Content Log

A Manifesto for Social Computing in the Enterprise

Investment in the infrastructure of the internet has dramatically increased bandwidth to everyone in the developing world and created home computers that are not only inexpensive, but very powerful. This change has expanded the usage of the internet exponentially and introduced new demographics and generations of users that had not used computing prior to the expansion of the internet. These users have themselves created the content and applications that feed the internet and have set expectations of the applications that we use in web browsers and new mobile devices. The increased bandwidth has made this experience much more interactive and visual experience encompassing video and visual elements. Web properties such as YouTube, Google, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr have set the benchmark for expression, accessibility and social interaction of computing systems.

Dubbed Web 2.0, this revolution in computing has shifted the face of software from a logical, linear, and introverted science to an expressive, graphical and social art. New designers of web sites, unschooled in traditional software techniques, are nonetheless able to create software that scales to millions of users and billions of objects of information and still meld those users into an artistically aware community. The next generation of enterprise employees who started using the internet in their early teens have only known this evolving culture of free and creative development of the internet and now demand better of the enterprise software that they meet. Older employees also know that that the software that they use on a day to day basis can be better. Enterprise 2.0 seeks to emulate the success of Web 2.0 in the creation of new software for the enterprise.

Social Computing

The shift of computing power from business logic and calculation to socialization and people-orientation has been dubbed by some as Social Computing. The term Social Computing has been used interchangeably with Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Social Applications, however, IBM and Microsoft have created Social Computing research centers and Forrester has started to use the term in describing next generation enterprise collaboration. Social Computing is the use of technology to support sharing of information and enabling collaboration through social networks and to tap into the value of the “Wisdom of Crowds”, a concept made famous by James Surowiecki in 2004 to explain how many people are smarter than individual experts. Social Computing exploits software oriented toward people and Social Networks, the extended relationships of individuals, to connect to more people and access the Wisdom of Crowds.

To tap into the wisdom and awareness of social networks and empower people to collaborate at any time or place, Social Computing platforms need the following capabilities:

• People - Support information about people, their preferred communications, their relationships and affiliations, since social networking is all about people rather than just systems, data and objects. The more information available about other users, the more likely they can be found as a source of knowledge.
• Context of Networks - Social networks organized around projects, teams and departments provide the context of work and relevance of information as it spreads from creation to the people that need that information. Social networks, especially networks extended beyond the enterprise, provide the greatest differentiation of social computing from previous generations of collaboration.
• Social Collaboration - Provide an environment where people can share ideas, contribute knowledge and solve problems in creative, unstructured socialization as opposed to rigorous workflows that are required for control of information. Next generation tools use techniques developed by Web 2.0, particularly those tools that empower social knowledge, such as social tagging, integration of communication and awareness of changes in social networks.
• Content as a Service - Content is the container of knowledge and information and is core to the socialization of information. Content needs to be accessible everywhere, not just in large, monolithic applications. Content capabilities need to be accessible as reusable service components. Social computing can happen inside the enterprise or outside and a channel can be a web site, web application, mobile device or even external web platforms such as Facebook or Google applications. Mashups can occur inside the enterprise or outside and the channel will require content as a service that can securely be accessed wherever it is needed or wherever it is contributed.
• People-centric Tools - As Web 2.0 has spread new paradigms of user interaction, the consumerization of software has created expectations that enterprise software becomes easier and empowers user to contribute, correct and classify content and information within the context of social networks. AJAX and next generation rich internet application interfaces such as Adobe Flex will provide users with a much richer, more intuitive user experience and the ability to scan much more social knowledge to find ideas and solutions. These tools should themselves be componentized and accessible as a service so that they may be mashed up with other sources of social knowledge.

This does not mean that the need for traditional enterprise content technologies such as document and records management goes away. They are still repositories of the truth and verifiable information and thus play an important role in sharing knowledge within social networks. However, these traditional technologies lack the usability, empowerment, and breadth of reach that Web 2.0 sites provide. They lack the collaborative nature that invites in people without barriers and restrictions to contribute to the sharing of knowledge and information. Web content management for creating a richer Web 2.0-style user interface becomes even more important to this collaboration to provide a compelling face to the interaction and to simplify the access and navigation of shared information. Enterprise Content Management cannot become one of the principle platforms of Social Computing unless it addresses the requirements of Social Applications.

Use of Social Computing

The balance is shifting from contained and controlled companies to engaged and empowered collaborative enterprises driven by Web 2.0-inspired social computing. At the center of the shift from old models of computing in the enterprise to new social models are companies that are inspired to innovate or to engage more with their customers. This includes companies not just using their internet or intranet web sites, but engaging in social networking channels such as Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Those using social computing are interested in engaging people, such as customers, employees or partners. They are using new people-centric tools and facilitate creating or extending existing social networks.

Major ECM vendors are all planning their Social Computing efforts and to a large extent are being dragged in this direction by their more forward-looking customers. Enterprises that have discovered the value of Social Computing are:

• Consumer-oriented companies that particularly address a younger demographic must engage their customers as part of both the marketing process as well as the development of new products. For example, games and film companies that engage their viewers in plot and scene development do much better than those that keep everything under wraps until the game or film is ready.
• Enterprises hiring a new generation of knowledge workers who grew up on the internet must provide tools as empowering as those available from Web 2.0. Turning these tools off forces these workers to seek employment elsewhere and forcing them to use tools that do not meet their expectations of usability and engagement.
• Financial Services firms are leading the shift in usage of these technologies. Financial Services have always been innovators in developing new technologies and investing in providing better service for their clients. Speed in innovation in these services becomes a major competitive advantage where churn of clients can be very high in turbulent times. Internally, competition for talent is intense and providing better support is important for attracting and retaining employees. In particular, young and ambitious brokers and managers are more likely to be sociable themselves and seek out Social Computing inside and outside the enterprise.
• Government and Non-Profit organizations that provide services and citizen feedback online find increasing their IT budgets much easier than those that merely arbitrated by a front-line service. It is now inconceivable for an American politician to run for office without an extended internet presence such as Facebook or YouTube.
• Enterprises that have faster cycles of product innovation, especially high tech, are looking to their customers and partners to participate in the development of new products and services. In previous generations, the field acted as a filtering mechanism of new customer requirements and ideas. However, today technology can provide a frictionless way of getting the entire enterprise to exchange ideas and improvements with the customer communities.

