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

The Start of Open Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

MySQL Acquisition and Enterprise Software

In a software industry that had little innovation and created obstacles for the next class of rising companies, open source is turning enterprise software on its head. Xen Source, Zimbra and JBoss are now part of larger companies acquiring new technologies and new distribution models by leveraging the power of open source. Now we see that MySQL has been acquired by Sun for $1 billion. Sun has been embracing open source more and more under Jonathan Schwartz's watch as CEO and this can be seen as a logical next step in that strategy.

Marten Mickos, a happy man and a really nice guy.

When we started Alfresco, we came in with the assumption that one of the only things that is working in enterprise software is open source. The past year or so have proven this prediction right. Although it wasn't really my prediction. A meeting with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL in 2002, helped me understand that, yes, open source really could work. Up to that point, I was of the same opinion as Bill Gates, that open source is equivalent to communism. MySQL helped me understand the power of huge numbers of people using software and the value that support can provide to fund the development of professional software. The fact that the model works means that small open source companies can thrive in an environment of behemoths consolidating stacks and actually create an environment of innovation.

David Axmark and Monty Widenius, founders of MySQL

When a category has been around long enough that customers know what they want, then open source works really well. MySQL provided a simple, cost-effective database system that meant that you didn't have to install a big, hulking Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server and more importantly, you didn't even have to pay for it. You just pay for support. JBoss did the same thing for app servers, Xen Source for virtualization systems and Zimbra for email. Some people question whether MySQL was really innovating, after all the set of SQL is the same as Oracle had in the early 90's. In reality, there wouldn't be a Web 2.0 or possibly even a Web 1.0 without MySQL. MySQL pioneered the model of Scale Out rather than Scale Up to provide web properties like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc. to scale to levels that were unthinkable in Oracle back in the 90s. JBoss, Xen and Zimbra were doing the same to their respective industries and bigger companies were willing to pay for that.

From our perspective at Alfresco, Sun is a great company to acquire MySQL. Sun has proven their alliance and cooperation with open source. And this doesn't change our plans to become a public company. We have created public companies in the past and we intend to in the future. Our sales of support and development of our community have exceeded our expectations and events like this make us even more determined that IPO can be successful for the development of the Alfresco system and the Alfresco community.

Congratulations to Marten and team and good luck in the future. We are looking forward to more successful collaborations and joint deployments of Alfresco and MySQL.

Open Source IPOs in 2008

Matthew Aslett at the 451 Group blogged on a Fortune article on IPOs in 2008 noting that 3 of the top 5 are open source including MySQL, Ingres and SugarCRM, all of which are partners of Alfresco and good friends. The 4th is an open source project sponsor, Parallels. The Fortune noted that even if a recession is coming that doesn't mean that business still don't need to innovate or cut costs.

On MySQL, the company most likely to go first, Matt says:

"MySQL has been talking up its IPO credentials for some time, and a 2008 offering was always more likely than 2007. The plan has not changed as far as The 451 Group is aware. What has changed is that the company has stopped being so open about its financial performance, which is typical of a company preparing to go public. Previously the company publicly claimed revenue of $50m in 2006 and $34m in 2005. Expect an IPO sooner rather than later."

The disruptive nature of open source and its low cost development and distribution model will ultimately thrive in a recessionary environment. The result could be very similar to previous recessions that created much bigger markets for mini-computers, relational databases, PCS, client/server and web-based technologies that ultimately cut costs of using older technology and made people more productive. The same will be true for the current generation of open source tools, applications and technologies. Companies just won't be able to afford using the old technology just because it is there.

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.

Open Source and Business Pleasure vs. Business Pain

A European PR firm was pitching my company for business last week and putting out a few ideas on how to generate demand in different countries across Europe. One of the ideas that they presented was a “business pain barometer” to indicate how much pain companies might be feeling using existing enterprise systems. This didn’t exactly resonate as a value proposition for open source, but it is a tried and true campaign strategy for traditional enterprise systems. Selling pain relief has worked for the last three decades to sell enterprise software, but has it run its course?

Read the rest of this entry »