Open Source or Proprietary ? A perspective question...

Hey,

Since I read articles upon Open Source, Business Model, licences... many ideas and principles are scrambling in my head and I create this post to share my ideas and opinions.

Simple question :

Open Source or Proprietary ?

Increasingly, I think (and I am convinced ...) that everything depends on perspective and point of view. ("Everything is relative" Einstein would say!).

Let's take a car. I'm sure you know someone in your social network(consultant, project manager, colleague, client ...) who often compare Information Technology with automotive.
PS: I bought all little or huge anecdotes between car and IT ecosystem. I plan to start a collection ...

So if I have to compare open source and car ecosystem, I would say : maintenance.

Maintenance ?

Questions : How do you maintain / repair your car?
Do you let your mechanic/repairman do all the work?
Do you drain off your waste oil, change your tyre or spark plugs ... ?
Have you a mechanic car insurance or guaranty for 3 years ?

Well... Open Source = maintenance = support ...

How do you plan to take care of your car (IT solutions) ? Following answers, you will take (or not) a support contract.

• If you are a good mechanician, you will probably pass.
• If you are resourceful but afraid to do special operations, you will ask a simple support.
• If you don't want to do mechanic and let other people do the work, you will take an all-inclusive contract.

And this is the main (and major) difference between proprietary and open source solutions.

• In open source world, you can take care of your car (if you like), ask a friend (the community) to help you AND / OR you can apply for a maintenance contract.
• In Proprietary world, you can't take car of your car alone ! You must apply a "nearly-exclusive" maintenance contract.

Finally, all depends (well almost...) on your profile to choose a solution.

And it is at this precise moment where the perspective (point of view) is important ...

• From a strategic layer (manager, chief, decision maker...), it's important to have a support contract with the editor. It guarantee performance and service quality of your application (even if a software developper has changed one parameter without knowing impacts... In general, we often say it's the solution fault... ^^' ). Whether open or not, the support of a solution is something vital. As quoted in the article, it is not because we has not been stolen this year that we should not take out insurance against theft. So be prudent, take the support!

• From a technical layer (developer, engineer, consultant, architect ...), Open Source as its name suggests, means literally "open source"! As a technician and code explorer, you can learn, understand the code and architecture of the greatest (or not) developers! It is something like having cookbooks of the greatest (or not) French cooks. Typically for a young curious consultant/developer like me, it is often useful to learn best practices from open source solutions. Unfortunately, this reflex is not fully exploited tough this is THE main advantage!

• From a commercial layer (accounting, commercial ....), open source equals free or huge margin! But I repeat again, this is not strictly true! In fact, It has been shown by numerous studies that Open Source solutions are cheaper than their proprietary competitors. However we have to compare features! Some proprietary modules are clearly very expensive, and that's normal due to the business functionnality. Care must be taken as usual with the requirements and needs of each user!

• From a quality layer (Quality ...), Open source often equals Standard! Usually (it's not a golden rule... be careful!), open source development and open source solution respect standards (OASIS, ISO, W3C...) . It helps to create interoperability, flexibility, continuity and simpler evolution.

To conclude: From my simple view, the real difference between proprietary and open source is the capacity to watch, understand and study the source code of the application. Everything else is not discriminatory.

So remember, needs and requirements are the only REAL criteria for selecting a solution!

If you have something to add or if you want to continue the discussion, I invite you to leave a comment at this post!

In any case Have fun !

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Interview : Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal, Analyst, Blogger, Educator, Innovator at Information Architected, Inc.

Hello everybody !

Today let's go to USA.

Remember : 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 have the great oppportunity to interview Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal, Analyst, Blogger, Educator, Innovator at Information Architected, Inc. and a long-time player in the ECM world.

Hello Dan !

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

Certainly, my pleasure to be involved.

So Dan, you have a lot of roles and titles. But among all of that, what's your favourite one and why ?

Ah, so difficult to chose only one - but if I were to choose one aspect of my working life that drives me the most, it would be as an educator.