Integrating Social Computing

Because Social Computing is unlikely to come from a single source, especially because of the diversity of sources of knowledge and social networks available on Web 2.0, it is extremely important for the enterprise infrastructure for Social Computing to be integrated with those sources. This means bring these sources into the enterprise and bring the enterprise sources out to Web 2.0. No matter where the people collaborating are, the tools they want should be available. To facilitate this, the Social Computing should be:

• Open Source - Through being developed through social computing paradigms and sharing best of breed components with the open source community, open source systems have evolved rapidly and encompass social computing capabilities developed by the open source community. Social tools such as MediaWiki, the wiki that powers Wikipedia, and WordPress, the most popular blogging software were developed using open source.
• Integrating the Inside Out - By providing content as a service and enabling light-weight, Web-Oriented scripting development, the Social Computing platform should quickly integrate content services into external channels and web sites, such as Facebook and iGoogle, to allow enterprises to engage customers, partners and home workers.
• Integrating the Outside In - If the Social Computing platform is modular and supports a Web 2.0-style mashup-oriented architecture, it enables users and teams to integrate external open source tools and social networking web services, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or other Open Social-enabled properties, to tap into the wisdom of crowds available on the internet and to make customers and partners part of team collaboration.
• REST-style Architecture - A Web 2.0-style or REST-style of architecture using easy, light-weight scripting languages and integrated through internet standards-based APIs can easily mash-up content services into any web-oriented application or web site. These architectures should be scalable, fault-tolerant and high performance to meet any enterprise or internet requirement.
• Choice - The Social Computing platform should be based upon open interfaces developed by the open source community to provide choice of operating system, database, application server, content authoring tools or APIs.

Over the past year and continuing into the coming year, Alfresco is dedicated to expanding its architecture and applications to enable this vision of Social Computing. We will work with partners and open source community to provide best of breed open source tools for enabling this architecture. We will integrate with external Social Computing properties such as Facebook and the Open Social alliance to expand the breadth of social networks and the ability to collaborate through those networks. We will be expanding the Alfresco system’s understanding of users as people and facilitate sharing of information and content through their networks. We will be open in the process and seek and encourage your feedback and participation.

AIIM - Web 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management

Next week, I'll be in Boston speaking at the AIIM conference there. My topic of discussion is Web 2.0 and the next generation of Enterprise content management. Joining me is Wilson D'Souza from MIT. We will be speaking at 2pm on Tuesday, the first day of the conference. I hope you can come.

As usual, I am putting finishing touches on my presentation. However, I found some interesting material for the presentation from Kathy Sierra's blog. Kathy has been the source of blogging lately because death threats aimed at her by some thugs posting gruesome images in other blogs. This is her first post-trauma blog and includes some interesting charts that illustrate what is going on with Web 2.0. Here is one my favorites from the post because it really hits home what is different for the ECM world. Click on Web 2.0 to see some of my thoughts.

The Future of Enterprise Content Management

The Alfresco executive team and I have been on the east coast at a user advisory panel for our American customers here in New York. (See "Is New York the Center of the Software Universe?") That is one of the reasons that I haven’t been blogging as much. This meeting was graciously hosted by one of our customers, the law firm, Davis Polk and Wardell. The meeting room was such a contrast from our offices in little old Maidenhead with a conference room that was as big as our whole office.

We received a lot of great feedback, but it will take me a while to digest all the information. However, I can share the strategy that I presented to this group. In attendance were two large software companies, two major banks, one federal agency, one newspaper and two major games manufacturers. All of them are also customers of other ECM products, but have chosen Alfresco for new content applications. They also said that none of the other ECM products are thinking about what comes next or at least they aren’t communicating it to their customers - probably a combination of both.

I started by discussing what we saw in terms of major business trends. These included:

• Greater purchase power of IT customers
• Continued outsourcing of non-core activities and related communications problems
• More, not less regulation
• Acceptance of Open Source by major corporations
• The fruition and fatigue of implementing Service Oriented Architectures
• Further consolidation of enterprise software
• Re-emergence of B2B initiatives
• Major rewrites of corporate web presence based upon Web 2.0 concepts

Additionally, some people mentioned the move toward a more trust-based development of content, particularly things like wikis, but also pointed out the continuing need to demonstrating trust through workflow for regulated content. Others pointed out the trend for the desktop to just go away with Google taking a lead in this direction.

I also gave my predictions of what is going to happen next in the ECM market as a result of enterprise software consolidation and IBM buying FileNet. Some of this informed by Geoffrey Moore’s Stack Wars in Orchestrating the Stack, which is a great insight into the maturation of the software industry, but neglects to mention the impact of open source. We believe that open source will provide an alternative stack that will be open to substitution of best of breed parts regardless of whether those parts are open or closed.

My guess as to what will happen to the ECM market is:

• SAP will buy an ECM vendor further filling out one of the prime stacks in Geoff’s Stack Wars
• OpenText continues to look for a buyer. Could they hook up with SAP after being jilted by Oracle? OpenText’s iXOS acquisition makes this an attractive pairing.
• Vignette, partnering with companies like Microsoft, are testing the waters for a possible acquisition
• Interwoven is testing a niche play by retreating into Marketing applications, but may still opt for being acquired. EMC could do worse than to acquire Interwoven. They could also help Microsoft.
• The remaining players (other than Alfresco) will retreat into niche areas either around verticals or technical specialization. After the current boom in web redesign, this is a sure path to the living dead.
• Alfresco may end up being last independent ECM vendor
• The introduction of Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 will be the single most disruptive factor in the ECM market
• Sharepoint 2007 has not really launched yet, but in competitive situations, Microsoft has told customers that a new version will be out (Service Pack 1?) with additional Web 2.0 features. Will this be the time that Sharepoint launches along with all the customers that Microsoft has been giving free consulting to?
• Continued expansion of Alfresco will be the second most disruptive factor

One person asked about the missing Gorilla - Google. To what extent would we be competing against Google? Looking at a next 3 year time frame to 2010, I don’t see it happening, but it could in 5 years. Interestingly, at Davos Eric Schmidt made the statement that as far as Google is concerned, web sites, applications, service provision, telcos and devices are all merging together. If that is true, an always connected Google would have a powerful position.

