So my New Year resolutions contain all the usual suspects – lose weight, exercise more, blah, blah, blah. But perhaps the most important, dear reader is to blog more. I have written several times how hard it is to blog, very much like trying to work yourself up to exercising. Thus, what better way to start again than to review the year 2008, then work myself up for tomorrow’s Looking Forward to 2009, which is a bit like getting ready for that 5k run after sitting at the desk for so long. (BTW, yesterday the manager of the local gym said he has not seen a membership card like mine for several years. :-( But at least I went. :-) )
First of all, 2008 was my 50th birthday year and I decided to celebrate by taking down the entire world’s financial system. Just kidding. I read just before my birthday that the time of least happiness for a man is supposed to be 50. But I have found this year very satisfying both professionally and personally, despite what happened to my portfolio. It helps that Alfresco is doing so well and I find working in open source so fulfilling. So a bit about the last year at Alfresco…
In 2008, two threads of our strategy came together and we have been actually working on these since our founding in 2005. The first is to implement the Microsoft SharePoint protocol to allow Microsoft Office users to access Alfresco the same way that they would access SharePoint. The second is to join with the largest players in the Enterprise Content Management space in developing a standard for the industry, hopefully an SQL for content management. These came together in our Alfresco 3 platform that also included the social computing application, Alfresco Share, and our new web framework, Surf.
It has always been our belief that Microsoft SharePoint was going to have a substantial impact on the enterprise content management industry and that the primary reason for this is the special lock that SharePoint has on Microsoft Office. We chose to release CIFS shared file system emulation first, but had always intended to implement the SharePoint protocol for Office. This summer, thanks to a deal worked out between the European Union and Microsoft, we were able to do that much more easily than we expected. This has been really popular with our enterprise customers since its release in July.
CMIS took the industry by surprise primarily because it is so long overdue that many people thought it would never come. After ODMA, DMA, JCR and iECM, the gorillas in the marketplace, Microsoft, IBM and EMC felt it was better to work together to create a bigger pie. We have been working with these three for the last year, along with OpenText, SAP and BEA, now Oracle. David Caruana has been very active in the REST/ATOM protocols and we were ready to deliver our implementation quickly. We all participated in interoperability fest at Redmond in August to prove that the web services and REST specifications would work. We had been working with SAP and BEA already as they used Alfresco as a reference implementation upon which to build clients for the August session. When CMIS was publicly announced in September prior to submission to OASIS, we were ready with an implementation based upon the 0.5 specifications.
The Alfresco 3 platform was the big focus of the engineering group this year and became the vehicle for both CMIS and the SharePoint protocol. The Alfresco 3 platform was developed to get people collaborating on documents and to enable new types of social applications. We started with the functionality we required in Alfresco 2.9, but found that the Java Server Faces UI infrastructure was holding us back. So we made the decision to move to a more Web 2.0, REST and scripting-oriented development environment, which we named Surf and was based upon the REST-based work of Web Scripts that we started in 2007. The social functionality that we created – activity feeds, calendars, blogs, wikis, etc. – were created as components and packaged as a site-oriented collaboration application, Alfresco Share, which can be used both inside and outside the firewall. Share is designed around our Web Content Management platform and you can use Surf / Share components in creating new web sites.
Open source has proven to be a good community and business strategy for Alfresco in 2008. It helps though to have someone responsible for it and Nancy Garrity has made tremendous progress in the last year as she has ramped up participation in the forums, wiki and the forge. With Web Scripts and Surf, we have increased the number of projects and contributions. A couple of contributions that I thought were pretty cool this year were FlexSpaces, a Flex/Air client by Steve Reiner, and Plutext, a collaborative simultaneous-editing Word add-in by Jason Harrop. In addition, JoomlaTools, founded by the chief architect of Joomla 1.5 Johan Janssens, built an integration with Alfresco to Joomla, the popular open source CMS, using our CMIS implementation. There are likely to be more CMIS-based applications and contributions as CMIS moves closer to standard later in the year.
Business has gone very well despite the economic slowdown. I wrote over a year ago that it seemed like a recession was coming and we have been prepared by being prudent and not over-extending ourselves. Credit goes to CEO John Powell who holds on very tightly to the strings of a very mean purse. Still we more than doubled the number of enterprise customers while continuing to provide more functionality to the open source community side. You can expect more in the new year. You can also expect that we will do well in the recession as we provide similar functionality to the larger ECM systems at 10% of the price.
From a personal perspective, it was a great year with loads of travel to tropical climes, my son getting in Winchester College, my daughter doing so well in horse riding and ballet, and my wife throwing a completely surprising surprise birthday party. The World Economic Forum in Davos in January was still very much a highlight like last year, especially meeting so many famous people. Just when you finally figure out what’s going on, it’s all over. I also got to develop my interests in photography with a great photography course in Tuscany.
With the new year, it is more or less the fourth birthday of Alfresco. So thanks everyone for your support, happy new year and let’s ride 2009 to new heights. Thanks everyone at Alfresco for all the great and hard work. And thanks everyone in the engineering organization for such a fantastic product.
Comments