linux. Red Hat launched its enterprise business after acquiring Cygnus and really displace both existing proprietary Unix system and Windows systems with an enterprise grade Linux.

The business momentum stalled a bit after the Dot Com Crash, but open source did not miss a beat. The value of open source became crystal clear to a lot of people in the constraints of a recession, just as they are doing now. Open Source didn't really start with the name open source, but it certainly accelerated from that point and the timing couldn't have been better.

Twittering My Life Away

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll!

John Lennon - Watching the Wheels, 1980

Earlier this year, I said that I would blog more, what I should have said, but didn't really realize was I would micro-blog more. I have been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately, even though I signed up two years ago in April 2007. Back then, I couldn't really tell what the point was. What could you actually communicate in 140 characters. In fact, the founders of Twitter back then saw it more of a tool to merge mobile SMS with web. Now, I guess I can't get enough of it. Find me at @johnnewton

As some people in Alfresco started to get into Twitter more and saw how other open source projects were using it, I became more curious. However, it really took off for me in mid-January. People who I tracked and respected were also on Twitter and they were putting up the links, blogs and thoughts that influenced them. This became a much better way to dissect the blogosphere and understand what was going on. I also found great advice on Twitter that said think of it as a river - you don't drink the river, you drink from the river. If you don't try to consume the whole think but just sample, you will find it a much more satisfying experience.

I started to find the mini-content compelling. I also found the power of the Retweet (RT) and started to pass on what I was reading as well. I asked my friends on Twitter what tools should I use on my Mac to consume Twitter and learned about TweetDeck, a great multi-channel Tweet machine. If you are familiar with the concept in psychology of Flow, Twitter had all the flow of a video game and what became clear was that it was simpler and more addictive than Facebook, which had become more of an occasional dalliance for me. The multi-channel input of TweetDeck, Web and SMS, meant that I could share what I was doing at conferences and meetings like the CMIS face to face or the Accel Stanford Symposium.

It's really like getting sucked into a vortex once you realize what Twitter is. But it is really hard to describe. Some people have described it as a very simple, disciplined email of 140 characters. Eric Schmidt poo-poo'ed it as a poor man's email. John Battelle described it as real-time indexing of live conversations, which he said is "insanely interesting". Anyone who is addicted to it, knows that it is so much more than any of those. It is an open API, which means that there are lots of tools like the Twittercounter that allows you to chart the growth of your followers. Or the addictive Twitterfall that I refuse to go near again, because I would never get out. It is also a community of people that you can ask any question and probably get an answer. There is also constant tagging of information with the # character linking to any subject such as #Alfresco. This makes it a very powerful search tool. It also makes it a constantly moving and evolving taxonomy based upon people and concepts that is self-adapting.

I have been struggling to find a metaphor for Twitter and have yet to find one. A roman forum where everyone gathers? A party telephone line where anyone can listen in on your conversation and you know that's what's happening? Twitter really is something new and something evolutionary at the same time. It's extremely simple. The open API makes it extremely adaptable. And there are hundreds of your friends telling you what's on their mind and what they are looking at or doing. Everyone seemed to be acutely aware of my trip to DC with my son. It was extremely cool to share thoughts with the whole world during Obama's inauguration. It's search. It's a categorization of the world.

It's also growing hyperbolicly. Look at the stats on alexa.com. No wonder Facebook felt compelled to copy Twitter. It is really, really addictive. I have found ways to control use, but I have no intention of stopping as some people have. What I have found is that peak impact of anything I write is between the hours of 4pm and 7pm GMT, so I can spend some time posting then. It is also much quieter in the morning UK time, so it is a good time to see what is going on in the world. Much better than the portals or even news sites, although it doesn't completely replace them -- yet.

There are already spoofs on Twitter that talk about the next big thing after Twitter. There is even talk about nano-blogs, whatever they are. I can't really imagine what's next, but I think Twitter probably still has an amazing future going forward.

Building a stronger open source product

It has been fascinating to watch the Alfresco community grow over the last few years. We really had no idea what the shape would be when we started and who would adopt our product and our project. Since 2005, we have been joined by some great world-class companies, household brands and some of the best names in small and medium size businesses. We are very pleased with the adoption of both the open source and enterprise products. What we are puzzled about though is that some of the biggest enterprises in the world (and I mean Fortune 50 and even Fortune 10) are only using the open source version of the product. We have designed our enterprise services specifically to cater to this type of customer.