I talked about standards as well. I have been reluctant to blog about these, because I am not sure what the confidentiality rules are around participation in the JCP (the JSR process) or in AIIM’s iECM. However, at a high level, I think that:

• JSR-170 still only has stealth support as IBM and Oracle have active development around this standard, but don’t really say anything about it
• JSR-283 is moving along and will have greater acceptance with the greater involvement of IBM, FileNet and Oracle. We’ll see what happens with Documentum
• iECM is not happening, but something will happen to fill its place

With these current factors and trends, what will happen to technology? Well I have already written my predictions for what will happen by the year 2010. But I stuck my ill informed neck out to predict that storage will triple in capacity, network capacity will increase by 5 times and with WiMax emerging, we will see the first notions of constant connectivity. I also predicted that typical desktop PC will have 4 to 8 cores in this time frame. The only pushback I got was that one customer believes that cores are low and that we will see 64 cores in this timeframe.

There are substantial implications for these factors. Desktops are overkill for the applications that people will be working in 2010. Much more knowledge worker activity will be handled on handheld devices that will be much more easier to use due to improvements in user interface and much greater power and storage.

At this point we had a very interesting discussion on licensing. Our customers were concerned about what happens to our per CPU pricing model when cores go up to 64 and beyond. It is a problem that is facing every enterprise software manufacturer that charges based upon CPUs or servers. Those companies that charge per user will face a backlash of charging this way when all a user does is take a look at a single piece of content. The idea of charging for usage also came up as an access or “click” charge appealed to some people as a way of paying for value. Someone mentioned Google per content model, but most seemed to agree that this was hard to measure and enforce. Expect more discussion in this area in the future.

I then discussed some of my thoughts around Web 2.0 and its relationship Right-brained thinking. The nature of right-brained thinking with its specialization of artistic sense, spatial relationships, face recognition, abstract concepts and future orientation explains a lot about the trends happening in Web 2.0. The way to think about this is that the first wave of the web was about use left-brained programmers who built it and now it is about everybody else.

I believe that there are implications as well for enterprise software as the focus moves from back office systems to front office applications and customer facing web sites. The Web 2.0 concepts of conversations and connections between people must factor in these systems as do improvements with usability. Creativity and engagement will be just as important as the factual accuracy, completeness of information.

The subject then turned to Sharepoint. Many companies represented also have Sharepoint implementations. No one seemed especially pleased with it, but felt that it implementation was inevitable largely due to Sharepoint’s connection to Office. This is consistent with my observation that Sharepoint is an extension of the Office monopoly. I reiterated my point that I made in What the Heck is Sharepoint 2007 that Microsoft is still not clear on what Sharepoint is. The only definition is this picture:

However, I conceded that Sharepoint is addressing a need in the enterprise that was not being met by the other ECM vendors. It is a knowledge worker stack for building knowledge worker applications as long as all the tools, platform and databases are Microsoft. Open Source, I believe, will provide an alternative with best of breed components. Our advisors suggested that we provide out of the box templates that would make it easier for end users to visualize what is possible. Our advisors also suggested that we provide integration with Office as Sharepoint does, which Paul Holmes-Higgin was able to demonstrate later. (Slick demo by the way.)

Prior to going into a detailed review of the Roadmap with Paul Holmes-Higgin and Kevin Cochrane, I talked about the strategy our team has been developing of creating a next generation ECM platform that meets the needs of Web 2.0 and exceeds platforms like Sharepoint. Characteristics of this platform include:

• Multi-channel distribution to mobile devices as well as PCs
• Mashup architectures that blur the line between internal and external systems
• Incorporate best of breed components regardless of the platform upon which they were developed
• Appliance delivery including soft appliances as virtual machines
• Highly interactive content as visual, video-oriented and personal. We would really like to see Flex become open source and become the basis of this content.
• People-oriented with close connections to directory services, presence and instant messaging
• De-centralized and loosely coupled in the same style that we have integrated OpenSearch
• Evolved by the community where it is not a single vendor driving its development and it developed through cooperation, not competition

For Alfresco there are four main use cases that our driving our strategy. These use cases are independent of how the solution is delivered whether it is a simple download, an additional package, a completely configured virtual machine, embedded in a device or hosted.

1. Collaborate and Publish. We have seen in many companies a desire to set up an out of the box solution that allows users to collaborate on deliverables, help them track and manage those deliverables and then publish out the result to the web. In another time and place, one would call this knowledge management.
2. Controlled documents. These are things like contracts and procedures that may be regulated and need to go through version control, review and approval and be audited.
3. Intranet and Internet sites. This includes sites that are especially targeted toward marketing products.
4. Records Management. The nice thing about US DoD 5015.2 is that it is a use case and has an entire validation test suite.

Our product strategy is to do the following:

1. To fulfil the four quadrants of ECM functionality of document, web content, image and records management. The four quadrants are the main areas that Forrester says are the main areas that are being spent on ECM.
2. Componentize our user interface to make it more mashable with other web sites and web applications. This is also the basis for our portal and Office integrations.
3. Focus on Web 2.0 - People and Collaboration. We went through what our plans are for wikis and blogs as well as calendaring and integration with directory information.

Other things that are important for our product strategy include scalability where we ultimately want to scale to 1 billion objects with 100 million being the next stopping point. We also plan to do more work on distributed including replication of content, but still focusing on loosely-couple architectures. Finally, we intend to work on security, particularly in a loosely-coupled, mashed up environment where it is necessary to authenticate not just inside the enterprise, but outside and between web properties.

Overall, we got great feedback from an impressive list of customers. It’s too bad that their legal departments won’t let me mention their names. I look forward to writing up more about what they feel we could be doing better and where we should be investing our time.

Alfresco Releases 2.0 with WCM and OpenSearch under GPL

Alfresco is pleased to announce the availability of the Community Version 2.0 of its Open Source Enterprise Content Management System and JSR-170-based repository. This version is now available under the GPL license with a FLOSS exception which allows any open source software using an OSI-approved license to embed the Alfresco repository or applications without change of license or attribution. You can download here.

Version 2.0 has combined the core Alfresco repository with the new web content management system and records management system. The web content management system was designed and implemented by the original engineers from Interwoven who joined Alfresco at the beginning of 2006. The WCM system provides:

• Simple import of existing web sites
• Simple Xforms-based entry of XML data based upon the open source Chiba project with AJAX extensions
• Templating of XML and HTML based upon XSLT and Freemarker
• Virtual sandboxes for staging of web sites without copying files
• Timeline snapshot of web sites with zero effort
• Standard web production workflows extending the JBoss jBPM engine with group and queue support

Our new web site is now a production user of the Alfresco Web Content Management System. It certainly makes it easier for ordinary guys like John Powell and I to add new content to the web site.

