Content Log

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

Follow me on Twitter @johnnewton

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.

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.

Introducing Alfresco Labs 3

I am pleased to announce the beta release of Alfresco Labs 3, our new version of Alfresco targeted at collaborative content management and the first open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. Alfresco Labs 3 is a natural evolution of the Alfresco platform that started with the first preview release of Alfresco three years ago. As Alfresco has grown more powerful in capabilities, we have strived to simplify both usage and development of Alfresco web clients, web sites and web applications. This release has leveraged the Web Script architecture that we introduced last year and provides simple user interface components allowing knowledge workers to collaborate on and share content. You can find out more here and download this latest version here.

New Alfresco Share application previewed in Alfresco Labs 3

We believe that the Enterprise Content Management market is evolving from specialized software for information intensive activities to become a major component of business and infrastructure for knowledge workers. Although over 90% of the Fortune 1000 have at least one type of ECM system, less than 10% of the employees in most of these companies use ECM, despite the huge increase in regulatory compliance and information explosion. Microsoft SharePoint, through its hooks to Microsoft Office, has made significant inroads into this yawning gap in the ECM market, and growing at 35% per annum as a result. We believe that open source has an even greater opportunity to reach into this portion of the market through its ubiquitous internet reach. With Alfresco Labs 3, our opportunity is to provide an alternative to, provide interoperability with, and be complementary to Microsoft SharePoint.

New Alfresco Surf RESTful platform uses Yahoo's YUI AJAX library for a more interactive experience. New thumbnail service provides previews before opening.

Much of the development of Alfresco Labs 3 has focused on building the Alfresco Surf platform, a robust, enterprise-class web application and site assembly framework that bundles a full site construction object model and toolkit for building class-leading web and collaborative applications. The Surf platform is designed to work in a number of different web environments, including as a Web Part in Microsoft SharePoint Portal. It includes content oriented components designed around the YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) AJAX Library and Adobe Flex for dynamic uploads and previewing of content and other information. The new user interface components make it much simpler for users to develop new collaborative web applications.

New Activities, Tagging and People services provide a social collaboration experience for the enterprise. Collaborative sites also have wikis, blogs, calendars and discussion forums.

With Alfresco Labs 3, we have also introduced a few important concepts as New Content Services to support collaborative applications and social computing including Sites, Thumbnails, Tagging and Activities. The Surf platform uses the Sites to construct a collaborative site and store framework information on how pages and components are constructed. The Thumbnail service generates previews of documents and content to show what you will open before you open it, enhancing the more limited view of an icon that only tells you what time you have. The Tagging service provides a simple folksonomy view of content as well as providing tools for constructing tag clouds. Activities are similar to Feed inside of Facebook, providing a stream of information on what activities people are working or commenting on. To support these services, the People services have been enhanced with more information and the ability to connect people to one another for social networking. These services are accessible through REST-based APIs and from JavaScript allowing their use in construction of new Surf components.

Integration with Flex and YUI provides simultaneous loading of files.

Alfresco Share, which we are previewing with Alfresco Labs 3, is built on the Alfresco Surf platform and is designed to be modified by end users or through programming to fit a wide range of collaborative and social computing applications. Share provides a simple web site paradigm for creating collaborative applications by aggregating Surf components and incorporating new Surf components as they are developed. This is an early release of the Share application, but we encourage our open source community to develop new components based upon the examples of the basic components provided. With Share, users can create a collaborative site either inside or outside the organization, invite users and share and collaborate around content. Share includes document libraries, calendars, wikis, blogs, and discussions.

Microsoft Office can access content in Alfresco as though it were a Microsoft SharePoint Server

Also previewed in Labs 3 is Microsoft SharePoint compatibility from within Microsoft Office that makes Office applications think they are talking to a SharePoint server. Microsoft released the SharePoint protocols this spring as part of its compliance with the European Commissions’ decision issued on March 24, 2004 along with an increasing tendency by Microsoft toward interoperability. Alfresco is the first ECM system to implement the Microsoft Office and Windows SharePoint Services protocols as a compatible server. This allows Office users to browse and find documents within the repository, checkout / checkin / version documents, share the documents in shared workspaces and access the additional menus and task panes reserved for SharePoint. All of this is available with no additional software needed to be added to Office.