Some open source systems try to prevent companies using their free version by either crippling their non-enterprise products or by letting their open source versions run into a destabilized state. Back in 2006, we came to the conclusion that we didn't want to hinder the open source version of the product. To hinder the product would make it difficult for certain governments to use our product and would encourage the community to build around imposed limitations. We don't want to provide you with a crippled version, because it doesn't really do the product justice when you try it. And we are trying to provide you with one of the biggest benefits of open source, eliminating lock-in to proprietary software. In fact, in the latest release of Alfresco, we went well out of our way to incorporate many of the changes that we have been putting into place for our enterprise customers into the Labs version of Alfresco.

MySQL has been experimenting with changes to their business model recently that attempts to draw a line on what is fair in open source. After all, it is the revenue that is generated from the enterprise subscription that helps fund, grow and improve the freely available open source version. When Matt, John and I met with Jonathan Schwartz last year, he said that he felt that it is important to have a completely open source core and system, but that in order to have the tools to run MySQL in production or in a high scale, high availability environment, it is only fair to have those tools be available as enterprise and for purchase. Interesting concept, but does it work?

We took some time earlier this year to consider what was fair and what are the core principles to which we want to adhere. We tried to determine where it is right to charge for a service or a function and where do we defend a capability as open source. If we are held to account, these are the principles that I expect we can apply with transparency, consistency and fairness:

• We must insure that customers using our enterprise version are not locked into that choice and that open source is available to them. To that end, the core system and interfaces will remain 100% open source.
• We will provide service and customer support that provides insurance that systems will run as expected and correct problems according our promised Service Level Agreement
• Enterprise customers will receive fixes as a priority, but that we will make these fixes available in the next labs release. Bugs fixed by the community are delivered to the community as a priority.
• We will provide extensions and integrations to proprietary systems to which customers are charged. It is fair for us to charge and include this in an enterprise release as well.
• Extensions and integrations to ubiquitous proprietary systems, such as Windows and Office, will be completely open source.
• Extensions that are useful to monitor or run a system in a scaled or production environment, such as system monitoring, administration and high availability, are fair to put into an enterprise release.

We started with Alfresco 3 to put extensions to proprietary databases such as Oracle or SQL Server into the enterprise release only, while extensions to MySQL, Ingres and other open source databases were available in open source. Now with the Alfresco Enterprise 3.1, we will be adding system monitoring capabilities and easy clustering administration that will only be available as part of the enterprise version. This does not prevent the open source version from being a very usable or even scalable system. However, we believe it provides an incentive for those large enterprises that have not chosen the enterprise system to do so, because it significantly reduces their costs of deployment and scalability, as well as providing them the help and support they need for deployment. These enterprise subscriptions help provide the resources that make a stronger and more functional open source release. The enterprise subscriptions also insure that production systems will be up and running. We still provide this enterprise system at a cost that is still less than 10% of proprietary systems.

We want to make both our enterprise and community users successful. The more people download, install and use the community version successfully, the more they will put it into production and look to an enterprise subscription as an insurance policy for that production system. The enterprise subscription is designed to save time and money and be more cost effective than supporting the labs product yourself. Alfresco is in a unique position to offer this. In all situations, we want our users to be able to choose the best option for them.

We are making these changes in a way that is based on a set of principles that are fair and accountable. We believe in open source and making it freely available and providing choice of not just proprietary systems, but between enterprise and open source. We think the rest of the open source world is heading in a similar direction, because this is what makes open source stronger in the long run. However, we are interested in what you think. Please drop me a line with your thoughts, ideas and concerns.

Happy Birthday US Space Program

 
From the Smithsonian National Aeronautics and Space Museum, which John Powell and I visited during the Washington Alfresco Community Conference in Oct 2008

My birthday, January 31st, is always the anniversary of the US space program. On the very same day I was born, the US sent it's first successfult satellite into orbit. The Soviets had sent Sputnik up about three months prior and most the US attempts had ended in spectacular explosions. Still, we had the better German scientists and got to the moon first.

This was the dawn of what became know for the next decade as the "Space Age". Everything in the news paper above (click on it for blow up) seems quaint and a different time. Most the parts that were used you can probably find in a Radio Shack today. Still it was enough to discover the Van Allen Radiation Belt on the day I was born. Since then, the space program and the race to the moon ushered in the next age, the Information Age followed by the Internet Age. Let's just hope we're not going into the Dark Ages.

