CMS Watch Alfresco Feed

Bam, WAM, thank you, DAM!

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 15:36:00 -0400

Late last month I had the pleasure of attending the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in London, UK, where I presented a summary of our research recently published in The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. It was interesting to contrast this event with Henry Stewart's other recent DAM event, in New York City, held in early May. While many of the challenges faced by digital asset managers on both sides of the Atlantic are similar, few vendors find success on both continents. Though most of the vendors in our report claim customers "worldwide," a true presence (meaning more than a sales person) beyond the headquarters is usually lacking -- oftentimes, the software is simply pushed by resellers abroad, with minimal success.

Unlike last year, Canadian vendors North Plains and Nstein had their footprint on the London show floor, while Artesia ( who was there last year) was notably missing. Otherwise, ADAM, Vyre and other smaller UK and Europe-based vendors continued to fulfill the need of their local markets, and look to expand. As I noted along with my colleague Alan at Internet World UK back in April, there's no shortage of small to medium-sized WCM vendors doing well in the UK market, either, and many have yet to venture even into continental Europe. For every vendor that's acquired an gobbled up, two or three new ones seem to emerge, fulfilling ever more specific micro-niches. Perhaps the "Go Local" trend isn't just about food anymore, but technology suppliers as well.

But talk in the conference rooms was more about the business challenges of broadcasters, designers, marketers, and publishers than it was about the tools and vendors themselves. What echoed most frequently at both conferences was the idea of DAM not just as an asset repository, but a set of workflows leading to an end product (be it a brochure, catalog, or 60-minute broadcast). Each step along the workflow should add value, be it metadata enrichment or some artistic or editorial improvement. And yet, as we've pointed out before, most tools fall short of allowing licensees to truly automate and expedite the often complex publishing processes required by typical DAM scenarios.

It's in this spirit that Chris Glynne, who recently started his own consultancy called Bold Visions, pitched the concept of WAM, or Workflow Asset Management. While the last thing we all need is another acronym, if we're going to take DAM beyond the concept of a digital library, focusing on workflow, and the automation of steps along the typical DAM path is one key way of making that happen.

Digital asset managers asked me a lot of questions about non-pure-play DAM vendors' DAM capabilities. From Alfresco to Microsoft to Oracle, conference delegates wanted to know if they really needed a pure-play DAM tool if they already had SharePoint or Oracle's UCM. That question is not easily answered without delving deeper and understanding your needs and business scenarios. Do you have digital assets that are larger than 5 MB? Do your assets require you to manage both individual and composite assets, such as an product image, and then a brochure where the image might be used, and subsequently a 250-page product catalog where it might be applied as well? Do you need to manage and use the same asset at various resolutions, for both the Web and print? Then SharePoint sure as heck won't do the trick, and you'd be stretching other non-DAM-specific tools. Specialized DAM vendors raison d'être is to fulfill needs like these.

I'll share more leanings from these two DAM events as the summer continues; feel free to email me with any DAM or MAM questions you may have as well, as we continue our research into this fast-changing technology.

Adobe and Alfresco

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:37:00 -0400

It's been a while since there was a big product announcement in the ECM world, but today's announcement by Adobe that they will be embedding Alfresco into their LiveCycle Enterprise Suite will doubtless garner a few headlines. Alfresco, the UK-based open source ECM company, has certainly done a great job of marketing themselves since their launch a couple of years back, stealing some limelight from more established and much bigger vendors such as Interwoven, Vignette, and Open Text.

The question we have to ask is whether this announcement is another marketing triumph, or whether it suggests something more substantial.

First off is the fact that it is a real OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) deal, and the technology will actually get embedded into the Adobe offering, so it is more than simply a paper partnership.

But let's think about what the Adobe offering is and why we do not currently evaluate it in our ECM Suites Report. Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite is a product set built upon the acquisition of Acellio in 2002 (better known as "Jetform"). Though the user interface and underlying codebase may have changed a bit, the principle of this product remains the same: automating simple, usually forms-based, processes. The product excels as a point solution particularly in Government, where a form needs to be issued to the public, and the capture and subsequent business process needs to be automated quickly.

In theory the Alfresco repository adds some true ECM capabilities at the back end of the Adobe product set. Also the Alfresco solution will add some "Web 2.0" capabilities to Adobe, as Alfresco supports Adobe Flex. So in theory, the LiveCycle solution could be extended to build more complex applications rather than basic forms routing.

On a corporate note the OEM deal is intriguing, since of course Alfresco is a minnow compared to Adobe, and there are close connections between the executive teams. For example the Senior Vice President of this particular Adobe Business unit is none other than Rob Tarkoff, a close friend and ex-Documentum colleague of Alfresco CTO John Newton. Could Adobe be planning to acquire Alfresco? Who knows? But if the OEM is successful, an acquisition might appeal to both firms, if less so to Alfresco's current customer base.

