By Jonathan Crow

I am here at the Alfresco Community Conference, held at Adobe in downtown San Jose. You might have caught our announcement today about the integration going on between Intalio and Alfresco.

Integrating Alfresco’s Enterprise Content Management solution with Intalio|BPMS has brought some clear advantages. Users are now able to include documents within the process stream, automatically send specific documents to unique sets of users based on complex criteria, and attach documents to processes that provide more detail than you can include within the process design.

The conference seems to be attended by a wide variety of users who are having some interesting conversations about the political battles that can happen internally over using Open Source software. In these days, with the prevalence of OS software, it surprises me that these conversations are still going on at the level they are. A more relevant conversation to me would be to discuss the merits of the software rather than the merits of the company. Obviously, whether a company is going to be around tomorrow is important, but a) after that threshold is met move on, and b) the more we support standards, the less the company matters.

Ok, back to the content of the conference. John Powell, the CEO of Alfresco, opened off the conference with remarks that reflect Alfresco’s move from the ECM of the last decade that people saw as this monolithic suite to being able to take webscripts, contribute to the Alfresco community, and have a democratic evolution of the software that is flexible and extensible. The growth in the Alfresco community has been impressive. In just two years they have a user base that rivals the more traditional players who have been around a lot longer.

ECM in the New Millenium. Alfresco is acknowledging that people view content not as a product but as a service. Users don’t care where the content exists (which I think is true), but they do care to have ubiquitous access to it, hopefully though a synchronization model. John is talking about content being an amalgam of different objects — Flickr photos, blog content, Facebook, Skype (maybe even Twitter streams?). They are building rich APIs to hook into new authoring environments while giving you a rich choice of back-end databases to connect to.

John Netwon, CTO for Alfresco, was up next to discuss the future of Enterprise Content Management. How is the internet changing ECM? ECM for the masses, make it simple, simple, simple. The Internet enabled Open Source development of free products. Content is gaining in importance — user generated content, more people are creating this content. John Newton said that content creation has grown from 10% to 90% within the enterprise. Open Source means transparency, let people know the good, bad, and ugly. Direct communication between partners and code. Throw out the idea of protecting the intellectual property, and you get a much more efficient model. Everything is becoming Open Source — according to John — OS Beer, OS Dictionaries, etc.

Hmmm, there is a slide here on the different aspects of Enterprise Information. Under search engines John has included LinkedIn. That seems odd to me. Why not under People with Facebook?

I wonder if there is going to be a huge push to OpenSocial with the drive to bringing in different content. I wonder where eDiscovery fits into this equation. With content dispersed over multiple locations and various streams, will I have an even harder time to find my information?

Ok, they are getting more into REST and ATOM. Good moves, constructing integration at a much simpler level. Lowers the bar for developers to learn new technologies. Sounds like yes, OpenSocial will be a huge component the community will be using to adopt the integration of Social Networks. This will be available in 3.0.

ECM leaves the boundaries of the enterprise. Brings up the question of culture in the enterprise. It may be harder to change the culture of the company to allow content inclusion from outside the enterprise, but Web 2.0 has already pushed that boundary. People will use what they want, whether it is officially sanctioned or not. Better to have it manage than contain people to rigid standards that won’t hold.

Well that’s it for the first two sessions. Hopefully I will be able to post more later.

March 12th, 2008