Version 2.0 has added new federated search by implementing the OpenSearch protocol, which I blogged about recently and is supported by hundreds of search engines. OpenSearch is a naturally federable search protocol combining searches from multiple search engines. Alfresco acts as both an OpenSearch server participating in a federated search from a web browser or portlet and an OpenSearch client as the Alfresco web client supports searching against multiple Alfresco repositories as well as multiple internet search engines.

In addition, Alfresco Version 2.0 has further simplified the extension of the core repository without updating the Alfresco server using the new Alfresco Modular Packaging (AMP) packs. The Alfresco Records is now provided as an optional AMP pack download. AMP packs extend existing repositories and can include folder structures, content templates, JavaScript and templating scripts, web site structures or Spring-based Java plug-ins in a standard zip file.

Alfresco has also added new AJAX controls for browsing and navigating the repository to the web client. The Alfresco repository has added a new relationships and metadata to support the translation process and multiple language variants of the same content. This capability was developed for use by multi-national corporations and government agencies.

A lot of people have put a lot of work into this release. The WCM team with Kevin, Britt, Jon and Ariel have been working almost a year on the web content components of Alfresco. Derek and Andy have helped to integrate some very sophisticated virtualization capability that WCM supports into the repository. Kev and Gav have been working their magic on the web client to support not just WCM, but also the new OpenSearch interface that allows the client to search multiple repositories, wikis, blogs and the web. Will has been a great guinea pig in building our new web site. Roy has now made it much easier to plug new components into the repository with the AMP packs and it will get even easier as we introduce the AMP Exchange with an iTunes like download capability. He also did a great job in packaging the records management into an AMP as a test base and to make RM optional. And Paul has worked very late nights to make sure it all works together. Congratulations guys on a great release.

We have come a long way in two years. Each of the five releases in the last year have been worthy of a dot-zero designation, but we felt now was the time when all the pieces of ECM have come together in a single package. Wait till you see 2.1!

Developing a Content Application in Alfresco and JSR-170

By John Newton, David Caruana, and Paul Holmes-Higgin

(Warning: The content in this blog is technical and Java in nature. Proceed at your own risk.)

Alfresco is a complete Enterprise Content Management System and 100% open source. It is a comprehensive content management development platform and scalable repository supporting JSR-170, so is suitable for building complex enterprise-scale content applications. Access to the repository is provided through APIs, such as JSR-170 and web services, as well as through a virtual file system interface implementing the CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocol to emulate a Microsoft shared file system, FTP and WebDAV. The Alfresco system is built upon Spring taking full advantage of Spring’s dependency injection model to extend repository functionality, as well as incorporating Hibernate for persistence, Lucene for querying and indexing, jBPM for business process management, and the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine.

The Alfresco system has a web-based application that provides document management, web content management and records management capabilities. The web application, based upon the MyFaces implementation of JSF, is extensible, programmable and scriptable. Through Spring configuration it is possible to add new dialogs, views and wizards. The web application also provides dashboards to track repository and workflow activity. These dashboards are programmable either through Java or high-level templating languages, such as the open source FreeMarker templating engine.

As an example of building an enterprise content application, we use a scenario of building an email archiving application. For this, we use the JSR-170 interface to add content; add a new action to the repository specifically for email; use JavaScript for processing the email; then create an RSS feed using a Freemarker template, and use the templating engine to create a web view of email activity.

Defining a Metadata Aspect in Alfresco

For the purposes of our application, we will add a new metadata aspect to tag incoming emails. A metadata aspect is similar to a type, except that it can be added after the content has been created and more than one aspect can be added to the content object. It is similar to a JSR-170 mixin, except that in Alfresco it can also have behavior attached to it. We will use a predefined aspect in this example, the “cm:emailed” aspect, which includes the following metadata:

• Originator
• Addressee
• Subject Line
• Sent Date

Alfresco models are defined in XML and can be loaded dynamically. In this example, we create a new aspect called “tagged”, which is defined as follows:

<aspect name="cm:tagged">
   <title>Tagged</title>
   <properties>
       <property name="cm:tag">
           <type>d:text</type>
           <multiple>false</multiple>
       </property>
   </properties>
</aspect>

In order to view this in the Alfresco web client, we can extend the properties sheet with the following configuration:

<config evaluator="aspect-name" condition="cm:tagged">
   <property-sheet>
      <show-property name="cm:tag" />
   </property-sheet>
</config>

There are metadata aspects available as well for Dublin Core, DOD 5015.2 records management, basic Microsoft Office metadata, automatic counters, workflow process data, classification, auditing and localization among others.

Content Storage through JSR-170

Alfresco is a JSR-170 compliant repository therefore supports the JCR API. For purposes of this example, we assume that there is an email listener that stores the email as a JCR node using the JSR-170 interface. The node is placed in an “email drop zone”, a well known path for processing the content based upon rules in the repository. The drop zone is identified as a node in its own right and the email is attached as a child of that node. The actual binary content of the email is then added to this child node.

public class EmailListener
{
    ...

    private Node importEmail(InputStream msg)
    {
       // locate email dropzone folder
       Node rootNode = session.getRootNode();
       Node zone =
       rootNode.getNode("app:company_home/cm:email/cm:dropzone");

       // add email to folder (which fires registered rules)
       Node email =
          zone.addNode(GUID.generate(), "cm:content");
       email.setProperty("cm:content", msg);
       return email;
    }

    ...
}

The purpose of placing content in a drop zone is that it allows the business logic of email filing to be specified independently of the application and more importantly by business users. This is done in Alfresco through rules and associated actions.

Defining Rules to Process Incoming Content

The Alfresco repository organizes information in a hierarchical structure similar to other enterprise content management repositories. These structures are called spaces, which are similar to folders in a file system, but also contain rules for processing content that is added, removed, moved or updated in that folder. They also have users associated with that space that may have different roles in interacting with content in the space.

The rules associated with the space determine the disposition of content in the space. Rules can be used to change the type of the content being added, add aspects of metadata, attach behavior such as locking and versioning, and transform and copy to other spaces. In the email example, we will use a rule to extract metadata from the content and use that metadata to classify and move the content to a new space determined by the metadata.

To do this, we use the Alfresco web client, navigate to the email drop zone space and specify rules for content entering the space. Through a set of wizards, we add the following actions for all new items of mimetype email or “message/rfc822”:

• Add the email aspect - this is the email metadata mentioned previously and can be combined with other aspects such as record data or process data.
• Add the tagged aspect - this is the aspect we defined earlier.
• Extract metadata - this is a standard capability of Alfresco that looks inside standard file formats to extract standard information such as author, title and subject. In this example, we will extend the system to extract additional standard metadata from emails.
• Execute the “emailtag.js” JavaScript - this is a server-side JavaScript example that we will show in a later section. JavaScript is stored in the repository and can be executed just like Alfresco internal actions.

