Archive for February 2008

North American Alfresco Community Conference (Chicago)

February 20, 2008 6:14 PM

The Chicago weather definitely tried to challenge the attendance at the inaugural Alfresco Regional Meetup last week. Despite the snow and cold, roughly 45 people showed up. I thought this was pretty good considering the weather and that it was the first Chicago event for Alfresco. Here is a quick list of highlights taken from the event: The meeting was kicked off by Michael Uzquiano (Alfresco) giving an in-person "Alfresco in an Hour" presentation. Ian Howells (Alfresco CMO) presented the latest findings from the Open Source Barometer - a survey using opt-in data provided by Alfresco community members. Matria Healthcare and CityTech (Jeff Brown) talked about the use of Alfresco in Matria's next generation touch system. TSGRP talked about a social networking proof of concept which uses Alfresco to store content related to a user's network. Michael Uzquiano (Alfresco) showed a demo of Alfresco's website framework application. The demo was very impressive. The product walked the user through a series of questions related to the new website, then created a drag and drop based site for managing the content.  The framework passes JSON between the Alfresco Web Script tier (REST based services) and the web front-end for rendering and interacting with content. There was talk about whether this framework will be available via the Alfresco Forge or possibly even being rolled into the core Alfresco product. Either way, we can't wait to get our hands on it as it has been a long time coming.After the presentations were over, Alfresco sponsored a cocktail hour where some of the attendees stuck around, drank a couple beers and chatted about technology. A few of the CityTech guys (Jeff Schwartz, Jeff Palmer and Tom Kelly) ripped out their laptops and setup shop on the cocktail tables to show a couple more real-life examples of Alfresco centric applications. One of the applications the guys demoed is a contract management application we developed using Alfresco to manage a highly complex contract approval workflow (over 50 steps!) and related documents for a large municipality. The other demo showed how Hyperic (and open source enterprise application monitoring system) could be used to monitor the health of Alfresco through the use of Hyperic monitoring plugins. On a side note, it is amazing how the open source application eco-system is growing. There is great value in bringing the top tier open source applications such as Alfresco, Hyperic, Mule and JBoss together to provide enterprise caliber solutions at a fraction of the cost.

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posted by Matt Van Bergen

Upcoming Posts

February 18, 2008 2:27 PM

I have a few drafts in progress for upcoming posts. Here is a preview of what is to come. Alfresco - Custom Regex Metadata Extractor Alfresco - Custom Association Extractor Alfresco - Custom XSL Transformer

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posted by Shane Johnson

Day Communique - Alternate to Request Filters

February 18, 2008 2:17 PM

For those of you who work with CQ, you will know that you aren’t building and deploying your own WAR. Instead, you can only add artifacts (classes, JARs, etc) to the repository. Continuing with that notion, you aren’t supposed to modify the author/publish WAR files at all. This means you can’t, for example, add a servlet filter via the web.xml file. However, I find the use of filters to be indispensable, especially for things like single sign on. There is a CQ alternative though. (more…)

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posted by Shane Johnson

Presenting at Alfresco Chicago MeetUp on Feb. 12th

February 8, 2008 12:35 PM

The Alfresco Community Meetup is a chance to learn about Alfresco and talk to your peers about how they are using Alfresco in their business space.    CityTech will be teaming with Matria Healthcare to present a use case of how Alfresco is being used to solve their business challenges.

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posted by Jeff Brown

Grails 1.0 Released

February 5, 2008 9:59 AM

Sporting a new design for their website, the Grails team today announced that Grails 1.0 has been officially released. A lot of excitement is building up around Groovy and its counterpart web framework Grails these days and I see why as its fun to use and you become way more productive as a developer. Grails takes a lot of cues from Ruby on Rails but also gives the ability to leverage your existing Java knowledge and JEE environment.

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posted by Bill Gloff

Alfresco Advanced Workflow and task due dates.

February 4, 2008 10:03 AM

I recently developed a workflow where the requirements called to dynamically assign task due dates relative to the task creation date. For example, a particular task was required to automatically have a due date assigned that is 3 business days from the date the task is created.

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posted by Jeff Brown