Interview : Rogier Oudshoorn, Senior WCM Consultant at Capgemini Consulting Netherlands and Alfresco Contributor of the month, August

Hello readers!

I am glad to present you a new interview.

The subjects I focused on for these interviews are
1. To introduce men and women playing a role in ECM environment
2. To discover the ECM community
3. To explore ECM Solutions
4. To learn more about technologies and content management practices.

Today, I’m very happy to interview Rogier Oudshoorn, Senior WCM Consultant at Capgemini Consulting Netherlands and Alfresco Contributor of the month, August.



Hello Rogier!

First of all, let me thank you for the time you take to make this interview reality!

So Rogier, you are Alfresco Contributor of the month, August. Could you explain what this is “award” means exactly?

This award is given by Alfresco for members of their community who have given a significant contribution in the said month. Mostly, these contributions are in the form of open-sourcing code or in the form of knowledge sharing.

So it’s a great honour! Can you tell us more about your contribution?

Alfresco WCM has a lacune in their system; it does not out-of-the-box allow content to be “moved” between several environments. Since we tend to develop on 4 distinct environments (development, test, acceptance-test and production) this was a setback for us. Luckily, there was an existing open source project which allowed importent content to be setup as if they were created in the system itself. This project – the WebSitetools – basically scans a web project for content which should be a webform, but isn’t. It then meta-dates and regenerates whatever it finds so the system will see it as webform content.

I ported this project towards the latest version of Alfresco (2.2 E), since it didn’t work on this platform yet. I of course donated the results to the community!

Now let’s talk about you. What’s your position in Capgemini? What's your Role and what’s your speciality?

My role in Capgemini NL is that of a technical WCM specialist. I’ve started off working with several Closed Source packages such as Tridion and Vignette, but moved towards Open Source as the first enterprise-ready packages started coming out. Right now my focus is to create a solid place for Open Source within the Capgemini WCM & ECM community, where Alfresco is an example of the packages we can use for our clients.

Have you always been working in the WCM World?

Not really ... I actually started off as a metrics specialist in Cosmic and FPA, but I wanted to be more involved in the Engineering side of software. I then joined Capgemini and have been working in the WCM field ever since.

What’s the difference and similarity between WCM and ECM ?

Good question, and a very tough one to answer shortly. For me, the major difference is the focus of the product. WCM is focussed on managing websites, whereas ECM is focussed on managing information. When you have a look at what they offer, you’ll most likely find WCM to be XML-based and revolve around editors filling out forms which get transformed into HTML. In ECM you’ll find lots of features for managing documents such as Word, high-end workflow engines, and lifecycle support. In the end, both systems manage information ... but in different forms and with different goals.

Does Capgemini have an Open Source WCM/ECM offer (Consulting, methodology, best-practices…)?

We certainly do! We have been using WCM & ECM since the nineties in Holland, consistently adding value for our clients. We offer every consultancy at every level, including marketing, project management, technical consulting and of course lots of expertise. We have a good track record of implementing ECM package deals – even on fixed-price and fixed-date basis.

It’s time to speak about Alfresco. Tell us more about your first experience with Alfresco? How do you meet this solution?

I came across Alfresco in 2006 when one of my colleges pointed it out as an enterprise-scale open-source ECM package. At that time, I was looking at several open source WCM packages – but was very disappointed at the options. Most were PHP-based, and really not up for enterprise use. We started working with Alfresco early 2007 with a document-oriented project, but it took off quickly as a back-end for several Rich Internet websites. Coupled with for instance Flex, JQuery or Backbase, Alfresco allows (through webscripts) massive feature-rich websites to be built on proper ECM foundations.

Why have you choosen Alfresco for your projects? Have you project case-study?

We have several case-studies, even though I cannot share them here. Our two most successful projects were based on Alfresco ECM + Backbase and Alfresco WCM + Flex. The first is a fully dynamic community website, the second a static marketing oriented financial site. We are working on another ECM implementation right now which will become a nice reference too.

Can you tell us what are the strengths and weaknesses of this solution from your point of view?

The absolute strength of Alfresco lies in its lean-mean repository coupled with Web Scripts. This allows a developer to very quickly build integrations or even a complete website on top of it. Another plus is the accessibility of the repository; the FTP & CIFS integrations are very welcome additions to an ECM system – making life a lot easier for both developers and users.

It’s weakness is the interface. It’s a bit messy, and especially the WCM interface is very hard to use for casual editors.

Are you a member of an open source community promoting WCM or ECM? Do you make other contributions (Animation, articles, posts, forums ...) ?

I try to read the Alfresco forums every week or so, helping out where I can. I am sad to say that I don’t really have enough time to do so – my life is quite hectic. I am however active inside the Capgemini Open Source Alliance which promotes and organizes our Open Source based service offerings in the Netherlands. Amongst others, we organize a yearly forum where we share our experiences with Open Source.

Finally, can you recommend us weblinks or blogs about ECM or IT in general ?

Erhm ... no. We have a lot of knowledge inside of our organization, but most is kept internal.

What would you say to conclude this interview?

I am happy to see an active blog about open source ECM. Most information to be found is for PHP-based system which we dare not implement for our customers; very little open source packages are really enterprise class. We work mostly for fortune 500 companies and high-end government clients, where you have to offer enterprise level consulting. Alfresco is probably the first open source ECM system to achieve this!

Many thanks, Rogier, for this interview. We wish you a nice and exciting journey on Open Source ECM Road!


To find out more about Capgemini : http://www.capgemini.com