Rules and actions can be combined and chained to create more complex logic. Rules can include tests of types of content, which aspects are applied and what metadata has been set. These rules in turn fire off the actions in sequential order or can be executed asynchronously for long running operations. Common actions performed in rules are transformation, copying, moving and metadata setting and extraction.

Adding a New Behavior to the Alfresco Repository

Although the Alfresco repository already has an action to extract metadata from email, since it is a relatively new extension of the existing repository, it is worth showing how it was added. In addition, it is a good example of how Alfresco uses the dependency injection pattern of Spring to add new functionality without requiring rebuilding the repository system. In this example, the metadata extraction action has a standard Java interface defined as follows:

public interface MetadataExtractor
{
    public double getReliability(String sourceMimetype);

    public long getExtractionTime();

    public void extract(ContentReader reader, Map<QName, Serializable> destination);
}

For this example, we will add a new interface to inject into the MetadataExtractor interface that uses the open source POI Java access tool to read the proprietary Microsoft file format. We first insure that the file actually is a Microsoft Exchange message or rfc822 and then we read the fields delimited by the following hex codes:

• 0C1F - The message originator
• 0037 - The message subject
• 39FE - The message addressee

The following code accesses these fields through POI and then sets the appropriate content properties on the metadata. Obviously, more complex processing or more metadata fields could be added to the code.

public class MailMetadataExtractor extends implements MetadataExtractor {
    private static final String PREFIX = "__substg1.0_";
    private MetadataExtracterRegistry registry;
    ...

    public void extract(ContentReader reader, Map<QName, Serializable> props)
    {
        POIFSReaderListener listener = new POIFSReaderListener()
        {
            public void processPOIFSReaderEvent(final POIFSReaderEvent event)
            {
                if (event.getName().startsWith(PREFIX))
                {
                    String type = event.getName();
                    type = type.substring(PREFIX_LENGTH,
                              PREFIX_LENGTH + 4);

                    if (type.equals("0C1F"))
                        props.put(PROP_ORIGINATOR, extractText());
                    else if (type.equals("0037"))
                        props.put(PROP_SUBJECT, extractText());
                    else if (type.equals("39FE"))
                        props.put(PROP_ADDRESSEE, extractText());
                    ...
                }
            }

            POIFSReader poi = new POIFSReader();
            poi.registerListener(listener);
            poi.read(reader.getContentInputStream());
        };
    }
}

To register this bean, we merely added the following Spring configuration:

<bean class="MailMetadataExtractor" init-method="register">
   <property name="registry">
      <ref bean="metadataExtractorRegistry"/>
   </property>
</bean>

Similar extensions can be added for transformations from one format to another, authentication interfaces, encryption and compression mechanisms on content transfer, and even rules and actions.

Using JavaScript to Add Repository Behavior

Previously, we mentioned the “emailtag.js” JavaScript for using the metadata to classify the emails. We could implement this in Java, but for simple tasks, it is often easier and just as efficient to implement them using JavaScript. Alfresco incorporates the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine. It includes all of the standard functions and classes of ECMA Script, but also has the ability to work with the Alfresco content model as well as the JBoss jBPM model for workflow applications. A special data dictionary space is provided for storing and managing scripts just as one would for any other content, allowing complete versioning, locking, auditing and CIFS access.

In this example, the “emailtag.js” JavaScript is invoked through the rule associated with email drop zone space. This script finds a tag from the subject line that has just been extracted from the previous rule action, searches for any term that is delimited by square brackets and adds that to the tagged metadata aspect. All that is required is the following four lines.

  var subject= document.properties.subjectline
  var tag= subject.substring(subject.indexOf('[')+1,subject.indexOf(']'));

  document.properties.tag = tag;
  document.save();

The script is atomic in that either the whole action occurs or it doesn’t. The script could also set up complex classifications or relationships to another content objects. Most of the Alfresco processing that can be done in Java can also be done in JavaScript, so the choice becomes one of performance and extension rather than capabilities.

Building an RSS Feed using FreeMarker

The Alfresco system also includes the FreeMarker templating engine. FreeMarker was chosen for its extensibility to other data models as well as its ability handle XML. The templating language is particularly suited to production of HTML and XML. Like other templating languages such as Velocity, Perl or PHP, directives to access and manipulate data are defined in tags interwoven with the static output to be delivered. The FreeMarker language has constructs for manipulating lists, defining reusable macros, and string and variable manipulation.

Alfresco has an open templating engine interface into which FreeMarker has been incorporated. FreeMarker has access to the Alfresco data model and can query and access content. FreeMarker can iterate through a folder, walk through a parent-child tree structure, and access properties and content. This ability provides a convenient tool for constructing complex content and provide re-use of content. In addition, FreeMarker has access to the URLs and icons for content to generate query-driven links and good report writing capabilities. Although designed for generating HTML and XML, FreeMarker can be used to generate any type of content and is the content is URL-addressable from Alfresco.

For this example, we use a FreeMarker template to generate an RSS feed for specifically tagged emails that have been collected by our email listener over the last seven days. In the FreeMarker template, we set up the normal RSS headers and use references to the Alfresco model to set up the description of the feed. For brevity, we include the heart of the RSS feed, which is a list generated by an XPath query of all content in the email space that has the tag of the argument tag associated with it. The template then pulls out metadata out of the content node to populate the appropriate RSS tags.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>

...

<#assign weekms=1000*60*60*24*7>
<#list space.childrenByXPath
      [".//*[@cm:tag:${args.tag}]"] as child>
    <#if (dateCompare(child.properties["cm:modified"], date, weekms) == 1)
|| (dateCompare(child.properties["cm:created"], date, weekms) == 1)>
    <item>
       <title>${child.properties.name}</title>
       <link>${hostname}${child.url}</link>
       <description>
         ${"<a ref='${hostname}${child.url}'>"?xml}
         ${child.properties.name}
         ${"</a>"?xml}
         <#if child.properties["cm:description"]?exists
            && child.properties["cm:description"] != "">
            ${child.properties["cm:description"]}
         </#if>
       </description>
       <pubDate>
       ${child.properties["cm:modified"]?string(datetimeformat)}
       </pubDate>
       <guid isPermaLink="false">${hostname}${child.url}</guid>
    </item>
  </#if>
</#list>
...

