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August was an incredible month for Alfresco in leading innovation in the ECM world. We released a new generation of content and social collaboration software with Alfresco Share which uniquely allows Microsoft customers to liberate themselves from the SharePoint lock-in by offering the first open source implementation of the SharePoint Protocol for Office. This should be good news for companies struggling to cope with the credit crunch by releasing them from the purgatory of proprietary licensing.

Oracle delivered a convincing demonstration of their power to wield the proprietary software tax with a swinging 20% price rise. With Larry paying himself $160 odd million dollars it’s probably not being levied out of economic necessity. Rather Oracle and other monopoly vendors know that when customers have tight budgets (where the customer has no choice) should be squeezed to the maximum. This benefits the vendor in 2 ways, it raises profits immediately and it forces the customer to cancel or reduce expenditure in other areas. This eliminates Oracles/ Microsoft’s competition and further increases the customer’s reliance on them as a sole supplier. Fortunately for the customers open source offers a way to access alternatives for minimal up front investment and give them the ability to resist the demands of rapacious monopolists.

I have been in the Enterprise software business for over 25 years and I was listening to a Stanford Thought Leadership podcast recently by Tien Tzuo, one of the pioneers of Salesforce.com. This got me to thinking about the change since the mid 1990’s and today and is Google now more relevant than Gartner for enterprise software. In the 1990’s there was a disconnect between product development and sales that fed into “the complexity machine”. There was a lack of product information and access to product. To discover a new product and work through the complexity machine to get “the new top ten” you went to Gartner. There was no other choice.

The world has changed. The Internet has made access to information and product ubiquitous. Think about Wikipedia and iTunes. Today, to discover a product you go to Google. To get information you rely on the wisdom of crowds not the high priests of complexity. People are turning away from “the complexity machine” and rewarding simplicity, value and transparency. Tools such as Google trends in real-time show market trends, masses of blogs offer information. Ranking and access allows good information to rise to the top. This is what has driven the success of Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica. This new world also offers transparency. Research should publically show the categories on how a product is ranked. The score and weightings should also be publicly available. This is the new world of transparency for banks governments and the Internet.

However, Gartner with its legions of analysts seem to miss the trends that are driving many companies to adopt open source with a non- transparent research process and contradictory findings presented in research reports. The fact that information and software is freely available for use based on open source with minimal switching costs compared to the proprietary vendors mitigates much of the vendor selection risk and reduces the value of Gartner’s analysis. The “Magic Quadrant” may have been magical in the 1990’s world of complexity and lack of access to information. In this century the world is different and maybe the “Magic Quadrant” is entering the “trough of disillusionment” when magic is being replaced by transparency. Unless they change and adapt to a new world of freely available software they will go the same way as the practitioners of alchemy and weather forecasting with seaweed. The Forrester Wave by contrast publishes criteria, weighting and score in a spreadsheet enabling the user to determine the weighting they feel is valuable for their business.

Further ECM market innovation continued this week Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP announced a planned submission of a draft Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). In simple terms, this will have the same impact on the content management market as SQL did in the 1980’s when the major database vendors standardized on it.

In order to allow developers and organizations to test-drive this draft specification, Alfresco have made an implementation of it available for download via Alfresco Labs. Get testing CMIS today!

Product Information

September is a very exciting month at Alfresco. During this month, all efforts at Alfresco are focused around tweaking and testing Alfresco 3.0. We've had a fantastic summer and are now at the culmination point. The technology has really come together and is now being joined with parallel efforts around training, documentation and support.

Alfresco 3.0

We're making excellent progress on Alfresco 3.0. We're presently winding through Timebox 3 (the third and final timebox of our 3.0 development cycle) and are focused on tweaks, improvements and test. In addition, the final user interface is being painted on top of the product this month.

One way to think of Alfresco 3.0 is as "social computing for Alfresco". The product provides blogs, wikis, discussions, comments, thumbnails, activity services and much more. It provides some very powerful content collaboration tools all integrated together within a single experience.

However, it also introduces a new architecture based around a presentation and repository tier split. Communication between the tiers is achieved through REST (powered by Alfresco Web Scripts). This allows our customers to scale out their user-facing applications separately from their repository and will help users to realize additional cost savings and performance benefits from the Alfresco 3.0 architecture.