Regardless of the work I'm engaged in at any particular time, I always strive to be learning for my own ongoing improvement, and to make sure that when I'm consulting, writing, blogging, presenting, that I'm helping to educate others, and most importantly, to get others to a spark questions that THEY should be tackling to further their education and awareness of the topic at hand.

My belief is that unless you are continuously learning, you are only going to fall farther and farther behind what is possible in this world - and who can afford to do that?

In December 2008, you have founded Information Architected, Inc. What's the purpose of this entity? Could you describe it ?

Sure, Information Architected is a phrase that is meant to flip conversations around from their typical TECHNOLOGY focus - such as "we need a wiki!" - to the business goals that need to be accomplished, such as needing to rapidly assemble a distributed project team in a professional services firm. Deciding what tool is appropriate comes AFTER the business need, not before.

This becomes a flexible question that can help people get to the root of what they're looking to do.

What is YOUR Information Architected for?

To increase sales? To reduce customer support calls? To engage your customers in conversations? To move faster than your competition? None of that happens by accident, and unless the technologies you put in place to SOLVE those problems is put together, purposefully, to create the end result, it will be far more difficult to guarantee that result.

If you run the question out a bit further, it becomes, for example, Is your information architected for collaboration? with your customers? to co-create new products? in a "crowd-sourced" social community? And how does that system connect to any other systems that might be "behind the firewall?" How does compliance factor into this? How many languages need to be handled? Is access necessary via mobile?

People don't want more tools, they want to solve their problems, but all too often, technology leads the discussion, causing serious limitations in the ways that organizations are thinking about how to solve their business problems. It seems trivial, but it's a battle fought every day in the business world, and frequently, lost.

What's your work day after day ?

Ah, the life of a startup! The glamorous side is over-rated, for those who haven't tried it. Fortunately, between the background of my partner, long-time colleague Carl Frappaolo, who had started two companies prior to this, and myself, with a varied background including marketing and hands-on development, we don't have to spend much time in running the details of the business. The great benefit of starting up a company these days is that nearly every service we need can easily be bought and activated in a matter of minutes, for example, our website was literally up and running with branding and initial content, in a matter of hours.

Which of course, in this economy, allows us to not focus on the plumbing of the business, and instead identify and serve clients. I have to say, as a former day-to-day IT guy, running racks of servers, this is quite a refreshing change! As I've said for a long time, even when I was a day-to-day IT guy coding and fixing, the less you have to do to get your technology to do your work, the more you can focus on whatever your business ACTUALLY does - creating new drugs, more fuel efficient cars, etc.. When technology becomes a burden, plain and simple, you're doing IT wrong.

The client-facing work varies - providing strategic consulting, at this point, most often on decreasing costs of operations, and increasing delivering value to customers more quickly and effectively through collaboration, keynoting and presenting at various conferences and events, rewriting and delivering the 2009 edition of AIIM's 4-day ECM Course - including a focus on MIKE2 (an open source methodology for ECM implementation which I've become intimately familiar with over the last year), creating some of the newest and deepest SharePoint research available on the web as of this writing, and more.

More succinctly, we provide Analysis, Consulting and Education - or you could think of us as ACEs for short. ;)

Analysis feeds our Consulting work, which is frequently part Education as we work at "teaching a man to fish" rather than stay on site for months, and the entire set of offerings loops back around to refresh itself with each engagement.

If you are not aware of what ECM can do for you, you've been sold a bill of goods that didn't deliver - by a solution provider or integrator, are looking to improve HOW you're using your current investment, or looking to replace all or some portion of your ECM environment - we can drop into your environment, assess this situation, and provide pointed guidance on how to quickly start making progress, whether towards a long-term or short-term strategy.

I visited your site : http://www.informationarchitected.com/ and It's the first time I found the term Innovation Management. Could you explain this term and the link with content management ?

Innovation Management is a relatively new term - the basic premise is that "Innovation" is not magic, it shouldn't be accidental, and if organizations are going to succeed at any point, and specifically NOW, in this economy, then innovation needs to be addressed and managed, in order to actually make it happen at all, let alone consistently.

