Content Log

Remembering Jeffrey McManus

My brother-in-law, Jeffrey McManus (on Facebook), passed away on July 5th at the age of 46. It was way too soon and unexpected. This came at a very bittersweet time in our lives as my son, Michael, was about to graduate from secondary school on July 6th and my daughter was just finishing her middle school on the same day. We took time to reflect on our long planned holiday in Greece prior to Michael going away to Georgetown in August. 

Jeffrey McManus

I can't imagine what my sister and her kids are going through right now. It is great to know that they have been surrounded by friends and family that celebrated Jeffrey's life. We truly wished that we could be at his memorial in San Francisco on the 19th. We celebrated his life with Singapore Slings on the same day and I felt like I was the only guy in Greece wearing an Aloha shirt - one of the items specified in the dress code for his memorial.

My kids knew him just as Uncle Jeffrey. The kind of uncle that shows up in movies made by SNL alumni and who any kid would love to have. There were very rarely any mopey faces around when Jeffrey was around. But with all the notices and comments on Facebook, my kids were wondering why he was so important.

That can be summed up on one word - Community. Jeffrey and my sister were part of the nascent social movement that predated any of this Facebook stuff. They were active members on the Well while Jeffrey earned a living at coding, teaching and writing on Microsoft technologies such as ASPs, SQL Server, C# and VB. See Jeffrey's books on Amazon. (http://www.amazon.com/Jeffrey-P.-McManus/e/B000APSY3K) Microsoft didn't really quite organize community the way that you would recognize today, that didn't stop Jeffrey. He would speak at events around the world evangilizing Microsoft technologies the way an open source community would do today. Using these technologies, he pioneered an API and social community with Insero, a company he co-founded with my sister.

From there he went on to establish the developer community for E-Bay, at the time a real innovation. Through trial and error, he helped develop the best practices in engaging developers and have them form a community. He did this with the understanding of someone who was a developer himself. He did this through developing the tools that developers need such as APIs and connections to IDEs. Most of all, he did it through his big, extroverted personality that developers found infectious. That's not to take away from the technical innovations he made while there, such as developing RESTful APIs only a couple of years after Roy Fielding's paper describing REST. In addition, he helped figure out the taxonomies that vendors and buyers could access products from the E-Bay platform. He really helped make E-Bay a platform, not just a site.

He became the expert in community development and naturally socialized with the connected technology crowd. People sought him out to participate in conferences. That's one of the first ins that I had to meet up with Tim O'Reilly. I would often name drop my brother-in-law as at least a conversation starter. I don't remember who went to Yahoo first, Jeffrey or my sister, but Yahoo recruited Jeffrey to develop their developer community. Unfortunately, this meant trying to tackle some of Yahoo's basic issues such as usability, which he was the first to admit was not his forte. He made an impact there, but Yahoo wasted the opportunity that they had with him on board.

So he struck out on his own with some of the many ideas of a very fertile mind. He had the brilliant idea of Approver.com, which was either too ahead of its time or he was not interested enough in taking venture money. He later developed CodeLesson to provide an online developer instruction experience that bridged the gap between online instruction and in-person instruction. He still consulted on community for companies like Twilio. We consulted with him at Alfresco in the early days of the development of our community.

Jeffrey and my sister are part the GenX crowd that invented social networking and with it all the social connections that easily explains the many kind thoughts that have been put onto his profile. It's just a minor sign of how much we will miss him, his wit and his ideas. RIP!

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.

The REST of the Story

As you can probably see from some of my posts, we are moving the Alfresco system in the direction of a more REST-style of architecture. As I posted in my ZDNet blog today REST-style architecture in the real world, a lot of people don’t know what REST is, but they may be implementing it anyway. In doing research for a presentation for a large US investment bank, I was able to discover others building applications using REST-style, but they weren’t necessarily aware that they were building it using REST.

The simple explanation for REST that I have come up with, thanks to Anthony Starks, is to describe it as Web Oriented Architecture rather than Service Oriented Architecture. By making everything a URL (although technically a URI), you can access everything via that URL and use standard web commands like Get and Post to access and update those things, something we call resources. This URL-based update of information contrasts with a very Remote Procedure Call-like interface of SOAP. Basically, every time you access information in a browser or a pop-up in a mashup receives or updates information, you are using REST. I tried describing it this way and generally people get it.

In my blog REST Battles SOAP for the Future of Information Services, I have positioned what is happening as a major struggle, but at its very beginning. What we do know is that there are huge investments in SOA that have yet to yield expected benefits. In the meantime, the Web 2.0 world of mashups and simple access is moving forward at a much faster pace in providing simple integration and massive scalability. Coming from a content perspective, REST is much better suited toward managing and accessing content than SOAP is. However, SOAP with the WS-* are much further along in managing security and providing transactional integrity.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Microsoft approaches REST in relation to the huge investment that they have made into SOAP and web services. From ECM perspective, SharePoint is very dependent on web services for basic content operations. However, they are just starting to make their first moves into REST, driven by Microsoft Live that has to compete against other Web 2.0 sites. In Microsoft needs REST http://blogs.zdnet.com/Newton/?p=14, I discussed what the issues are and potential pitfalls for everyone, including Microsoft, if they buck current approaches like Atom Publishing and go it alone with their own standard.

Our approach to REST is to provide Web Scripts, which is a new technology in Release 2.1 of Alfresco. Web Scripts are the brainchild of our Chief Architect, David Caruana, and provide a way to map URLs to scripts built using JavaScript, FreeMarker or other scripting languages to access resources in the Alfresco system. We already support OpenSearch, which is a REST-style of search interface that is supported by hundreds of search engines. We are looking at applying Web Scripts toward supporting Atom Publishing or other content-oriented, REST-style interfaces as the content industry explores the opportunities. Alfresco also supports different response formats so that you can return data as XML, Atom, JSON, HTML or whatever is appropriate for your application or mashup.

Anyway, much of this is to remind you of my ZDNet blog Newton’s Theory and hope you take a visit.