Because my birthday was on this anniversary, NASA often sent up various space shots on Jan 31st. I had my fair share of launches, like some of the first Space Shuttles, various Apollo and Gemini flights. I also had my fair share of disasters around my birthday. Both Apollo 1 and Challenger disasters were on days that I was celebrating my birthday. However, most of the time I had a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm around Space. I would suspect that most of my generation that entered into software were inspired by the Space program and learned science and mathematics because of the investment made in these areas as a result of the Space program. I look forward to new enthusiasm and launches with the new Ares program.

It wasn't called NASA then, but happy anniversary NASA and travels in outer space. To infinity and beyond!

CMIS Face to Face at Microsoft in Redmond

Dave Caruana and I just finished participating the in the first Face to Face of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee here in Redmond, WA. Companies participating in person were IBM, Oracle, EMC, Alfresco, Exalead, OpenText, SAP, Day, Nuxeo, Dennis Hamilton (representing himself), and of course, Microsoft. Gary Gershon, Julian Reshke from Greenbytes and Betsy Fanning from AIIM participated by phone. (Sorry if I missed anyone.) Virtually everyone in the Enterprise Content Management market. The tone of the meeting was very cooperative and collaborative. David Choy from EMC is the chair of the committee and did a good job of staying neutral on the issues. Al Brown from IBM/FileNet is the secretary for the bindings and Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft is the secretary for the data model. All three did an excellent job keeping things on track and discussing all the open issues. Most of us have all worked together before in both the JCR meetings and iECM meetings and that made collaboration a lot easier. Dennis and I even go back to ODMA and DMA - over 15 years ago.

(BTW, I micro-blogged what was going on Twitter. CMIS Tweets are below. You can follow me on http://twitter.com/johnnewton)

The CMIS effort so far has been use case driven with the main use cases being collaborative content management, integration into portals, mashups and search. There are a number of use cases that explicitly out of scope, such as records management and web content management. Some use cases lie in between where the main application may not be addressed, but we want to allow developers to create applications that may access the information that may be created by other out-of-scope applications. An example that we discussed a lot was records management. We don't want CMIS to be so complex that you can build a records management system, but you may want to access records information for the purposes of eDiscovery.

These use cases that are in-scope seem to be clear and compelling enough that we all agreed that we urgently want to get CMIS to market to get people building these applications. Although this was one of the last thing that we discussed, it is the most impressive outcome of the meeting. There was so much agreement and consensus in the meeting that we all felt it is important to meet the deadline of having CMIS complete before the end of the year. David Choy did a great job outlining the OASIS process and what must be done. The bureaucracy (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) of the OASIS process is such that the minimum time that it takes to get from public review to standard is 6 months. So we all agreed a timeline that would get this done. This means that the spec will be ready for public review by the end of Spring. That's a mean feat, but all agreed doable with few obstacles in the way. It also means that the 0.5 spec going into the OASIS process was pretty solid.

That doesn't mean that there wasn't plenty to discuss. It was a three day event after all and we used it all up. The most controversial issues were around security and what is truly RESTful. The Security proposal was presented by SAP who have a real need to secure documents consistently with the SAP system. This was an excellent use case and provided a real-world example from which to work and focused on Access Control Lists. Most of us have been involved in round and round discussions on security and I'm not quite sure how we got to a general consensus. We are not quite done, but we all seem to have a great deal of agreement. A subcommittee will work on this some more. I had proposed a more abstract Policy interface prior to OASIS submission based upon work that we have done in iECM and JSR-283. After discussing this with David Pitfield of Oracle, I think we need to think about that one some more. (Sorry James McGovern, but XACML was shot down in flames. For the reasons why, please see this IBM article on implementing ACLs with XACML and look how horrible ACLs look. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xacml/)

David Nuescheler, who is the chair of the JSR-283 committee and CTO of Day Software, presented a couple of discussions in collaboration with Julian Reschke. Julian is also on the WebDAV committee and brings a unique perspective. David presented some of the thoughts that originated with Roy Fielding, also from Day, on whether the REST binding is really RESTful. Although there are arguments to not call the Atom Pub protocol REST bindings, we all felt it was important to communicate our intentions toward REST. In the end, we will call the protocol support RESTful Atom Pub bindings or something like that. David suggested perhaps exploring protocols other than Atom Pub, such as WebDAV. Apparently, these were ruled out quite a while ago and there are already WebDAV standards bodies. Decision is to continue with Atom Pub. Julian, who also seems to know HTTP extremely well, logged many issues around how CMIS uses / abuses HTTP and most of his recommendations are being incorporated into the spec.