The tie to ECM is that the process of innovation management can be greatly improved by layering many of the core components of ECM. For instance, the "front end" of innovation, where as many ideas as possible are generated, are generated and feed into some place where it is "captured" - just as a form, contract, or other piece of content would. That front-end is then moved through a process or workflow, to allow others in the organization to collaborate around improving, validating or dropping the idea. The actual implementation of the idea, if it makes it this far, could shoot into another process, perhaps separate from the ECM system, such as to set a new automobile design into motion. By capturing this entire process in an electronic system, it can be thoroughly tracked, made visible to all who are participating in that process, and undestood how long it takes to bring a new idea to market, who is best at this, and so on.

This is fairly cutting edge, although the core concepts that support innovation management are not new. My interest in this topic began when I was working in the Innovation Lab of Perot Systems about 4 years ago. It's a fascinating area, and an area that organizations need significant help in seeing how it is possible to manage innovation in a systematic way.

While I am happy to help people with the more typical day-to-day uses of ECM, such as streamlining e-commerce, improving intranets, designing systems to allow distributed collaboration, creating publishing systems that allow distribution across paper, websites, mobile devices, etc., it is quite useful to be able to point to the larger and more thoroughly modern ideas that innovation management represents. IBM or Google, for example, are prime examples of addressing innovation in a serious way from a cultural standpoint, and in building the technical environment to innovate all the time, with as broad participation as possible from their employees, at the least, out to their customers and partners.

By the way, where did the "ECM Experience" begin for you ?

I accidentally stumbled into the world of ECM. Prior to my "official" introduction into ECM when I first started working at Delphi Group in 1994, I'd built an internal solution for a previous employer to track library clippings in the pharmaceutical press, and to manage marketing and sales materials for a distributed workforce. What we now talk about as tagging or metadata, and content re-use, I'd accidentally "invented" (not really, but it was certainly seen as a new invention to my employer at the time) as a way to save myself and my colleagues time. Who knew I'd make a career out of ECM after that?

The journey I've made since then is something that I try to condense and infect others with - and that is the simple fact that unless business and technical people are working together, they are only doing their organizations harm.

Until business people and technical people can translate what they are mutually looking for, placing blame on either side does nobody any good. I'd started in the IT world as what I'd call a "classic IT guy" - focused more on operations and tactics rather than in supporting what the business would need to grow to meet tomorrow. At some point I realized I'd better be part of the solution or I was going to be a boat anchor to the growth of the business, and once that lightbulb went off, I did everything that I could to be the "go to guy" and speak both in business and technical terms. Having people on staff, or at hand, that can translate between the business and technical worlds is a KEY to getting the right things done for businesses. Unfortunately, it's still fairly rare to find companies that have people with such skills.

It's been a long, strange, yet rewarding journey since then. We're only just beginning to realize what is possible given a hyperlinked, collaboratively-driven world - I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds - and to help bring people along the path as it unfolds.

What's your feelings about Open Source solution and open source movement in the CM ecosystem ?

Whether the topic is open source, SaaS or MOSS/SharePoint, the more options that potential buyers have, at a variety of price points, and with choices for whether they have to buy, build, rent, lease or deploy in some other manner - having far MORE options, and as a result, more competition, can only do good things for this industry.

Open source solutions that provide a "full suite" of capabilities for ECM are not nearly as easy to find as it is to find open source solutions that "only" provide blogging, wikis, social networking, and so on.

I've found that most of my clients, or discussions with buyers/users of technology still have more fear than acceptance of open source. Understanding the licensing models, setting the expectations for customer support, all serve to provide a bit of an uncomfortable feeling for many people. I'm not saying that SHOULD be the case, but for all of the positive benefits shown by the investment IBM or Sun, for example, have made in their own cost-savings in open source, the general corporate public world has not yet reached the "tipping point" in seeing open source as a real option.

That said, in working with a federal agency recently, they were quite willing to embrace open source, and had just begun to ramp up their development staff, as some recent RFP responses had quite an expensive price tag that they were not prepared to accept.