To invoke this RSS feed, first save the above script in the Presentation Templates space of the data dictionary. Then navigate to the email drop zone space and open the properties dialog. There is a tabbed area for RSS feeds. Apply the above script as the RSS feed and copy the URL link for the RSS feed. Add an argument of “?tag=tag_name” and add this to your RSS reader.

Scalability and Clusterability

This application provides an example of the capabilities for storing, managing and accessing content from the Alfresco repository. This application can sit side by side with the other applications that Alfresco provides out of the box. Nothing is required to make this application and others scalable.

The Alfresco system can scale from small organizations to hundreds or even thousands of users on inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware. In benchmarks validated by independent parties, Alfresco using RHEL 4 and MySQL 5.1 was able to produce the following numbers on a SuperMicro 3GHz Opteron dual core, dual processors system with 12Gbytes of memory of which 4Gbytes were allocated to Java and 6 x 100G RAID-configured drives.

• 10 Million objects total in repository
• Bulk load 60 documents per second into 10 Million object repository
• Up to 128 concurrent threads
• Access via unique id in under 0.1 seconds
• Concurrent active mix of reads and writes at 128 per second

To support even larger systems, the Alfresco system can be clustered in loosely coupled hardware to take advantage of existing hardware resources. This is due to the fact that Alfresco is architected as stateless system with all operations performed in the context of transactions coordinated through the underlying database.  Using the distributed EHCache open source cache means that all clustered systems share a common view of the contents of the cache and their freshness. Combined with a clustered database such as MySQL 5.1, the Alfresco system can be extremely scalable.

Conclusion

We have seen an example of how the Alfresco system can be used to build an enterprise-class application such as the archival and retrieval of email and enhance that storage with rules that can extract additional metadata and act upon that data. We have seen how the Alfresco system can be used as a web conduit for monitoring and delivering content from an enterprise repository. The system itself can scale to the requirements of the enterprise using the inherent scalability of the components upon which Alfresco has been built and through the transactional clustering capability of the system.

If you would like to know more about Alfresco, please visit the developer web site at http://www.alfresco.org.

John Newton is Chief Technology Officer of Alfresco. David Caruana is the Chief Architect of Alfresco. Paul Holmes-Higgin is the Vice President of Engineering for Alfresco.

OpenSearch in Alfresco 2.0 Federates the Distributed Organization

Alfresco's Chief Architect Dave Caruana’s blog post on Alfresco’s support for Open Search in our version 2.0 should not go unnoticed. Dave's latest contribution to Alfresco is a big deal and I think it is a first in the Enterprise Content Management space. OpenSearch was originally created by A9 to provide a mechanism to aggregate search results from multiple search sources. Now it is supported by literally hundreds of search engines. Alfresco is one of the latest pieces of software to support OpenSearch.

Alfresco supports OpenSearch both as a client and as a server. This means that you can include one or more Alfresco repositories as well as the internet or any other search engine in your web browser, a portlet or other type of search tool. Firefox 2.0 and IE7 support OpenSearch from their built-in search tools and it is now easy to add Alfresco searches. In addition, you can search multiple Alfresco repositories and the internet from the Alfresco web client. This is a powerful tool to bring content into a repository and to aid in collaboration. We have been able to use both tools in customer implementations that include multiple Alfresco repositories with blogs, wikis and external search engines.

This brings a whole new definition to Federated Repositories. Alfresco can now join federations of search engines and collections of repositories. Existing tools like IBM’s Venetica and EMC’s AskOnce use proprietary connector technology that relies on centralized topologies of integration. Because these searches rely on proprietary interfaces, what repositories and sources are supported depends on the vendors or after-market suppliers to provide the connectors. If these engines wanted to include the list of information source provided above, then they will eventually have to support OpenSearch.

The Alfresco approach is different in that it uses a standard protocol and allowing departments and individuals to configure how they want to federate their searches. It allows for a loosely coupled topology of repositories that can grow and fuse repositories as business needs require. Departments can try Alfresco at their leisure and then merge results through federated search, even if the collaborating organizations are outside the enterprise. Also, searches do not need to be limited to what Alfresco supports. The user can include searches to information sources that are important to the task at hand. This is a leap away from the repository-centric view where all activities revolve around the repository to a holistic view of information in which the repository plays a supporting role.

The OpenSearch really a collection of technologies based upon relatively simple, standardized protocols. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch The search engines are described using XML that is extensible and therefore expandable to support more sophisticated ECM types of searches. The search itself is invoked using a URL and therefore fits the web and REST model very neatly. The search is usually described in a template form, but is extensible to add additional metadata types of searches and is designed to include metadata. Page results are returned in the form of ATOM, RSS or HTML and well suited to work within a browser or to be aggregated in an aggregation tool. We have been able to use an open source Java aggregator as part of our web client implementation. (That’s the beauty of open source - we don’t have to reinvent it every time.)
Please give it a try. You can access the latest version of 2.0 at http://www.alfresco.com/products/docs/releases/2.0/

Right Brain Goes Shopping on Web 2.0

I recently wrote a post on how Web 2.0 is about the right-side of your brain. Yesterday Om Malik wrote about a new on-line shopping site, Browse Goods, that uses a much more visual shopping experience as differentiation in the very crowded shopping and directory business. The service is currently limited to shoes, watches, toys and a limited selection of sporting goods, but more is coming.

Browsing is more like going into a department store where all the goods are organized into separate, but very visible parts of the store. You walk in and see what catches your eye. You can imagine yourself stumbling across something that you weren't planning on buying, but impulse and the devil made you do it. I'll take one of those, these and that. This isn't about analysis and comparison, real left-brain activities, that are delivered by most on-line sites.

The left-brain in me sees a pattern in the presentation. This is very similar to drill-down heat maps that have been used in financial services for a while now. O'Reilly uses a heat map on his book sales to indicate what subjects are hot and what are not. At the moment there isn't enough data on the Browse Goods site to drive a heat map of sales, but you can see it coming.

