Great things from the Alfresco Community Conference

Just returned from New York City where we attended the inaugural Alfresco Community Conference. The conference was attended by both community and enterprise Alfresco customers as well as Alfresco integration partners. We flew out late Tuesday night, attended the conference Wednesday and then flew back Wednesday night. Not even time to have dinner at a great NYC restaurant!

The quick trip was well worth it however. Since most of the Alfresco team is quite spread out geographically, this was an opportunity to meet face-to-face with many we had worked with via email, phone, and the forums over the past few years.

I won’t go into all the details of everything covered at the conference at this time. You can see the complete agenda here: Conference Agenda and I suspect others will detail the great discussions led by both John Powell and John Newton. However, I do want to discuss a few of the major new features we can expect to see in the coming months. These are major advancements in out-of-the-box functionality and two particularly are in areas that we are seeing growing interest in from our clients.

Collaboration

The first is the Collaboration module that will be available in the v2.9 Community Edition. This module integrates popular wiki and blogging tools (MediaWiki and WordPress) into Alfresco and allows Alfresco to serve as the repository for such content as well as to integrate it’s workflow and search capabilities with these tools. We also saw a demo of the use of email-addressable content and spaces that allowed emails be stored in the repository. The content type of the email was even dynamic based on the context. For example, an email addressed to the alias of a Forum Topic space was seen as a post content type.

This module fills a major gap and now allows Alfresco to be the single source repository for all popular collaboration methods beyond the existing document collaboration. This code is already available in the v2.9 Community HEAD, so I can’t wait to check it out.

Flex

The integration with Flex http://flex.org/ for providing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) was the second major announcement. We saw a working demo of a Flex application being used to page through a virtual photo album of images stored in the Alfresco repository. This was done using the Flex API that is in v2.9 Community HEAD as well. The Alfresco team made it clear that they see Flex as the future of RIA and they plan to enhance the current JSP based web UI with a Flex version in the future. The difference in the user experience between a Flex application and a traditional HTML application is huge. I would compare it to watching football on a 50″ plasma HD versus the 36″ standard definition device. It is that type of jaw-dropping difference.

While I am discussing Flex, we saw some screenshots of the planned future “Alfresco Network Application” to be built using Flex. This application is targeted for the consumer and will allow “everyone” to take advantage of ECM transparently. This application is based on the social networking sites that have huge following already and are starting to gain some traction for enterprise use as well. There rough target for this is 2nd Qtr 2008 with the v3.0EE. That feature alone is worth it’s own blog coming soon.

iGoogle and FaceBook

Other features with 2.9 are Google gadget creation and FaceBook integration. We saw a demo of the familiar workflow tasks and spaces dashlets both displayed in iGoogle. I am guessing they take advantage of the new JavaScript workflow API as we saw them completely manage a workflow task from within iGoogle. For the FaceBook demo, we saw content in FaceBook being served and stored within the Alfresco repository real-time.

I also got a chance to pick David Caruana’s brain on some workflow ideas that I had as well as discuss the enhancements we can expect with version 2.2 and beyond. I have worked with David via the forums and support extensively over the last year, so it was a pleasure to finally talk in person.

That’s it for now.