David also raised the issue of reference implementations. In the end, we all agreed that we are all making progress on our own implementations and that a reference implementation wasn't necessary. There was interest and probably continues to be interest in an open Test Compliance Kit (TCK), but we all agreed that a clearer spec should be the primary point of reference rather than a TCK. It may be up to us, the open source vendors, to come up with a TCK. We have already created both a Java and .NET test harness to test CMIS access. Even Microsoft said that if you need a free CMIS test platform, you can get Alfresco. :-)

As the spec has developed, we have all been prototyping our implementations. The early implementors (Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP - in alphabetical order :-)) participated in an interoperability session or "plug-fest" at a Redmond interop lab in August prior to making the spec public. And it worked! It is a real testament to the fact that this is becoming a real standard. In other words, it works. This is part of the reason that there is not as much demand for a reference implementation. It is also part of the reason that it continues to develop and have such momentum. By working with each other to test each others implementations, we are discovering what needs to be tweaked in our software and what needs to be fixed in the spec. Another interop session is planned sometime around AIIM as well as a demo that the AIIM conference is organizing and sponsoring.

In addition, we were able to demonstrate our integrations with CMIS. IBM showed Quickr accessing CMIS. Day showed a prototype that they are working on that sits on Jackrabbit. Dave showed some new components that we are working on with Share and the Joomla and Drupal integrations with Alfresco using CMIS. Microsoft and EMC had shown their integrations in previous interop sessions.

There were a few other issues that we discussed. OpenText presented hierarchical properties. I presented a proposal on how to deal with Aspects or Mixins. A little more than half the systems represented, some like Oracle and IBM had more than one, support some notion similar to Aspects - think of them as data type plug-ins. The vendors that have broad search requirements had a great deal of interest in Universal Search (really a new use case) and want to see access to change logs to simplify indexing new or changed documents in ECM systems. However, I think we all agree that we don't want any of these to hold up a 1.0 of the specification and getting CMIS out to market.

CMIS has momentum. It will be a real specification. We all seem to agree on what we want and what our customers need. Companies are implementing it. IBM, EMC and Alfresco have released 0.5 implementations. Microsoft can't talk about what they are doing, but they will. (They would probably have to kill me if I knew exactly what they are doing. ;-)) It could be more and it can probably be better, but CMIS that is out there and implemented will be better than the perfect spec coming out much later.

Microsoft were gracious hosts and provided with good facilities and food. (Just replace the projector bulb. :-)) Thanks very much Ethan!

If you are interested, CMIS Tweets follow:

• Discussing CMIS use cases: Collab Content Mgmt, Portals, Mashups, Search
• Open use case issues: Observation, tagging, data dict., better REST bindings - less verbose
• Can't use MSN Messenger inside of Microsoft on their guest network. Bizarre.
• Going thru introductions, including favorite color. (Hmm.) Should note that SAP and OpenText are also here.
• Interesting discussion on reference implementation. Decision that Tech Committee will not implement ref impl.
• TC agrees that we need well documented test cases. Lots of interest in a Test Compat Kit.
• Show and tell coming up. Day and Lotus.
• Tomorrow will be REST design (with input from Roy Fielding via David Nuescheler), schema design and various issues.
• Now discussing REST issues. David Nuescheler is bringing up the issues first raised by Roy Fielding who first described REST.
• Discussed REST at length. Staying with Atom Pub, but will look at browser-based Javascript libraries.
• Gary Gershon is reviewing the SOAP bindings for CMIS.
• David Nuescheler: "There is no such thing as a REST binding. REST is an architecture."
• It is very difficult to concentrate on the minutiae of SOAP web services. (zzzzzz)
• Ethan (MSFT) now discussing unified search.
• Long discussion on universal search and relationship to observation. Universal search indexing looks like a MUST. Obs is SHOULD.
• Dave Caruana is demonstrating Alfresco SURF and CMIS.
• Dave Caruana just demonstrated Joomla and Drupal integrated with Alfresco thru CMIS.
• Just got caught out. I'm supposed to talk about data dictionaries and I don't remember what the issue was. :( Jet Lag!
• Long discussion on ACLs proposed by SAP. No appetite for XACML. Sorry James McGovern. Keeping it very simple.
• I was very surprised at Microsoft's interest in content crawling and Universal Search. Lumped into Observation discussion y'day.
• Just finished presenting how to do Mixins / Aspects in CMIS. Some want to model as related objects. How would you do it?
• Just finished OpenText proposal on "Hierarchical Properties"
• Question on the table - What do we need to do to finish the proposal?
• After lunch, group photo! Courtesy of Dennis Hamilton.
• Now batching.
• Discussing timeline for CMIS and flowcharted process. We are remarkably close! But min 6 months.
• Let me clarify. Get to public review in under 6 months.
• Closing out most open issues on spec from the Technical Committee.
• Would love to see Adobe here.
• Successful CMIS face to face complete! :-)