When presenting potential solutions to clients, all options are available in my toolbox - whatever set of tools will serve the client, I will suggest as valid options. I will say, in the face of economic mayhem, solutions that are cheaper and faster to deploy, rather than expensive and complicated, are beginning to make a lot more sense to people. Why that didn't make sense BEFORE, well, that's a topic for another day.

On the technical front, I've long said that ECM environments have some of the most hostile interfaces both for "normal" users, as well as for administrators and developers. Open source providers have helped to change that perception to a certain degree, as the individual pieces underlying the open source "stack" have been pulled into single installers, and unified frameworks, but there is still quite a bit that can be done in open source and the traditional commercial ECM world to make the interfaces and overall management MUCH more streamlined.

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

At this point, there are very few blogs that I regularly read. Most of the blogs that I read are those entries that are specifically pointed out to me by people I'm following or who reply to me on Twitter (I'm @dankeldsen, incidentally) - or entries that I find, regardless of where they are posted, by various agents and alerts I have, setup on topics such as SharePoint, ECM, Enterprise 2.0, and so on.

I've been a longtime user of LinkedIn as well, and have begun to see many interesting questions and concerns posted to various ECM, search/findability, BPM and Enterprise 2.0 groups.

Whether content is on a blog, forum, community or generically a "web site" - it's all content to me. Wherever useful insights are arising, and discussion are being had, if it's of interest to me or clients I'm working with at the time, I'll be there. I strive to point out "the best" content as I find it, and post these finds via Twitter, my blog, and social bookmarking sites such as delicious and Diigo. All of those resources are likely to be more useful, and more current than any single list I could provide here. My sources change on a daily basis.

What would you say to conclude this interview?

The many benefits and possibilities of ECM are still not well understood by most businesses, although that has begun to change due to the increasing adoption and use of web content, as well as the rise of open source, SaaS and SharePoint. Whenever I interact with companies who are still driven by paper-based forms, cold calls, direct mail and faxes, I wince - they are missing huge opportunities. If we can all work to help raise awareness of what ECM can do for them, in language they understand, then we can ALL look forward to much better experiences as customers, patients, workers, teachers, students, and on and on. Anything I can do to help you and your readers to that end, my virtual door is wide open!

Many thanks, Dan, for this interview. We wish you an exciting journey on the ECM Road!

Thank you, Jean Marie, and great to be a part of your journey as well.

Find out more about Information Architected at:
http://www.informationarchitected.com/

You can find Dan's blog at:
http://www.BizTechTalk.com/

Follow him on twitter at:
http://twitter.com/dankeldsen

Sample his presentations at:
http://www.slideshare.net/dan.keldsen

Or connect with him on LinkedIn at:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dankeldsen

PS : You can download this interview at this url : http://www.scribd.com/doc/13658395/InterviewInformationArchitected-DKeldsen-ENG-Open-Source-ECM-Interview-ENG-Dan-Keldsen-Information-Architected-Inc

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Nuxeo 5.2 RC1 is available

Nuxeo EP 5.2

Official announcement :

• http://www.nuxeo.com/en/news/nuxeo-5-2/
• http://www.nuxeo.org/sections/news/nuxeo-5-2-rc-released/

ChangeLog :

• http://jira.nuxeo.org/browse/NXP?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:changelog-panel

Packages :

• http://www.nuxeo.org/static/NuxeoEP/nuxeo-ep-5.2.0-RC1-jboss-all.jar (installer for the “full-fledged” document management server, based on jboss)

• http://www.nuxeo.org/static/NuxeoEP/nuxeo-we-5.2.0-RC1-jetty.zip (lightweight WebEngine server, embedding the Jetty web container).

• http://www.nuxeo.org/static/NuxeoEP/nuxeo-we-5.2.0-RC1-glassfish.zip (lightweight WebEngine server, embedding the GlassFish v3 application server).

Now it's time to test!

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Twitter : a new way to follow ECM news

Do you twit? Have you aTwitter account ? I often read this kind of messages in recent time. So that's why (I'm curious...), I started to test this new communication way. And my first impressions are very good! So I will share my findings.

First, What's twitter ?



Then, Who am I supposed to follow ?