In short then, it's an intriguing announcement, and we will be looking at demonstrations of the technology in practice later today as well as testing it out more thoroughly over the coming months. Like us, you should treat this new product arrangement with real caution until it has been thoroughly tested by customers. That is not a a slight against either firm, but an announcement is just that and no more. Time is always the true test.

Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:02:00 -0500

Facebook is all the rage -- and consequently bringing Enterprise 2.0 to the fore. Is it time to revisit your Intranet platform? CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne looks at Facebook's benefits and demerits and concludes that your IT department could learn some important lessons about balancing employee enablement and control over information...

Zealotry of the Apostate?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:48:00 -0500

At the Gilbane Conference keynote today, execs from ECM vendors Alfresco, Oracle, IBM, and Adobe focussed on -- perhaps inevitably -- Enterprise 2.0. The overall gist was: enterprises should focus on sharing information rather than just controlling it.

Well of course that's true. But it's always been true. So I couldn't help feeling a sense of irony inasmuch as each of those vendors were proponents of the kind of über-centralized infrastructures and enterprisey controls that they are now telling those very same customers are no longer cool. It was just a year ago when these same guys were going on about Sarbanes-Oxley.

And even today, they are sending mixed messages. Twice in recent months I've heard an IBM enterprise content management (ECM) rep describe ROI as "Risk of Incarceration." Fear-based selling anyone? Oracle's new Stellent step-child is moving away from its Web CMS roots to do more heavyweight document and records management. Adobe acts like AJAX doesn't exist. Alfresco built a very complicated and rather user-unfriendly development framework that only a Java systems architect could love.

So while the ECM vendor talking heads get excited about their new religion, their companies are actually praying to different gods when it comes to selling enterprise information management on the ground.

Plone: What's in a name...

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:15:00 -0400

Earlier this month at the annual Plone Conference 2007, the consulting firm "Plone Solutions" announced it would change its name to "Jarn." Plone Solutions / Jarn has been among the most experienced Plone system integrators, in particular since one of its founders was also a founder of Plone.

So why change such an esteemed name? The company cites "commitment to the community, to the Plone Foundation, and to a fair and open marketplace around Plone." This certainly makes sense and is a smart community-relations move, but still a step that many other open source firms have not taken, e.g., Alfresco, Magnolia, or eXo. If you're an Alfresco (the tool) integrator, it kind of sucks to compete against Alfresco (the company).

So I think avoiding having a commercial firm by the same name represents an important measure of a true community-oriented project. Remember that the community around your product of choice can make a significant difference to your project, in particular for open source tools.

Open Source ECM continues to grow

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 11:38:00 -0400

South African open source ECM developer Knowledge Tree recently announced that their package has seen more than 380,000 downloads. Of course, veterans of open source projects will concede that downloads doth not a production implementation make. However, Knowledge Tree has sold the commercial version of the tool to such clients such as Bank of Scotland and the European Space Agency. Doubtless one of the appeals of the package is that it's written in PHP -- common enough among Web CMS tools, but quite rare for a document management platform.

It seems amazing that just a few years back there were no credible open source ECM vendors, and now we have at least three vibrant offerings, Nuxeo, Knowledge Tree and Alfresco, with more emerging. Throw into this the ECM-in-a-Box offering from InfoGrid, and the array of SaaS offerings hitting the market and one has to conclude that buyers' choices have never been wider. The ECM marketplace clearly remains far from mature.

Scalability the Terracotta Way

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 06:23:00 -0400

One of the theoretical advantages of Java-based Portals and Content Management applications is the ability to cluster servers for better performance. But the reality is that clustering is a black art that few vendors and implementation teams really ever seem to master adequately. So it comes as a (welcome) surprise to learn of an open-source technology that delivers many (if not most) of the things customers want here, but in surprisingly quick, painless fashion, at low cost, with no need to recompile code or stay up nights learning about disturbing-sounding concepts like "STONITH" (shoot the other node in the head).

The technology in question is called Terracotta, and it works by clustering the Java Virtual Machine in such a way that even a participating JVM itself doesn't know that it has been enlisted in a coordinated effort of any kind. Through a clever bit of boot-time dependency injection, Terracotta patches a handful of core JVM memory-management bytecode instructions, achieving transparent virtualization across any number of enlisted VMs, under the control of a Terracotta server that lives in "aspect space." The Java memory model is not altered. Application code does not have to handle locks any differently or follow any special APIs, or even know that it's been clustered. Have I lost you here? Think of it this way: Instead of implementing special cluster services at the application level using product-specific APIs, Terracotta clusters the Java heap itself, underneath your applications.

It all sounds like science fiction until you try the tutorials, read the white papers and technical literature, and examine the long list of integration efforts (listed on the Terracotta website) involving other Java-based modules like Apache Lucene.