The entire team is getting way too big to congratulate individually, but everyone has done a great job so far getting this beta to realization. For this, I am extremely grateful. We look forward to providing the next update in early September where the following will be provided:

• New REST APIs based upon ATOM Publishing
• New look and feel for Alfresco Share
• Additional collaboration components, including instant messaging
• A new properties framework for extended metadata
• New people and site search capabilities built around social networking
• Web views support for Microsoft Office SharePoint emulation
• Associated technical documentation

Our current plan is that the Enterprise version of Alfresco 3 will be available in mid-October.

We think that Alfresco 3 will provide our users and customers choice in developing collaborative application and in supporting basic content management and collaborative sharing for Microsoft Office users. Rather than a single fixed platform, Alfresco offers a choice of operating system, database, application server, development environment, and web browser, including those provided by Microsoft. In addition, through our work with Unisys, we have demonstrated a platform that is much more scalable. By providing this new platform as open source, we hope that you will also help us in making it a better platform and contribute new collaborative capabilities and components that we could not even have conceived.

Adobe embeds Alfresco Repository

It's been quite a while in the making, but I am very pleased with the news today that Adobe will be embedding Alfresco technology as part of its LiveCycle Suite. A while ago, I wrote a blog about embeddable content repositories. It was clear then and more clear now that the old generation of content repositories is not really designed to be embedded as part of content-oriented applications. Yet, we all know that there is more information in content than there is in databases. Why can't applications use a set of services for managing content the way they manage data in embedded databases?

On this particular news, ComputerWorld reports Raja Hammond, Group Manager for Adobe LiveCycle, as saying, "Alfresco has a fantastic lightweight installation. It is J2EE server-based, so it is very much aligned with our architecture. We're able with this release to totally embed it. We've done extensive customization to the UIs to add additional capabilities to them. We've integrated them tightly with the various solution components within LiveCycle."

At InfoWorld, Brian Wick, Director of Product Marketing at Adobe said, "It's much easier, much quicker for our customers to build LiveCycle apps with the content services piece built in." This should be the sentiment of any product manager whose product handles content. This clearly the case of LiveCycle which handles potentially huge numbers of PDFs and forms.

Over at CMS Watch, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a long-time ECM observer, blogged on the announcement that, "It's been a while since there was a big product announcement in the ECM world, but today's announcement by Adobe that they will be embedding Alfresco into their LiveCycle Enterprise Suite will doubtless garner a few headlines. Alfresco, the UK-based open source ECM company, has certainly done a great job of marketing themselves since their launch a couple of years back, stealing some limelight from more established and much bigger vendors such as Interwoven, Vignette, and OpenText. The question we have to ask is whether this announcement is another marketing   triumph, or whether it suggests something more substantial. First off is the fact that it is a real OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) deal, and the technology will actually get embedded into the Adobe offering, so it is more than simply a paper partnership."

It is also significant that the Alfresco platform is open source. Open source allowed Adobe and our dozens of other OEMs to try out Alfresco before even approaching us. Open source also provides a level of comfort and confidence in a platform for services like content services and content repository. It is much better than providing code in escrow. it actually provides a community as well to ensure the long-term success of the platform.

We look forward to a fruitful and simbiotic relationship with Adobe. We believe that this is the beginning of looking at content management as a peer of database management of an essential component of any enterprise-class application. Congratulations to Adobe on all the hard work and the new release.

Happy New Year and Happy 3rd Birthday Alfresco

This is more or less Alfresco’s third birthday. More or less because we started Alfresco in earnest in the new year as people were coming back from the holidays. Early 2005 was an exciting time, since we knew we wanted to create an open source enterprise content management system, but we didn’t know exactly who was going to buy it or how the open source model would work. With 2007 just completed, we have learned a lot and the future looks to be just as exciting as our first year. Alfresco is in its third year of exponential growth thanks to all of you who not only downloaded the software but deployed it in the tens of thousands of live systems and your active participation in the community.

Every company needs to start with table football.
L-R: Dave, Kev, Derek and Roy in early 2005

The year started by focusing on our community and nothing could have been more important than our decision to move to the GPL license from our previous modified MPL license. With this we made the entire system open source with an OSI approved license and decided not to withhold any features or bug fixes. We would encourage the community with full feature set and encourage enterprise customers with support and more testing and certification on different platforms, a model that most open source companies are adopting including MySQL and RedHat. CMO Ian Howells and his team are responsible for getting the world to know about Alfresco with a budget that is a tiny fraction of what anyone else in the ECM industry spends by building on an open source foundation and helping community development. Ian has hired Nancy Garrity as a community manager and we are in the process of revamping the whole community infrastructure. The result has been a dramatic growth in the community, over a hundred contributions, and our first user community meetings in New York and Paris.