Now that you know the principle, below you can find links about

ECM solutions :

Acquia

• Acquia : http://twitter.com/acquia
• Bryan House, Marketing Director : http://twitter.com/bryanhouse
• Linea Rowe, Director of Product Management : http://twitter.com/linearowe
• Kent Gale, Sr. Director, Customer Support : http://twitter.com/kentgale
• Joshua Brauer, Support Specialist : http://twitter.com/jbrauer
• Kieran Lal, Drupal community adventure guide : http://twitter.com/amazonk
• Chris Brookins, Vice President, Engineering : http://twitter.com/chrisbrookins
• Chuck D'Antonio, Senior Director, Professional Services : http://twitter.com/crdant
• Brenda Boggs, Support Specialist : http://twitter.com/brenda003

• Drupal : http://twitter.com/Drupal

Alfresco

• Alfresco: alfresco1
• John Newton, CTO: johnnewton
• John Powell, CEO: JohnPowell996
• Paul Holmes-Higgin, VP of Engineering: paulrhh
• Nancy Garrity, Alfresco Community Director: nancygarrity
• Brian Robinson, Consulting: br524
• Jessica Sant, Developer Alfresco Network: jsant
• Peter Monks, Consulting: pmonks
• Scott Davis, Director of Services: sdavis139
• Mike Hatfield, Senior Software Engineer, UI Team: mikehatfield
• Luis Sala: luissala
• Gavin Cornwell, Senior Software Engineer, Services Team: gcornwell
• Roy Wetherall, Senior Software Engineer, Services Team: rwetherall
• David Caruana, Chief Architect: dcaruana
• Jared Ottley, Solutions Engineer: jottley
• Ashutosh Dandavate, Program Manager: ashuda
• Michael Uzquiano, Director of WCM and Network: uzquiano
• Linton Baddeley, UX Designer: lintonb
• Kevin Roast, UI Team Leader: kevinroast
• Derek Hulley, Senior Software Engineer, Repository Team: derekhulley
• Yong Qu, Chief Solutions Architect: quyong2000
• Lee Faus, Director of Solutions Engineering: Ronin_Warrior
• Natasha Woodhouse, Training Coordinator: tashawoodhouse
• Paul Hampton, Director of Product Marketing: pauldhampton
• Nikki Tyson, Director of Corporate Marketing: ntyson

• Twibe : http://www.twibes.com/group/alfresco

Day Software

• Day Software : http://twitter.com/daysoftware
• Kevin Cochrane, Chief Marketing Officer : http://twitter.com/kevinc2003
• Lars Triellof, Product Manager Collaboration and Digital Asset Management : http://twitter.com/trieloff
• David Nuescheler, Computer Software Professional : http://twitter.com/davidnuescheler
• Bertrand Delacretaz, Senior developer : http://twitter.com/bdelacretaz
• Jukka Zitting, Senior Developer : http://twitter.com/jukkaz
• Ryan R Sciandri, Manager, Technical Solutions : http://twitter.com/sciandri
• Michael Marth, Software Architect : http://twitter.com/michaelmarth
• Gerd Handke, Director Product Management : http://twitter.com/gd_h
• Jeff Cowen, Senior Account Manager : http://twitter.com/jtcowen
• Lucas Whittaker, Client Services Director : http://twitter.com/lucaswhittaker
• Florian Schaulin, Sen Dir Global Education : http://twitter.com/schaulinsan
• Cédric Hüsler, Product Marketing Manager : http://twitter.com/keepthebyte
• Michael Eppelheimer, Creative Director : http://twitter.com/michaelepp
• Frank Schmiedle, Presales Consultant : http://twitter.com/schmiedle

eZ Systems

• eZ systems : http://twitter.com/ezsystems
  
• Bertrand Dunogier, Software engineer : http://twitter.com/bdunogier
• Nicolas Pastorino, Consultant - Trainer - System Developer : http://twitter.com/jeanvoye
• Roland Benedetti, Product Management : http://twitter.com/rolandbenedetti
• Ole Marius Smestad, Product manager : http://twitter.com/dotten
• Mariko Toyoshima, Country Manager Japan : http://twitter.com/marikotoyoshima
• Derick Rethans, Project Manager eZ components : http://twitter.com/derickr
• Paul Borgermans, Head of Development : http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

eXoPlatform

• eXoPlatform : http://twitter.com/eXoPlatform
• Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder : http://twitter.com/benjmestrallet
  