Alfresco Labs 3 Special Inaugural Release

 

Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

"It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom." - President Barack Obama, January 20, 2008

How do you put out a release on one of the biggest days in history? The answer is you don’t, you wait until the day after and create a new beginning.

I’m pleased to announce that the final release of the open source Alfresco Labs 3.0. Alfresco Labs 3 has been our most important version of Alfresco yet. Combining new technologies, new techniques, new standards and new levels of ease of use, we have been fulfilling a lot of the vision that we had when we started Alfresco four years ago. This release combines the stabilization work that we have been working on in the enterprise release with new innovations specifically for the open source community.

The Alfresco Labs 3 releases that started in summer of last year have been aimed at expanding our collaboration and social computing initiatives and to providing an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. In doing so, we have introduced a number of new capabilities that have not been seen in either commercial or open source systems:

• The first implementation of the new CMIS specification that is now in the standardization process with OASIS and promises to become the SQL of content management. Both the REST-based Atom Publishing Protocol and SOAP Web Services are provided.
• The first ECM implementation of the Microsoft SharePoint protocol after publication of the protocol by Microsoft in April 2008.
• New SURF, REST-enabled web runtime to provide an AJAX-enabled set of content management and collaboration components that utilize the rich Yahoo YUI AJAX libraries.
• Alfresco Share, which is a new collaboration application built using our WCM technology and provides on-demand collaboration sites integrated with SURF collaboration and Microsoft Office integration through the SharePoint protocol.
• New SURF collaboration components including wikis, blogs, forums, calendars, discussions, and social tagging.
• A new document management experience with the SURF-based document library that includes thumbnail and preview generation to avoid long downloads and eliminates the need to have the application locally with a Flash-based preview.
• Continued innovation of our WCM platform introducing features from the most recent enterprise release including web farm deployment, virtualization and reuse of assets between web sites. We have also converted much of the WCM functionality into Web Scripts that are accessible from you SURF applications.
• Multi-tenant capability to create virtual instances of Alfresco from a single machine.
• Managing in-bound email to collaboration sites for email-based collaboration.
• Integration of native PHP interpretation with the Caucho Quercus interpreter for integration of PHP applications and development of Web Script and SURF components in PHP.
• The new Web Studio drag and drop web site development tool designed to develop SURF sites and applications.

Perhaps most important is the fact that the enterprise and open source lines were merged to provide bug fixes found by our customers or through the certification process on a multitude of platforms. Since the majority of our enterprise customers start using Alfresco as a result of using the open source version first, it is in our interests to have a viable, robust open source implementation of Alfresco. We also believe that ultimately the primary reason people are buying the enterprise subscription is for support, warranty and indemnification and the fact that Alfresco is open source is what draws them in the first place. We therefore recommend that the community upgrade to this version of Alfresco as soon as possible.

There are still new features being introduced for the first time as part of this release. Web Studio is new separate application using the new SURF web framework to provide a drag and drop design experience to build SURF web sites and applications. Web Studio allows you to work with and view the web site you are developing, but uses the Yahoo YUI AJAX libraries. Web Studio is also designed to develop and edit web sites safely by using the new WCM REST-based Web Scripts and is fully interoperable with the Alfresco WCM application.

With the economy in the dumps, this is a particularly propitious time to release the stable open source version of Alfresco 3.0. Open source should thrive in this environment. Where companies and IT organizations may not even take a call from a traditional enterprise salesperson, they will download open source software. We want to be able to build market share in the ECM market with open source that is robust and thriving.