Kevin Cochrane and Paul Holmes-Higgin presenting at the Paris User Conference

Our engineering group led by VP of Engineering Paul Holmes-Higgin and Chief Architect David Caruana, expanded functionality of our ECM capabilities while providing excellent support for customers and increasing robustness and scalability of the Alfresco system. During 2007, Kevin Cochrane, Britt Park and Jon Cox led the release of our web content management product, although almost all of engineering was involved in the WCM application, runtime or deployment services. WCM has already had a significant impact on the product, the community and our customer base. During 2007, Activision, EA Sports, Harvard Business School Publishing, Kaplan Educational Services and Swisscom launched internet websites on Alfresco. Web Scripts, the brainchild of Chief Architect David Caruana, uses REST as a web-oriented architecture to make it easy to create both mashable user interface components and new data APIs. Web Scripts enabled us to quickly create Microsoft Office extensions and integrate Alfresco into all sorts of environments such as Facebook and iGoogle as well as standard portals. The simplicity of web scripts has also led to a lot more contributions of new functionality to the community such as the new calendaring functions provided by the London Boroughs of Islington and Camden.

Dave Caruana's Facebook enhanced with Alfresco content thanks to Web Scripts

Enterprise sales and support grew dramatically and allow us to make the Alfresco system available free and open source. Matt Asay finds time between blogs on CNet to sell and hire the rapidly expanding US team. Denis Dorval, previously from FileNet, was promoted to VP of European sales and expanding a strong partner network here in Europe. The speed with which companies are adopting the enterprise system has surprised even us. I normally find out about and am surprised what new companies have bought an enterprise license during our end of quarter review.  This meant that we added hundreds of paying customers in 2007 and Helen Dann has been furiously hiring both here in the UK and in Austin, Texas to support them. In addition our OEM business has been growing very strongly with more companies, such as Ricoh and Quark, incorporating either our lightweight repository or our CIFS capability with the newly GPL’ed JLan engine developed by Gary Spencer.

The coming year is shaping up to take Alfresco into the realm of greater collaboration and social computing as a natural extension of our Enterprise Content Management business. In 2008, we will be developing enhanced collaboration features, integrate Web 2.0 and social networking services into our applications, and take Alfresco services to the outside world as “Content as a Service”. The idea behind this is that ECM is no longer about application suites, but accessing and contributing content wherever it is needed, inside or outside the enterprise. Briana Wherry and her growing team are developing new documentation and training to help you learn more about these new and existing capabilities. We will be expanding our footprint into Europe with more support, marketing and sales in more countries and increasing the depth and breadth of experience in the US.

On this third birthday, I would like to thank all the people of Alfresco for their efforts who are now becoming to numerous to name. We are now getting close to seven times the number of people we had at the start. I would like to also thank all the people who have been active in the community and spreading the word about Alfresco and actively contributing to its success, especially people like Russ Danner, Jeff Potts and Ray Gauss. I would especially like to thank the original team that came together in that small room in Maidenhead in January 2005 - John Powell, Andy Hind, Dave Caruana, Derek Hulley, Gavin Cornwell, Kevin Roast, Linton Baddeley, Paul Holmes-Higgin, Roy Weatherall, and Steve Rigby. Thanks for believing.

Alfresco 2.1 for Mashable Enterprise Content Services

I am happy to announce the availability of the Community Version 2.1 of its Open Source Enterprise Content Management System. I know it came out a week ago last Friday, but we wanted to give the vacationing Americans a chance to catch up after the 4th of July holiday.

This release brings a more modern REST-oriented or Web-oriented architecture where anything can be addressed through a URL through our new Web Script technology. In addition, Web Scripts are our strategy for bringing new light-weight UI components into portals and Microsoft Office. Using Web Scripts, the Alfresco system now provides access to its repository services from anywhere, are easier to access content and workflow information, and are easier to construct using scripting languages like JavaScript, FreeMarker or PHP. Alfresco Version 2.1 is available for download from SourceForge at http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads. (Remember to vote for Alfresco for Best Project for the Enterprise while you are there.)

