It's time to UPDATE the Alfresco ECM Book

For the past 25 months (since the first version of this book is released), the open source content management software has entered into mainstream business.

The adoption of Alfresco has grown exponentially with over 1.5 million downloads of the software, with over 50,000 live sites and with over 150 applications in Alfresco Forge to download.

The book was written for the version 1.4 and since then the software is upgraded many times. The Alfresco product is matured and improved with lots of new and exciting features. The current version 3.0.1 and the upcoming version 3.1 offer new concepts which are very significant to the end users.

I think it is a high time to upgrade this book.

We (at CIGNEX) implemented Alfresco at many large enterprises such as Activision, Sesame Street, Medco, Electronic Arts and Cross Country Healthcare. Some of these Alfresco deployments serve over 10 TB of data to millions of users in a clustered and high-availability environment. We have integrated many 3rd party applications with Alfresco.

Documenting our experience & expertise on Alfresco implementations will be a great value addition to the book.

We will provide updates about the upcoming book...VERY SOON.

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

Alfresco WCM article on Packt website

A nice article about Alfresco's WCM features is at:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/alfresco-web-content-management-2-0-part1

Alfresco 2.1 (the new release) includes many enhancements to Web Content Management module.
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Alfresco Enterprise CMS Implementation on PacktPub.com First Alfresco book, worldwide service, 10% discount.

Alfresco Book Review by EMC Documentum expert

Pawan Kumar, Principal @ doQuent, and the author of "Documentum Content Management Foundations: EMC Proven Professional Certification Exam E20-120 Study Guide" has done a review of Alfresco Book.

Summary of the Review:

This book is definitely a must-have for anyone implementing a solution using Alfresco. It is a handy reference for performing various tasks on the Alfresco platform. If you are new to content management in general then you may need additional resources to make effective use of the information available in this book.

I liked the changes he had suggested in his review. I will follow them in the next update.

Read the complete review at:
http://doquent.wordpress.com/2007/07/27/book-review-alfresco-by-munwar-shariff/

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

Alfresco Case Study - Presto

Presto's unique digital delivery system is a combination of Presto Service and the HP Printing Mailbox. It allows users to receive email, photos, and newsletters from a variety of well-known publishers without the need for a computer or an Internet connection.

CIGNEX Created a Flexible, Easy-to-Use Content Management System to power newsletters for Presto's printing mailbox service. The Presto CMS is developed on top of Alfresco, an Open Source enterprise content management platform. The architecture supports high availability, high performance, and replication support across multiple servers.

Read the case study at http://www.cignex.com/site/resources/library/case_studies

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

Learn, Customize and Use Alfresco ECM in 60 minutes

It’s happening! The Open Source Content Management System (OSCMS) Summit is being sponsored by Yahoo! The OSCMS summit takes place on March 22nd and 23rd in Yahoo Campus in Sunnyvale, California.

As an Author of the book Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation, I am presenting a 60 minute packed session covering the complete cycle of planning, implementing and customizing your ECM installation. My colleague at CIGNEX, Harish Ramachandran is helping me out with the live Demo.

Our presentation is on this Thursday (March 22nd, 2007) from 1:45pm to 2:45pm.

Alfresco offers true Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) - Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging. Unlike most other open source CMS which offer only the web content management, Alfresco provides a wide range of solutions to Enterprise customers with an impressive roadmap.

The topics which are going to be covered are:

• Working with users and membership accounts
• Using Alfresco as a Smart document repository; working with automatic version tracking and control, and accessing the repository from the Web, shared network folders, or CIFS
• Making content easy to find using search, content categorization, and metadata
• Automating document management tasks with business rules and complete workflows
• Working together using Alfresco’s collaboration and syndication features to create effective working groups
• Customizing the user interface, creating your own dashboard layouts; presenting content in custom ways relevant to your business
• Implementing Imaging and Forms Processing

With real-life examples from CIGNEX project implementations.
If you are attending the conference, hope to see you in the conference.

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

Alfresco Book Code Download

If you have already purchased the Alfresco Book, please check if you have downloaded the code samples and files from the Book's download page.

There are about 60+ hands on exercises illustrated in the book and it is going to more convenient for you if you have access to the sample code and the example files.

The entire code bundle with sample files is a 6.5 MB ZIP file. It contains two folders:

1. chapter_downloads
2. full_downloads_alf14

1. chapter_downloads

Contains various sample scripts, images and content files are used in each chapter of the Alfresco Book. In some of the chapters you will also find information to edit various configuration files. The "chapter_downloads" folder contains sub-folders for individual chapters containing all the required files. Read the individual README.txt file present in each sub-folder to get more details.

2. full_downloads_alf14

This folder contains all the files required to bring up the complete DEMO site as per the Alfresco Book. Read "README.txt" file in this folder for more details. The demo files present in this folder are applicable ONLY to Alfresco 1.4 Release.

Hope you enjoy the samples provided in the book.

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

JavaRanch Promotion Winners

We recently had "Alfresco Book" promotion week in JavaRanch website (Feb 6 - 9, 2007).

JavaRanch is a friendly place for Java greenhorns. This is the place where all the JavaRanchers go to replenish their inventory, and learn a few new tricks. Not only are there all the answers to frequently asked questions, but also further links to WhereYouCanGetStuff you don't find here. There is also a list of JavaEvents, and JavaRanchInTheNews, they put the newspaper cutouts on the wall.

I really enjoyed answering to questions related to Alfresco technology in the Forum. At the end of the week there were 4 winners who received free copies of the recently published Alfresco Book.

If you are a serious Java Developer, I recommend you to visit this cool website.

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