I believe that the set of visualization mechanisms that are available for use in Web 2.0 presentation are limited, but can be stylized in infinite number of ways. We know that the left-brain likes linear and tree structures, where the right-brain like abstract concepts and spatial structures. So here is my first approximation of what those structures might be:

• Maps - this was the first wave and we saw this with Google maps being mashed up with things like real estate in sites like Zillow and similar concepts being applied to Flickr maps. This can be metaphorical or fictitious maps as well, such as those found in Second Life
• Heat Map - Already discussed, this is a more compelling mechanism of displaying the same information as analytic charts. Pie and Bar Charts provide good targets for drill-downs of popular or hot topics, but are not exactly right-brain friendly. Go to where the heat is.
• Color and Image Coded Lists - Top 10 lists will always be popular, but can use color and images to emphasize position, trends and rank like Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom chart
• Tag Clouds - Simple presentation of various levels of interest through typeface and font size
• Mind Maps - Related to tag clouds in presenting concepts, but more directed with explicit relationships. These may be too personal to use in mass market environments.
• Fish-eye and Hyperbolic browsers - This concept was originally developed at places like Xerox Parc and MIT Media Lab in the 80's and early 90's with few great applications, but could apply to things like tag clouds
• Time lines - What makes Technorati different? Time lines provide a tool to move in dimensions that the mind moves with scrolling walls and spheres (like Picasa). These can be stylized into lines or as calendars.
• Family Tree - A way of presenting the complex flow of relationships over time, especially for product lineage
  
• Radar - As a metaphor for what's over the horizon, radars present how far objects are from you and what direction they are coming - good for presenting future events, interest or threats
• Human Body - Presenting biological organisms is a powerful metaphor and none more powerful than the human body. You can use the human body as both a map and as part of parts explosion
• Rogues Gallery - There is a reason it is called Facebook. Your brain is extremely tuned to look at a large crowd of people and pick out a face.
• Parts Explosion - Taking a photograph of an ordinary physical object and blowing it apart with other photographs and animation as a way of drilling down a subject and providing a means of connection other objects (or things to buy - particularly in high-cost goods like autos)
• Analog Controls from the physical world. We already see touch-tone phone pads and dials and volume controls on many web sites. This was an equalizer control from Facebook to control output of stories based upon characteristics:
  

• Floating Detail - By floating over any of the above visualizations, Pop-up, hover dialog that provides a quick summary of information along with a representative thumbnail. This can take on the characteristic of a post-it or a magnifying lens

What these have in common with each other is modeling and presenting relationships between objects or describing a property or characteristic of an object. This is what the web has been doing with lists, tables, forms and charts since the beginning. More artistic types, such as those at Dotted Pair, are transforming the user experience by using the spatial and conceptual models of the right brain.

Have I missed anything?

Web 2.0 is for the Right Side of Your Brain

A lot was said in Davos about Web 2.0 as a concept that was important for the development of the world. The level of buzz around connected devices, virtual worlds and community sites was tremendous in Davos as it seems to be subsiding in the valley. I was even interviewed by the BBC about avatars and the virtual world of Second Life, even though I'm not an expert on either. People who attracted a lot of attention at the conference were Chad Hurley, founder of YouTube, Mitch Kapor, Chairman of Linden, the maker of Second Life, and Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr. CNN even hosted a somewhat disorganized audience session on Web 2.0 that had Mitch, Caterina, Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of Orange, Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters and Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook who looks like he just left university, because he has. Too bad that CNN, like many other people, doesn’t seem to understand what Web 2.0 is.

On the Saturday, I went to the Geeks' Dinner, an alternative to the Gala Soiree developed by techies and journalists who were not encouraged to go to the Soiree since they might not fit in. The dinner was held at the Pot au Feu, which is an informal, traditional Swiss restaurant and a real contrast to the Grand Soiree. Attending the dinner is everyone you can probably think of involved in Web 2.0. There were also journalists, Nobel prize winners, Olympic athletes, anyone left who matters from enterprise software like Shai Agassi, Paul Sagan and Peter Gabriel. Larry and Sergey from Google were there and apparently they brought some of the people there in the Google jet, which is a converted 757 that has been fitted out something like Air Force One. Paul Saffo from the Institute for the Future was the Master of Ceremonies and asked everyone to introduce themselves in seven words or less. (Let me tell you, that was a truly terrifying prospect in such company.)  It was the Web 2.0 people who probably had the easiest time describing themselves like Mark Zuckerberg and Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia.

At this dinner, I sat next to John Markoff, technology writer for the New York Times, and Caterina Fake. John was explaining that he originally wanted to be an astronomer, but that he didn’t enjoy the math. He was also talking about an idea that he had for a portal that was very visual for the everyday pieces of information that people need. We talked a bit about personality types and how they respond to different types of information. Caterina mentioned that she was very good at math, but really preferred right brained activities. It finally clicked! John and Caterina were right brained and very much aligned with what was happening in Web 2.0. Everything that has been described about Web 2.0 is more or less a description of right brained activities whereas the old web is about left brain activities, built by people with left brained tendencies.

So far, Web 2.0 has been defined from a session that Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle (who was at Davos and may have been at this dinner) back in 2004. In this session, they collected a set of “memes” that described a new wave of web properties that were emerging on the internet. Rather than trying to synthesize the collection, that named it Web 2.0. Since then, there has been a debate about whether this is really something new or just evolutionary. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it felt like something new.




This meme map is not very helpful in distilling the essence of what Web 2.0 really is. Now consider the definition of Right Brain/Left Brain or Lateralization of Brain Function from Wikipedia. The left brain functions include:

•    Language and grammar
•    Arithmetic and mathematics
•    Present and past
•    Concrete concepts
•    Linear thinking
•    Pattern perception

Right brain function includes:

•    Intonation and emphasis
•    Philosophy
•    Present and future
•    Abstract concepts
•    Holistic reasoning
•    Spatial perception
•    Facial perception
•    Music
•    Artistic ability

When you think about the touchstones of Web 2.0 like Google Maps, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and Second Life, it all falls into place. When the last generation says that there is nothing new here, it is because they cannot see it. They see the technology, which has not moved on significantly, and miss the nuance and conceptual difference. There have been technological changes to be able to better express either abstract concept or spatial relationships, such as AJAX and the virtual world of Second Life, but these pale in the change in accessibility of internet services. First generation was created for the people who built the internet and second generation is for everyone else who isn’t left brain.

This was a real revelation for me. However, I don’t think that John and Caterina shared my excitement. Maybe it’s already bleeding obvious. The next day I did a Google search on “Web 2.0” and right brain and didn’t find a lot. However, for me it is profound and it is something I think that we can apply immediately to the development of Alfresco. I am going to explore the concept more and I believe that there are implications from Myers-Briggs personality types in how they interact with the Internet.