• Julien Viet, Portal Product Manager : http://twitter.com/julienviet
• Nicolas Filotto, DMS Product Manager : http://twitter.com/essobedo
• Julien Brulland, Web Marketing and Communication : http://twitter.com/JulienBrulland
• Tugdual Grall, VP of Business and Product Strategy : http://twitter.com/tgrall
• Brice Revenant, Director South East Asia : http://twitter.com/bricerevenant
• Oualid Chaker, General Manager, Middle East & Africa Office : http://twitter.com/oualid
• Peter Nedonosko, Project Leader : http://twitter.com/peterneo
• Patrice Lamarque, Product Manager : http://twitter.com/plamarque
• Gennady Azarenkov, Managing director Ukraine : http://twitter.com/gazarenkov
• Dimitri Baeli, Usability Manager : http://twitter.com/dbaeli

• Twibe : http://www.twibes.com/group/eXoPlatform
  

IBM

• http://twitter.com/IBM_ECM
• http://www.twitter.com/DelphRB
• http://www.twitter.com/iod2009_session
  
• http://www.twitter.com/ctr4socialsoft
• http://www.twitter.com/Jeroen_krah
  

Interwoven

• Interwoven : http://twitter.com/Interwoven_Inc
  

Jahia

• Jahia : http://twitter.com/Jahia
• Elie Auvray, CEO : http://twitter.com/elieauvray
• Serge Huber, CTO : http://twitter.com/bhillou
• Tristan Renaud, VP sales : http://twitter.com/tristanrenaud
• Emmanuel Garcin, VP north USA : http://twitter.com/emmanuelgarcin
• Clement Eggier, Manager : http://twitter.com/TheKlem
• David Griffon, Software Enginneer : http://twitter.com/David_Griffon
• Stefane Croisier, Head of Products : http://twitter.com/scroisier
• Amine Tazi, Presales Manager: http://twitter.com/atazi_jahia
• Stefane Monier, Business Development : http://twitter.com/trezi
• Cédric Mailleux, Software Architect : http://twitter.com/aillas
• Sergiy Shyrkov, Software Engineer : http://twitter.com/shyrkov
• Fancois Laize, Financial Controller : http://twitter.com/flaize

KnowledgeTree

• KnowledgeTree : http://twitter.com/knowledgetreesw
• Daniel Chalef, CEO : http://twitter.com/danielchalef
• Serge Meunier, Software Engineer : http://twitter.com/sergemeunier
• Damien Williams, Software Community Evangelist : http://twitter.com/Damien_Williams
• Monique Chavda, Support Team : http://twitter.com/moniquech
• Philip Arkcoll, Product Manager : http://twitter.com/parkcoll
• Kevin Fourie, Director of Product Development : http://twitter.com/kevinfourie
• Mark Holtzhausen, Senior Software Engineer : http://twitter.com/MarkH_KT
  

• Twibe : http://www.twibes.com/group/KnowledgeTree
  

Nuxeo

• Nuxeo : http://twitter.com/nuxeo
• Eric Barroca, CEO : http://twitter.com/ebarroca
• Stefane Fermigier, Founder and Chairman : http://twitter.com/sfermigier
• Alexandre Russel, software engineer : http://twitter.com/arussel
• Bassem Asseh, Consulting director : http://twitter.com/asseh
• Florent Guillaume, Director of R&D : http://twitter.com/efge
• Ian Smith, cloud guy : http://twitter.com/iansmith
• Olivier Grisel, Software Engineer : http://twitter.com/ogrisel
• Marjolaine Weibel, Human Ressource : http://twitter.com/Marjolainew
• Anne de Forsan, Communication Director : http://twitter.com/adeforsan
• Alain Escaffre, Technical sales/project manager : http://twitter.com/aescaffre
• http://twitter.com/alnuxeo