In late August, we decided to introduce a new feature to the Alfresco Repository. We were not sure if we'd have time to implement it for 3.0. However, we've had such a productive, code-filled summer that it is now possible. Look for more details in the coming weeks!

The next release of Alfresco Labs 3 is targeted at the middle of the month. Stay tuned!

Alfresco Surf

Bundled within Alfresco 3.0 is the Alfresco Surf platform. This is the result of an effort by Alfresco Engineering and our community to provide a lightweight and easily customizable presentation framework built around REST components and services. The goal - to make it very simple for our users to customize their Alfresco web applications and to build their own from scratch with minimal effort.

As such, Alfresco Surf veers away from much of the heavy coding that you'd have to do with the JSF web client. While still available in 3.0, the JSF web client meant that you had to be saavy with JSF to build extensions. With Alfresco Surf, building new web extensions is as simple as writing a new Alfresco Web Script. That's right - it's all just Freemarker and JavaScript.

Another great thing about Surf is that it is 100% compatible with Alfresco Web Content Management. The framework inherently knows how to work with AVM stores and understands the meaning of things like web projects and sandboxes. An application built with Alfresco Surf will naturally play very well with Alfresco WCM.

Over the coming months, we'll promote Surf to our community of users. We'll have formal training and guides. We're kicking this off in October with a series of community code camps entirely dedicated to Alfresco Surf and Alfresco 3.0. Stay tuned!

Alfresco Web Studio (Surface)

With the formalization of the Alfresco Surf platform, we have an XML-driven model for expressing web applications - made up of things like pages, templates, components, theme, chrome and more. We also have a powerful, no-restart method of building web templates and components (our Freemarker and Web Script runtimes, respectively).

We are now in the process of building a Visual Designer for Alfresco Surf. The goal is provide a 100% drag-and-drop web application self-assembly tool. It must be easy-to-use and allow users to create new Surf applications from the ground up - including the visual design and layout of templates, pages, components and more. We will let you know when Alfresco Web Studio (Surface) is available via Alfresco Labs.

Community Updates

Our community continues to grow at a rapid pace and the number of member-contributed extensions, sample code, tutorials, wiki pages and other technical resources is also on the upswing. We don't want you to miss out on any of these great resources so we've decided to launch a separate newsletter aimed specifically at the developer segment of our community.

If you are interested in receiving the monthly Alfresco Community Newsletter, register here (http://www.alfresco.com/community/newsletters/community_news).

Partner News

US Partner News

CTA announces Alfresco-based 21CFR Part 11 Solution for Life Sciences

Carnegie Technology Associates (CTA), a leading provider of information technology and regulatory compliance solutions for the life sciences industry, recently announced a 21 CFR Part 11 compliant solution based on Alfresco. For more information or to discuss CTA’s complete implementation and validation services for Alfresco, visit www.ctaconsulting.com

European Partner News

Ancud has just developed a mechanism to provide Single-Sign-On based on the JAAS standard for the integration of Alfresco in Liferay.

What´s so special about this? Alfresco already comes with SSO, however it only takes the first part of the user name into account when you log in. For example, if there are two users with the email adresses will.smith@alfresco.com and will.smith@liferay.com, both will log in the same account. The reason is that Alfresco natively only looks at the first part of the email adress (until the @ symbol), not at the entire email adress. We have developed a mechanism that helps you avoid this problem. Our developers refactored the JAAS Components of Alfresco and Liferay to ensure unambiguous authentication. As otherwise you would need a CAS server to fix this problem, this is a good method to ensure that users correctly log in Alfresco when using Liferay.

Atol Conseils et Développements provides hosted Alfresco solution.

Atol’s hosted version of Alfresco is ready for immediate use and provides users with:

• Secure hosting
• Dedicated Alfresco instance
• Alfresco Enterprise certification
• Support and assistance
• Basic settings

For more information visit Atol’s website

dmc has been awarded a contract for optimizing companywide document processes in Dialog Semiconductor (FWB: DLG), a global supplier of power management, audio and display driver technology.

Dialog targets the implementation of a global Enterprise Content Management system based on the competence of dmc and the Open Source ECM solution Alfresco. Today’s paper intensive processes will be replaced by a companywide document management system with electronic flows to speed up approval processes while increasing tracking in a controlled environment. Dialog believes that with the help of the ECM solution Alfresco, the company will be able to significantly improve productivity and overall efficiency.

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