I'd like to publicly thank all of engineering for the tremendous effort around Release 2.1, which is the foundation for a revolution in how enterprise content management is done. The engineers accomplished a tremendous amount while supporting the customers and the technical support team to provide the level of service that you all expect. Thanks to Paul Holmes-Higgin for managing the project and Kevin Cochrane for bringing in product management. Bringing you the actual code of Version 2.1 was:

• Andy - Web Content Management indexing and search
• Ariel - Forms enhancement, asset regeneration
• Britt - Locking services, deployment services, attribute service for web content
• Dave - Creating the Web Script technology while updating BPM for WCM launch & expiry workflows
• Derek - Multilingual services, XML extractor, map-able metadata extraction, core service improvements
• Gary - CIFS Fixes and enhancements (major code merge still going on for AIFS)
• Gav - Link management UI, deployment UI, launch and expiry UI
• Jon - Link management service
• Kev - JavaScript & Freemarker enhancements, portlets, WCM locking UI and web client enhancements
• Linton and Lawrence - UI design for this release and next
• Mike - Word integration and portlets with some cool AJAX enhancements
• Roy - PHP scripting, Blog integration, Mediawiki integration
• Steve - For managing the quality assurance process as always

In addition, new employees Jan started work on extending multi-tenant support for our hosting customers and Saravanan provided prototyping with Flex and Web Scripts for our enterprise network offering which will be in a follow-on release.

I would also like to thank those in the community that have contributed to this release. Particularly interesting were the extensions to manage translations and multi-lingual documents contributed by the developers in the European Commission.

Version 2.1 of Alfresco is a significant change in how we are approaching integration with other systems. The Web Script framework for constructing REST-style interfaces will simplify mashups and provide several out of the box user interfaces for previewing and viewing content, view query results and processing workflows. The Web Script dispatcher maps URIs to resources such as user interface components and data-oriented resources in the Alfresco repository, such as content, content metadata, workflows or people registered with the repository. Web Scripts support access and update using standard HTTP methods and can be constructed using light-weight scripting languages including JavaScript or PHP. The Alfresco server includes a built-in server-side JavaScript debugger to enable line by line step through, variable inspection and arbitrary script execution.

JSR-168 Portlet construction and integration is now much easier with Web Scripts with pre-built components providing some of the most common features required in portals, such as document browsing, mapping of web content, tracking of workflow and tasks, and tracking of web content forms, tasks and assets. These new components use a much easier AJAX-based user interface that simplify browsing, hide more complex information and provide detachable previews and summaries. Out of the box integrations with Liferay 4.3 and JBoss Portal 2.6 will be available soon. Creating new portlets can be done using simple scripting using FreeMarker or JavaScript.

A new Microsoft Word integration built using the Web Script technology, provides a simple, light-weight browser control that display Web Script components based upon the context of the document being edit. The plugin provides a Office-tailored set of components including a document dashboard for personal context, current tasks and actions available on the document, a repository browser, document detail view, task and workflow information and search pane providing federated search available using the OpenSearch API.

In addition, version 2.1 provides extensions to web content management and workflow to simplify the management of websites. Alfresco web content management now supports transactionally-complete deployment of content to one or more web servers. Either all the updates happen or they don’t. Preventative locking of web assets is now supported as is native search of the web site based upon the Lucene full-text engine. The Alfresco workflow, built using JBoss jBPM, now provides task commenting, viewing history of completed tasks, and timers to support expired tasks or timed release of content to a website.

Alfresco Now a Sourceforge Finalist

Thank you very much for helping nominate Alfresco as a finalist for the SourceForge Community Choice Awards for Best Project for the Enterprise.

BUT WE AREN'T DONE YET! Please get everyone you know to vote for Alfresco in the Enterprise category, by clicking here. Voting finishes the 20th of July.

While you are at it, please nominate Spring for Best Technical Design since we make extensive use of Spring the Alfresco architecture. Since we are competing with our friends at Zimbra, why don't you give a consolation prize of voting for them in the Most Collaborative Project category.

Thanks for your continued support and Get Out the Vote!

If You Like Alfresco...

Please help us by nominating us for the SourceForge "Best Project for the Enterprise" category. There are thousands of installations of Alfresco out there now and if Alfresco is helping you out, you can help us in return. Please click here or on the logo below to nominate us. Thanks.

Alfresco + Liferay Meet Up

Alfresco, the leading open source enterprise content management system, and Liferay, the leading Java open source portal, are a very powerful combination used in an increasing number of enterprises and displacing proprietary commercial systems. It makes sense to share resources in a meetup to discuss common issues on integration, best practices and roadmaps for both content management and portals.

We have a meetup planned at Liferay’s offices in Ontario, California on Wednesday July 18th at 9am. It is being organized by our own superstar, Luis Sala, and the many Brians ;-) of Liferay. Please attend if you can. Details can be found here. Map can be found at http://tinyurl.com/27psum.