• Twibe : http://www.twibes.com/group/nuxeo
  

Open Text

• Open Text : http://twitter.com/OpenText
• Open Text WCM : http://twitter.com/OpenTextWCM
• Open Text Content World : http://twitter.com/OTContentWorld
  
• Martin Sumner Smith, VP, Enterprise Architecture : http://www.twitter.com/MartinSS
• Cheryl McKinnon, Director E2.0 : http://www.twitter.com/CherylMcKinnon
• Kimberly Edwards, Product Marketing Manager for the collaborative solutions : http://twitter.com/KimberlyEdwards
• Cheryl Alden, Director of Marketing : http://twitter.com/cherylalden
• Jason Varmazis, Senior Consultant : http://twitter.com/hydrogenbob
• Adam Lee, Public Relations - EMEA : http://twitter.com/photo_ad
• Richard Maganini, Director, Corporate Communications : http://twitter.com/rtmaganini
• Daniel Kraft, SVP Corporate Strategy : http://twitter.com/DanielKraft
• Owen Brandt, Director of Professional Services and Customer Care : http://twitter.com/owenbrandt
• Michael Griebenow, Field Marketing Coordinator : http://twitter.com/grieben
• Tucker Elliott, Senior Sales Engineer : http://twitter.com/tuckerelliott
• Stephanie Fazio, Corporate Communications Specialist : http://twitter.com/sdfazio
• Craig Hepburn, Senior Marketing Manager : http://twitter.com/craighepburn
• Brigid Greenway, Field Marketing Manager, Sales Services : http://www.twitter.com/brigidgreenway
  
• Dave Chalmers, Enterprise Strategy : http://www.twitter.com/DaveChalmers1
  
• Lubor Ptacek, Vice President, Product Marketing : http://twitter.com/lptacek
• Jeremy Reed, Director, Program Management : http://twitter.com/Jeremy_Reed
• Jim Rieder, Director of Sales : http://twitter.com/riederj
• Stewart Lynch, Senior Services Engineer : http://twitter.com/StewartLynch
• Werner de Jong, Senior services engineer : http://twitter.com/wernerdejong
• Kimberly Proudfoot, Marketing Manager : http://twitter.com/proudfootk
• Orla Conaway, Director, Office of the President : http://twitter.com/orlaconaway
• Bill Forquer, EVP : http://twitter.com/billforquer
• Joyce Hostyn, Senior Director, Experience Design : http://twitter.com/joyce_hostyn
• Wendy Chung : Senior Manager, Corporate Marketing : http://twitter.com/wendychung
• Steve Currie, Director Marketing : http://twitter.com/stevecurrie
• James Cleaver, Manager of Human Resources : http://twitter.com/youngjames44
• Jody White, Program Manager, Extended ECM for SAP : http://twitter.com/JodyWhite
• Elizabeth Torrie, Analyst Relations : http://twitter.com/bethtorrie
• Ginny Bartosek, Marketing Programs Manager : http://twitter.com/GinnyBartosek
  
• http://twitter.com/otex_brig
  

• Twibe : http://www.twibes.com/group/opentext
  

Vignette

• Vignette : http://twitter.com/vignettecorp

25.03.09 : A new list of CMS Vendor

• Gilbane Group Blog : http://gilbane.com/blog/2009/03/content_management_vendors_on_twitter.html

Organization/Analyst/NetWork/Press :


AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management)

• John Mancini, President of AIIM : http://www.twitter.com/jmancini77
• Atle Skjekkeland, Vice President : http://www.twitter.com/skjekkeland
• Hanns Köhler-Krüner, Director Education EMEA : http://www.twitter.com/HannsKK
• Peggy Winton, Vice President : http://www.twitter.com/pwwinton
• Bryant Hudon, editor : http://www.twitter.com/bduhon
• Betsy Fanning, director : http://www.twitter.com/bfanning
  