One of the more intriguing integration efforts thus far has been Geert Bevin's recent quest to achieve heretofore unknown levels of scalability and performance with the open-source Web CMS package, Drupal. Drupal is actually written in PHP, but in this case runs on Caucho's Quercus (a Java implementation of PHP), leveraging Terracotta in the cache layer. As Web CMS Report readers know, Drupal is a collaboration-intensive CMS solution of the "let's cache everything in the database" variety -- with difficult scalability problems to match. Bevin's system is highly experimental at this point, but it hints at what people might be able to accomplish with the technology.

In the meantime, other content technologies that take advantage of well-known Java subsystems like Hibernate, Tomcat, Resin, EHCache, Quartz, and so on have the most to gain by exploring Terracotta as a fast path to scalability. Individual subsystems can be tested against Terracotta separately, to find sweet spots.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes mainline ECM and Portal players (particularly those that rely heavily on Java-based infrastructure components) to include Terracotta in their "supported product configurations." I would expect the Alfrescos and Liferays of the world to stay out in front of the situation. Purveyors of complex proprietary solutions might miss the boat.

Scalability always has been (and probably always will be) the Achilles' heel of all the technologies we cover. I'll be watching to see how other communities adapt Terracotta-like notions to other well-known virtual machines (e.g., .NET). Anyone at www.mono-project.com listening?

True ECM for Salesforce.com?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:34:00 -0400

The story begins with Computer Associates (CA), who spun off its Ingres line into a separate, open source project. Ingres is now teaming up with open source ECM provider Alfresco. The Ingres "Icebreaker" product (linux + database stack) will offer an ECM option provided via Alfresco. That's good for Alfresco, who charges a pretty penny for support. But of interest also is the fact that Ingres is working with BI/Analytics firm Jaspersoft to incorporate a software bundle to complement Salesforce.com. The hosted CRM giant recently announced its intention to join into the ECM market by offering collaborative document management for its clientele. But true transaction-scale ECM via Alfresco/Ingress could also make a powerful option to deal with content resources and workflows that intersect the process of managing customer relationships. It's a thought....a two tier ECM offering from Salesforce.com -- basic for general office collaboration - extended for high volume critical needs.

Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:09:00 -0400

Buyers looking at strategic ECM investments can find product research from CMS Watch and other analyst firms, but, Alan Pelz-Sharpe argues, you need to look beyond the tools to the vendors themselves. And here, Alan finds that some of the biggest and well-known vendors are undergoing substantial change right now, at some near-term risk for their customers...

Alfresco releases WCM module

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 17:41:00 -0400

After luring away several Interwoven staffers earlier this year, open source ECM vendor Alfresco has beta-released a long-awaited Web CMS module. I haven't seen it yet, but it will be interesting to see how a platform that is long on repository-oriented services will deal with the particularities of web publishing in general, and customer expectations for web site management in particular. If you end up using Alfresco for web content management, I'd love to hear how it turns out.

Alfresco to add WCM to ECM

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:33:00 -0500

In case you hadn't noticed, open-source content management vendor Alfresco has been preparing to expand its platform to cover Web content management. After a noisy launch where the company politely dismissed open-source Web CMS efforts in favor of its more document-centric approach, Alfresco leadership seems to have had a change of heart, or maybe their funders have? In any case, Alfresco has recruited former Interwoven wünderkind Kevin Cochrane to lead the WCM effort.

A review of Alfresco

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 1 Sep 2005 10:16:00 -0400

I recently reviewed open-source ECM project "Alfresco" in a short KMWorld article. On the whole, Alfresco's release generated a bit more heat than light, but when anyone develops a serious open-source alternative to MS SharePoint, well, you just have to applaud.

Alfresco vs. Plone

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 07:21:00 -0500

When Alfresco made a noisy launch earlier this year, the new project put some noses out of joint elsewhere in the open-source CM community by claiming the mantle of "first open-source ECM platform." In particular, some in the Plone community pointed out that Plone was frequently used in the wild for managing documents, not just HTML text. Well, along comes Seth Gottlieb with a typically detailed comparison of the 2 platforms. It turns out they each have some strengths (and weaknesses), and appear to be targeted at different use-cases.

Announcing latest version of The Web CMS Report

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:01:00 -0400

Today we released The Web CMS Report - 2007. That's Version 11 if you're counting. I have so much to say about the new trends, tools, and challenges we found that I'll write up a longer article about that next week. In the meantime, for a quick review of deltas from Version 10, in this new update we:

Assess how Web CMS vendors are adapting Web 2.0 tools into their stacks (and find them coming up a bit short -- see press release)
Introduce coverage of Enonic, Drupal, Joomla!, and Alfresco WCM
Evaluate MOSS 2007 as a successor to Microsoft CMS
Expand our coverage of standards, development models, and tool testing

Plus of course we update all our product evaluations, drawing heavily on the experiences of you, the customer.