It also suggests a more appropriate name for Web 2.0 - the Right Web, as opposed to the Left Web. The Left Web as the necessary infrastructure developed to make the Web possible in the first place. The Left Web is not done, especially if you want to see the holographic web that John Chambers is talking about or the physical web that Shai Agassi is talking about. However, the Right Web is only just starting and based upon the bold and visionary statements made at Davos, I think we will see rapid development of the creative and personal side of the web in the next couple of years.

It also occurred to me that this wasn’t a nerds’ dinner anymore. The left-brain, analytical nerds were gone from this event and seem less relevant today. At this dinner were all the right-brained people defining the world that we will live in. Looking at the comparison of the two lists of characteristics above, it will probably a much more fun world as well.

Looking Forward to Alfresco in 2007

The year 2006 was a fantastic for Alfresco and primarily thanks to you the community. We delivered Releases 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and the preview release of our Web Content Management product. We were very pleased to start 2006 with the addition of the team from Interwoven led by Kevin Cochrane. We provided document management, image management, records management and WCM becoming the first complete open source ECM system. We delivered the first ECM benchmark in the industry and proved Alfresco’s enterprise scalability in the process. This year was our first selling the product and I’m not sure exactly how many customers we have now as the number increases toward the end of the year. However, it is somewhere between 100 and 150 and growing rapidly. Well done to the engineering team led by Paul Holmes-Higgin and architect David Caruana in producing so much, so quickly with such high quality. Well done to the sales team led by John Powell and Matt Asay who were able to sell so much just through email and phone calls.

There has have been some personal tragedies and triumphs as well this year. One of the saddest parts was when the wife of our Chief Marketing Officer, Ian Howells, died very suddenly just before her 40th birthday. A close colleague of ours from Documentum and Ingres, Dave Ross, also passed away from complications from a cancer operation. But the Alfresco family is bounding with babies and children from a large part of the organization. Confidence and optimism is high in the organization as we are doing so well.

We are not complacent though. We are not done innovating and will continue to evolve the product and services for our customers. We have been planning over the last couple of months for next year and intend to provide our customers with cost effective ECM products. We will continue to use the best open source components and we are cooperating even more with other open source organizations to bring you new whole solutions for ECM. We will deliver this around 3 releases during the year: 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0. We will keep up the iterative release process that allows us to adjust the product as we move along, but anchor the iteration in these main releases.

The first release is 2.0. Originally, this was intended for December 2006. After a string of releases delivered more or less on time, we found that there was more that we had to do to consolidate the progress we have made so far. The main intent has been to combine the WCM release with the main repository release. Up to this point WCM has been a separate release due to the complexity of the virtualization services on top of the repository. The merging of the code lines is complete and we will be releasing the combined product in the middle of January. In addition, we will be releasing a new federation search capability that uses the OpenSearch.org interface. This will allow us to federate Alfresco searches with other search engines. Also, we have added more multi-lingual capability for the European Union to allow metadata in multiple languages; multiple language variants of the same content; and locale based indexing and searching, including Chinese and Japanese thanks to moving over to Lucene 2.0. We are also adding AJAX capabilities in the web client including a full tree control and preview hover over items. This preview will be driven through Freemarker so that you can control what is delivered in the preview. An update to the Records Management capability will be provided with some features hardened in Java for robust execution and better user interface integration. A new packaging capability will be provided to simplify the addition of new modules independently of any particular release.

Release 2.1 will follow in April 2007 to add more WCM capability, additional Web 2.0 capabilities and more configuration options for enterprises. The full suite of web services has been delayed for some time now because of the lack of perceived value from customers. However, we now need this to provide more options of splitting up the functionality of the system onto different servers. WCM will add new tools to simplify page layout, site management, deployment and possibly dependency management. Pieces of the web client will be componentized to become Web 2.0 components in mash-ups with other applications. An example of using these components will be in the context of a task pane for Microsoft Office which will be provided as a preview in this release. User interface enhancements will be made in the web client to take advantage of the new federated search, multi-lingual support and forms. We anticipate that our long awaited wiki will be available in this time frame with more collaborative work with other open source projects. Performance will continue to be a focus with our target of reaching 50 million items in the repository in this time frame. We will also integrate new network features into the enterprise client for advice, information and configurations. The source code will be made available for these features, but the information delivered will only be for those purchasing enterprise support and services.

Between Release 2.1 and 3.0, we will provide a series of add-on packages delivered in release packages using the packaging technology provided in Release 2.0. Some of the packages we anticipate in this time frame are: new web site designers, system administration interfaces, calendaring, records management enhancements, new office plug-ins for Microsoft Office and Open Office, blogs, email listener integration. More on this in the new year.

Release 3.0 will be delivered at the end of November (which is one of our fiscal quarter ends). We anticipate that there will be new content management standards that will be REST based in this time frame. With this standard will be new REST API interfaces and new language definitions that we expect to be SQL based. We will be extending our distributed capabilities with more enhancements to our federated search and multi-directional replication for geographic distribution. We will also provide additional system administration capabilities. We will also refactor portions of the architecture and replace components that have better alternatives or limit our license flexibility.

Have a great holiday period and Happy New Year.

Présentation à Paris le 3 Octobre

Je ferais une présentation (en français!) au sujet de la gestion contenu 2.0 au Forum GEIDE à CNIT La Défense.

Je présenterai la façon dont le Web 2.0 change radicalement l'expérience dans laquelle les utilisateurs agissent l'un sur l'autre avec des entreprises et des systèmes interactifs. Les utilisateurs exigent maintenant un environnement plus dynamique, plus interactif, plus facile et personnalisé pour gérer et partager du contenu. Satisfaire cette exigence et gérer des contenus dans un contexte interactif a surchargé et complexifié l'offre des fournisseurs traditionnels de gestion de contenu. . Une nouvelle génération de gestion de contenu d'entreprise est nécessaire pour relever les défis du Web 2.0 que nous appelons la gestion de contenu 2.0.

Alfresco utilise mieux des composants open source pour créer un environnement complet du Web 2.0. Alfresco fournit une plateforme unique de la gestion de contenu 2.0 pour la gestion de contenu de Web, et la gestion des documents, l'image et les archives aussi bien que de nouvelles formes de contenu telles que des wikis et la syndication.

Ma présentation expliquera les nouveaux défis du Web 2.0, quels changements de technologie sont exigés, comment exploiter ces nouvelles techologies pour intégrer ces nouveaux modèles de systèmes ensemble, et quel rôle joue les processus pour faciliter tout cela.