Happy New Year and Happy Birthday Alfresco

So my New Year resolutions contain all the usual suspects – lose weight, exercise more, blah, blah, blah. But perhaps the most important, dear reader is to blog more. I have written several times how hard it is to blog, very much like trying to work yourself up to exercising. Thus, what better way to start again than to review the year 2008, then work myself up for tomorrow’s Looking Forward to 2009, which is a bit like getting ready for that 5k run after sitting at the desk for so long. (BTW, yesterday the manager of the local gym said he has not seen a membership card like mine for several years. :-( But at least I went. :-) )

First of all, 2008 was my 50th birthday year and I decided to celebrate by taking down the entire world’s financial system. Just kidding. I read just before my birthday that the time of least happiness for a man is supposed to be 50. But I have found this year very satisfying both professionally and personally, despite what happened to my portfolio. It helps that Alfresco is doing so well and I find working in open source so fulfilling. So a bit about the last year at Alfresco…

In 2008, two threads of our strategy came together and we have been actually working on these since our founding in 2005. The first is to implement the Microsoft SharePoint protocol to allow Microsoft Office users to access Alfresco the same way that they would access SharePoint. The second is to join with the largest players in the Enterprise Content Management space in developing a standard for the industry, hopefully an SQL for content management. These came together in our Alfresco 3 platform that also included the social computing application, Alfresco Share, and our new web framework, Surf.

It has always been our belief that Microsoft SharePoint was going to have a substantial impact on the enterprise content management industry and that the primary reason for this is the special lock that SharePoint has on Microsoft Office. We chose to release CIFS shared file system emulation first, but had always intended to implement the SharePoint protocol for Office. This summer, thanks to a deal worked out between the European Union and Microsoft, we were able to do that much more easily than we expected. This has been really popular with our enterprise customers since its release in July.

CMIS took the industry by surprise primarily because it is so long overdue that many people thought it would never come. After ODMA, DMA, JCR and iECM, the gorillas in the marketplace, Microsoft, IBM and EMC felt it was better to work together to create a bigger pie. We have been working with these three for the last year, along with OpenText, SAP and BEA, now Oracle. David Caruana has been very active in the REST/ATOM protocols and we were ready to deliver our implementation quickly. We all participated in interoperability fest at Redmond in August to prove that the web services and REST specifications would work. We had been working with SAP and BEA already as they used Alfresco as a reference implementation upon which to build clients for the August session. When CMIS was publicly announced in September prior to submission to OASIS, we were ready with an implementation based upon the 0.5 specifications.

The Alfresco 3 platform was the big focus of the engineering group this year and became the vehicle for both CMIS and the SharePoint protocol. The Alfresco 3 platform was developed to get people collaborating on documents and to enable new types of social applications. We started with the functionality we required in Alfresco 2.9, but found that the Java Server Faces UI infrastructure was holding us back. So we made the decision to move to a more Web 2.0, REST and scripting-oriented development environment, which we named Surf and was based upon the REST-based work of Web Scripts that we started in 2007. The social functionality that we created – activity feeds, calendars, blogs, wikis, etc. – were created as components and packaged as a site-oriented collaboration application, Alfresco Share, which can be used both inside and outside the firewall. Share is designed around our Web Content Management platform and you can use Surf / Share components in creating new web sites.

Open source has proven to be a good community and business strategy for Alfresco in 2008. It helps though to have someone responsible for it and Nancy Garrity has made tremendous progress in the last year as she has ramped up participation in the forums, wiki and the forge. With Web Scripts and Surf, we have increased the number of projects and contributions. A couple of contributions that I thought were pretty cool this year were FlexSpaces, a Flex/Air client by Steve Reiner, and Plutext, a collaborative simultaneous-editing Word add-in by Jason Harrop. In addition, JoomlaTools, founded by the chief architect of Joomla 1.5 Johan Janssens, built an integration with Alfresco to Joomla, the popular open source CMS, using our CMIS implementation. There are likely to be more CMIS-based applications and contributions as CMIS moves closer to standard later in the year.

Business has gone very well despite the economic slowdown. I wrote over a year ago that it seemed like a recession was coming and we have been prepared by being prudent and not over-extending ourselves. Credit goes to CEO John Powell who holds on very tightly to the strings of a very mean purse. Still we more than doubled the number of enterprise customers while continuing to provide more functionality to the open source community side. You can expect more in the new year. You can also expect that we will do well in the recession as we provide similar functionality to the larger ECM systems at 10% of the price.

