Alfresco Community - Alfresco Reaches Landmark 1 Million Software Downloads

Looking back at 2007 I am delighted to report that Alfresco experienced its third year of exponential growth thanks to all of you who downloaded the software and those who deployed it in the tens of thousands of live systems. A selection of the main highlights includes:

• Alfresco reaches landmark 1 million software downloads
• Alfresco 2.0 and 2.1 released; Alfresco continues to innovate with launch of the first Open Source Social Computing Platform for the Enterprise
• Alfresco Content Community membership exceeds 37,000
• Alfresco hosts first Community Conferences in New York and Paris with a total of 200 customer, partners and community members in attendance
• 10,000 participants ensure the Alfresco Open Source Barometer becomes the de-facto open source industry survey
• Over 4,500 people trained on Alfresco using "Alfresco in an Hour"� webinar
• Alfresco Partner network exceeds 120 companies world-wide, offering Alfresco services including integration, consulting and training
• Active deployments of Alfresco exceed 20,000
• SAP Ventures joins Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund in funding Alfresco

The future for Alfresco looks set to be just as exciting and full of opportunity as it did when we started just three short years ago.

January got off to a flying start with Alfresco Enterprise 2.1 exceeding the 100 million document mark in an independently certified benchmark test conducted by Unisys Corporation. The benchmark demonstrated the readiness of Alfresco for enterprise-class ECM. The report is available via: http://www.alfresco.com/media/releases/2008/01/unisys-benchmark/

There was more good news as Linux Magazine named Alfresco one of the top 20 companies to watch in 2008. Linux Magazine praised Alfresco, saying: "We have to admit, Microsoft's SharePoint isn't a bad solution, but we want a collaboration platform that doesn't lock us into Windows. Lucky us, we have Alfresco to look to for a collaboration platform that's open source and just as slick."�

The Alfresco German website was successfully launched in the New Year. Thanks to Michael Stettberger and everyone at Westernacher for all the translation work and to DMC for pre-building the forum community. Alfresco now has a site that can face the critical German market and the feedback from Community members in the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) has been very positive. The German site is at: http://www.alfresco.com/de/

And finally, I would like to extend an invitation to all Alfresco customers and partners to participate in the upcoming Alfresco Community Conferences in San Jose & Barcelona:

• Alfresco North American Community Conference: San Jose, March 12th, 2008
• Alfresco European Community Conference: Barcelona, April (tbc), 2008

The Alfresco Community Conference events are designed to provide a continuous exchange of information, ideas, and product plans between the Alfresco Community and the Product Development team. As an attendee you will have the opportunity to participate in roadmap reviews and prioritization, along with learning from best practice and implementation case studies and taking part in peer to peer discussion sessions.

John Powell, CEO, Alfresco

Product Information

The QA team has completed the certification of Alfresco on 12 independent stacks,

as well as the certification of Alfresco running in a cluster on three separate stacks and the creation of over 1100 test cases for Alfresco. The QA team is now working with Ingres to get their DB certified for Alfresco, with Sun to get their hardware and OS (Solaris) certified with Alfresco.

Technical Tips

Tip # 20 - Want to provide more context to your users when navigating spaces?

• Create a file called readme.html in your space containing the text you want to display.
• Add a Custom View to the space using the readme.ftl template from the space details page.

The text from your readme.html will now be displayed inline when users navigate to the space.

Featured Community Contribution

Our featured contribution, the Opsoro demo, comes to us from Jan Pfitzner, the ECM Practice Leader at Alfresco partner fme AG. It's a great example of using web scripts to build a custom content-enabled Web 2.0 application.

Opsoro is an AJAX-based repository browser built using Web Scripts and an AJAX library called ExtJS. The fme AG team had such a good time learning these technologies that they named the application Opsoro, short for OPen SOurce ROcks.

You can read more about it at: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Opsoro

Contributor Of The Month

If you've been following Alfresco then you'll have already heard of our first ever "Contributor of the Month"� Jeff Potts.

As the ECM Practice Lead for Optaros, an Alfresco partner, Jeff works with clients to assemble Next Generation Internet solutions using open source software and open standards.

Jeff is an active contributor on the forums, has edited and added new pages to the wiki and is probably best known for authoring an outstanding collection of Alfresco developer tutorials.

You can find his tutorials in the partner section of the Content Community or at ECM Architect.

Partner News

Quark And Alfresco Announce Partnership

We were pleased to announce our partnership with Quark in a deal designed to free customers from being tied to proprietary solutions. Quark's eponymous publishing software is a favorite among journalists, media companies and PR agencies. For more information go to - http://www.alfresco.com/media/releases/2007/12/quark/

Cignex Adds ECM Consulting Center In New Jersey, USA

CIGNEX, an Alfresco Gold SI Partner, recently announced that it had opened an ECM consulting center in Edison, New Jersey. CIGNEX has opened this center to better meet the needs of its rapidly growing customer base in the East Coast. This is the company's third consulting center, after its world-wide headquarters in Santa Clara CA and the 100 person center in Ahmedabad, India. In the last couple of months, the company has begun new Alfresco-based engagements at both Medco and Sesame Workshop. For more information go to- http://www.cignex.com/site/company/news/press/cignex-opens-consulting-centre-in-new-jersey

EMEA Partner Momentum

The Alfresco European Partner Network continued to expand at the end of 2007 and we are pleased to welcome PBFH UK Ltd, as our 80th official Alfresco partner in EMEA! The rapid expansion of our EMEA Partner Network in 2007 demonstrates the continuous high and growing interest shown for Alfresco all over EMEA. As an Alfresco customer or prospect, you can now be sure to find partners who will not only know Alfresco products and have the integration skills for your Alfresco project, but who will have specific project vertical expertise and the capacity to assist you locally or across multiple geographies.

A special mention to partner Ixxus (UK) who has recently engaged with 3 Customers delivering next generation WCM projects based on Alfresco, as well as our worldwide partner Optaros who has been implementing high-end, Alfresco WCM projects for both US & European customers.

The most recently signed partners are: PBFH UK Ltd (UK), fme (Germany), Interplay & Dado Quatro (Italy), Gestetner - NRG (Spain).