Content Log

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.

Impressions of Enterprise 2.0 in Boston

Boston at five in the morning before I had to take off on Friday.

This past week, I was on a panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston with Bob Bickel of Ringside Networks and Jeff Whatcott of Acquia, the commercializer of Drupal. The topic was open source options for delivering an Enterprise 2.0 Experience. Both Bob and Jeff are excellent speakers and bring a wealth of experience behind new companies. I think that Kathleen Reidy at the 451 Group did a very good job of covering the panel, so I will move on to my impressions of the conference.

On the panel, we spent much more time talking about open source and less about Enterprise 2.0. However, this doesn't mean that there was a lot of clarity on the meaning of the term Enterprise 2.0 at the conference. Although Web 2.0 had no less than Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle to define what that term means (barely), Enterprise 2.0 has no such authority. Consensus says that it is just Web 2.0 for the enterprise. However, researching the concept a couple of years ago, E2.0 is about taking the social aspects of Web 2.0, collaboration, social networks, user contribution, wisdom of crowds and social tagging and voting and applying it to information, documents and content in the enterprise. There are no fixed patterns for how to do this, although popular Web 2.0 sites, such as Facebook, Google Maps, Digg, YouTube and Wikipedia, provide at least paradigms for how these can be accomplished in the enterprise. It is very difficult to describe Enterprise 2.0 without drawing analogies to these web properties.

On Wikipedia, the topic "Enterprise 2.0" redirects to Enterprise Social Software. In August 2007, a "Ruud Koot" permanently redirected it from Enterprise 2.0.  The last direct version of an Enterprise 2.0 article in Wikipedia extolls an Alan Wurms as the person who apparently coined the term in 2001. That is the power of Wikipedia, it can get rid of the rubbish. Most people's problem with the term is that it does not describe what it does and it sounds like it is just riding on the tailcoat of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Is this really a new version of the Enterprise? I sat in a session with Carl Frappaolo where he equated Enterprise 2.0 with the evolution of Knowledge Management, but made the point that enterprises have not fundamentally changed as a result.

Some people believe that Enterprise 2.0, like Web 2.0, must be delivered as a whole hosted platform on the internet in order to be Enterprise 2.0. For some people this is absolutely true, but a majority still look to keep this information under enterprise control for bandwidth and security reasons. The majority of vendors in the exhibit area provided Software as a Service solutions. Most likely they used open source in creating those solutions.

I apparently missed the highlight of the show, which actually occurred on Monday before the opening. This was a shoot out between Microsoft SharePoint and IBM's counter to SharePoint, Connections. As an IBM product manager at the IBM booth said, "We don't fuck up demos." Everyone seemed to agree with him. Poor Lawrence Liu of Microsoft was not so lucky. The Microsoft demo did not have the business process coherence in which IBM is very well versed. There was a lot of hand-waving about how various Enterprise 2.0 features were supplied by partners. The performance issues that Lawrence faced may very well be related to the terrible internet connectivity provided by the Westin Hotel. Imagine an Enterprise 2.0 conference where no one is connected. Both companies are talking more about Social Software, Social Computing and Social Networking more than Enterprise 2.0, so my feeling is that this emerging market will be named more along those lines rather than E2.0.

Peter Fields of Wachovia

There were three customer presentations on their usage of Enterprise 2.0 and these present probably the best understanding of what these collections of technologies are, what they are trying to accomplish and what market is forming as a result. Despite the fact that he was using Microsoft SharePoint, I really liked the presentation from Peter Fields of Wachovia. Peter seems to think about the business problems and technology solutions the way I do. (Or probably the other way around.) He described the need to empower employees as a way of tapping into the intuitive sense of employees and he is the only other person I have ever seen that has uses Myers-Briggs to describe this paradigm shift. In a session just before, I got shot down in flames for daring to suggest that the change in enterprise software is the result of shifting demographics and a new, incoming generation of worker - the Millennials. Here Peter was backing it up with data that suggests that in less that five years, this generation will move from 25% of the working population of the US to 41% of the working population. He discussed an imperative that I had not really considered as well, which is that the baby boomers are retiring and this will represent the single largest loss of implicit knowledge in industrial society. Enterprises MUST facilitate capturing what the baby boomers know now and lower the barriers dramatically toward capturing that information.

Simon Revell from Pfizer

Peter is roughly my age, but Simon Revell from Pfizer, who looks a lot younger, presented a view of what the new generation wants - seemingly both Generation X and Generation Y. Pfizer has created a couple of sets of slides describing life in a networked world. Pfizer does use the 2.0 word and even describes a "Doctor 2.0" as a female researcher who also seems to spend a lot of time on Facebook. But rather than trivializing what that means, Simon presented a set of tools that Pfizer is using (open source by the way) that allow researchers to collaborate. Pfizerpedia is a mediawiki implementation modeled on Wikipedia and used as a single instance. Its primary purpose is to capture best practice in an informal way, which Pfizer codifies and controls after the process is discovered or developed. The result is actually a knowledge base of information that can be used for many other purposes. My sense has been that wikis that are single, highly interconnected instances rather than many team or project wikis. Bob talks about one wiki, Peter is hoping for 10,000 wikis. My take is that we need two words for what is now described as a wiki.

I wish I could have seen more the conference, although many of the break out sessions didn't add a lot. The subject of wikis and blogs have been covered better at Web 2.0 conferences. Some of the sessions on community didn't really say anything at all. Neither did a session by Mark Woollen from Oracle CRM. Mark is a good speaker and there was some good content at the end. Too bad that the beginning didn't say much except that social networking will probably be important in the future.

The direction that Oracle's Mark Woollen's presentation took

Enterprise 2.0 is not just about wikis, blogs and forums. These do not make communities. A whole bunch of the vendors in exhibit area are likely to be gone in a couple of years if not sooner. Open source, although played down in this conference, will likely be one, if not the, major driver of this new market. Companies are actually using this and it is those that hope to attract and retain not just a younger generation of employee, but also customer. The smart ones are also recognizing that they need this stuff to make sure that critical knowledge is not retired when their baby boomer employees have.

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.