From a personal perspective, it was a great year with loads of travel to tropical climes, my son getting in Winchester College, my daughter doing so well in horse riding and ballet, and my wife throwing a completely surprising surprise birthday party. The World Economic Forum in Davos in January was still very much a highlight like last year, especially meeting so many famous people. Just when you finally figure out what’s going on, it’s all over. I also got to develop my interests in photography with a great photography course in Tuscany.

With the new year, it is more or less the fourth birthday of Alfresco. So thanks everyone for your support, happy new year and let’s ride 2009 to new heights. Thanks everyone at Alfresco for all the great and hard work. And thanks everyone in the engineering organization for such a fantastic product.

Alfresco releases first CMIS implementation

The same day that the Large Hadron Collider starts unlocking the mysteries of the universe at CERN in Geneva, the enterprise content management community has decided to explore what would happen if we could all interoperate between each of our respective systems and content could be tapped into with a common set of services. For the ECM industry, this day could prove to be just as momentous. EMC, IBM and Microsoft just announced a new content service interface along with Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. The result could unlock the huge potential of the content contained within enterprises and unleash its power for discovery, customer service and knowledge sharing in the same way that databases have become the backbone of many businesses. On this occasion, we are releasing our CMIS implementation of this specification as open source.

A whole new universe of content possibilities

The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) promises to become the SQL for Content Management. There have been previous attempts to create a universal standard for ECM, but none of them (ODMA, DMA, JCR) got further than a few vendors supporting it. The difference now is that the largest vendors, IBM, Microsoft and EMC have been joined by Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP to not just endorse this specification, but actually create working versions of the protocol. There is real wood behind the arrow, not just a lot of talk. With the results of an interoperability session, this group of companies will submit this specification for standardization by OASIS.

The only other parallel that I can think of for this type of industry collaboration is when the database industry decided to standardize SQL and its language bindings in the early 1990s. Bitter rivals realized that a bigger pie was in everyone's interest and would encourage greater application development and enterprise adoption. This collaboration resulted in a huge growth of the database industry, the creation of the client-server industry yielding SAP, Siebel, Documentum and Business Objects, and within a few years, the creation of the web and web applications. If the resulting standard creates even a fraction of this success, it can have a significant impact on IT, applications and web sites.

Having been involved in some of the preliminary discussions in iECM, the AIIM alliance that resulted in the CMIS alliance, I find the development of the two flavors of CMIS, SOAP and REST, very interesting. One world, the SOA world of web services, represents the operational, records-oriented roots of ECM where integration with structured business processes is important. The other, REST and Web 2.0-oriented services, represents the melding of content in the enterprise with the social content being created by Web 2.0, business communities and the social networks of companies. The REST style of interface also fits the growing Cloud Computing world much better. It became impossible to select one over the other. Each will find its own purpose. However, having a common set of data models and semantics makes it much easier for vendors fit in both worlds.

Having anticipated CMIS for some time, Alfresco is pleased to announce the first implementation of this specification. We have been anticipating and planning for this day since Alfresco’s creation at the beginning of 2005 and have been architecting the system to support both web services and a REST architecture. David Caruana, Alfresco's Chief Architect, has built our Web Scripts architecture to simplify the creation of CMIS-like services. Since CMIS is based upon the ATOM Publishing Protocol, it meant that we have a pre-existing standard to model how Web Scripts can be modeled and built. We were able to demonstrate interoperability of web scripts and our web services along with other CMIS implementations at the recent Plugfest in Redmond in August.

As we release our latest recommended version of Alfresco Labs 3, you can now try CMIS for yourself. Included are both the REST and the SOAP implementations as a prototyping platform. In addition, we have the latest version of the new SURF platform that simplifies building Web 2.0 types of applications and will increasingly be used to create CMIS applications and components as well. To complete the package, we are also delivering the latest version of Alfresco Share, which we anticipate will become a popular application for accessing not just Alfresco content, but other content in the future. We are very excited about what the future holds for CMIS, SURF, and Share. I would like to thank the Alfresco team for the hard work that they have put into building Share and SURF as next generation content applications and application platforms.

If you want to learn, explore and experiment with CMIS, you can download the Alfresco Labs 3 here. You can join the discussion on CMIS here.

We congratulate EMC, IBM and Microsoft in setting aside their differences to create a common set of interfaces that will create a much bigger market for everyone and solve many customers problems of interoperability. We are proud to be part of the initial submission of this milestone stage in the development of the content management market.