Alfresco Top Brass on UK National Radio

John Powell and John Newton, the founders of Alfresco, discussed open source in general -- and their project in particular -- on BBC's Radio 4 yesterday evening.

NEW WAVE COMPUTING

Peter Day talks to some of the rising stars of the new revolution and finds out how the computer industry is changing yet again.

The world’s biggest computer companies are being threatened by a host of new start-ups powered by open-source software, strings of inexpensive computers,and ‘mash-up’ websites which combine information in innovative ways.

Other projects discussed: Zimbra, Platial, Open-Xchange, ActiveGrid.

You can read more about the program, and listen to it (until Thursday) on the BBC web site here.

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Alfresco Enterprise CMS Implementation on PacktPub.com First Alfresco book, worldwide service, 10% discount.

3 Ways for Alfresco ECM and BPM to work together

Ishmael Ghalimi at IT|Redux posts about methods for integrating ECM systems with BPM systems, and cites three main ways in which they can usefully work together.

1. Use the CMS features to manage document life cycles that form part of process instances. You could manage document lifecycle in the BPMS, but a CMS will be simpler, more elegant, more flexible.

2. Use a CMS to store the process model artifacts. Programmers might say CVS is better, but for the business managers who see these artifacts as documents and want them treated as such (and pay the bills), a CMS is better.

3. Use a BPMS process design tool to take care of advanced processes involving CMS documents.

Ishmael cites Intalio as already working on the first two with Alfresco, but doesn't mention the 3rd. Perhaps Alfresco's built in workflow tools already negate number 3!

Source

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Alfresco Enterprise CMS Implementation on PacktPub.com First Alfresco book, worldwide service, 10% discount.

Book Out Now! Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation

The very first copy of Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation arrived in the Packt office yesterday. We are now shipping copies to everybody who pre-ordered.

From now on, orders will be shipped within a day or two of being placed. So buy your copy now.

There is also a PDF ebook version available, which is cheaper and available for download immediately after ordering.

Buy on PacktPub.com worldwide service, 10% discount.

Here are some blurry pictures of me holding the proof copy.

What?! Another Open Source CMS?

When I talk to people about Alfresco, I can tell what they're thinking: how on earth can the world need another free open source CMS?

I can understand why, but here's what they're missing. Just about every CMS you've seen before is a web CMS. They are there to manage web content. Whether you're using it for a web site or your intranet, they're all for building content-driven web sites. Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, Ez Publish are all primarily about web pages: news, profiles, forums, and so on.

Alfresco is completely different. As an enterprise CMS, it exists to manage enterprise content.

Think of the enterprise content you use every day. At Packt, I'm working with sales records, book proposal documents, chapter drafts, guideline documents, and contracts every single day.

And boy is it awkward. It's all in shared folders. Shared files and folders are extremely hard to work with. The fact is that most of us can't manage our own My Documents folder and Desktops properly... much less store files in a place that will make sense to anybody else.


Something needs to manage this content, and if I'm stuck with shared folders it's not going to be me!

Alfresco, and Enterprise Content Management Systems in general, provide a solution to this.

When I was reading Munwar's drafts, I was overwhelmed by how useful Alfresco could be in Packt... and in any business that relies on sharing documents and files between staff members.

Here are just a few of the things I saw covered in the book (relatively early too... it gets much more powerful towards the end):

• Make shared folders smart drop files into a big catch all folder, and have Alfresco figure out the best place to put it... based on rules that you can define
• Smart versioning... never worry about manually backing up a shared file every time you make a tiny change. Alfresco can keep track of versions automatically, allowing you to look back at earlier versions whenever you want.
• Search content... so you can find the stuff you need, wherever it is.

So this is not just another variant on Joomla!, Drupal, or Typo3. It's a completely new beast. And it's one you should seriously consider learning about, if you or your clients struggle to keep their shared digital content organized, findable, and managed.

PS With Alfresco 1.4 (which our book covers), Alfresco can act as a web CMS as well as an enterprise CMS. So maybe it is another Joomla!, but Java. Check out samaxes' description of Alfresco, much more in depth than mine.