• Amy Michalski, Marketing Strategist : http://www.twitter.com/amichalski
• Georgina Clelland, Director Global Education Services : http://www.twitter.com/gzclelland
• Thedra White, Director Global Education Services : http://www.twitter.com/tgwhite1
• Theresa Resek, Director, Webinars & Data Analysis: http://www.twitter.com/tmresek
• Bob Larrivee, Director/Industry Advisor : http://www.twitter.com/BobLarrivee
• Joe Ryan, Manager, Global Relations : http://www.twitter.com/jryanaiim
  

CMSWire

• http://twitter.com/cmswire
  

CMSWatch

• http://twitter.com/cmswatch
  

451Group

• http://twitter.com/the451group
  

FierceCM

• http://twitter.com/FierceCM

CMSGroup

• http://twitter.com/cmpros
  

Blogger/Experts/Consultants/Independant

• Seth Gottlieb, Founder, Content Here : http://twitter.com/sggottlieb
• Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal at Information Architected, Inc. : http://twitter.com/dankeldsen

Of course this listing is not thorough and extra hands are always welcome to complete this list!

Finally, if you want to follow me ?

http://twitter.com/jeanmariepascal

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Rich Client, Alfresco and me...

Hi!

Since the beginning of this year, I'm trying to create and develop "rich client" connected to Alfresco services (in other terms : ECM services). When I speak about "rich client", I speak about RDA: Rich Desktop Application and RIA: Rich Internet Application.

For my first tests, I used an excellent graphics library that some of you already know : Ext js. This library allows to create rich user interfaces with high quality components. For those who are part of the Alfresco community, you can find some Ext implementation in projects as:

• Opsoro: http://www.opsoro.org/
• Docasu: http://docasu.sourceforge.net
• Web Studio: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Studio
• ExtAlf: http://louise.hu/poet/?p=753
  

For my part and to keep simple, I used this library to create a graphical documentary process designer based on nodes. Simple isn't it?

In architectural point of view, the solution is composed by:

• Specific Java API for treatment,
• Javascript API (API Java Export to be used by webscripts) (BaseScopableProcessorExtension for coders ...)
• A lot of Webscripts for REST,
• Extjs for presentation layer,
• SVG forworkflow graphical representation,
  

Ps: This solution is totally specific and is not in linked with JBPM! (but nothing forbid to plug services JBPM with this king of GUI...)
Ps 2: Thanks to RCO and MDU for teaching me the art of SVG and Javascript!

In any case to see the result you can see the video below:

Record your screencast online

Why have we to create rich client for Alfresco ? It already has a customizable User interface...
It is a good question! But the answer is simple: Everybody has different tastes. :)

Indeed, Alfresco's interfaces does not necessarily match needs and expectations of all users. Design too complex ... Non corporate graphic style... There are plenty reasons to change interfaces! and to be honest... Although Alfresco default interface is customizable, it's quite limited. And if we decide to change many components, it can become very tedious and dangerous if we are not careful!

Or a content management system must provide the ability to access and consolidate all the content. It must deliver them in various formats to fit user screens (computer screen, tablet, mobile, smartphone, pda ...).

As integrator, we need to create new interfaces from scratch! In fact ... not completely... Alfresco offers the ability to display and export most of its content management services via APIs like Java, JavaScript, PHP, REST and display content in several formats like XML, HTML, CMIS, ATON, JSON... In the end, it's developper's role to choose the right service and the right format. He can later link it to a graphical library like Ext to improve user experience (see You Experience Technovision in 2012).


My point of view
Rich Interfaces in a ECM system are solutions to specific business problems. They represent a vision of the company content repository.

For example :

• An HTML form with data preview and javascript fields validation.
• A desktop widget based on Adobe AIR to follow a community activity.
• An external JSR 168 portlet to publish papers on a portal.
• An Ext graphical interface for managing the lifecycle of a special content type ...
  

Sometimes, it is (really!!!) better to create an interface from scratch than to modify the existing!

For my part, I am currently working with Ext and Adobe Air. I'm testing integration capabilities between this framework.
In this area you can see a demonstrator by Luis Sala at: http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/luissala/2009/03/05/my-adobe air-project-writing-an-alfresco-desktop-app /
or
in a different category, you should view the CMIS Explorer by Shane Johnson (blog).

At the end, I'm (maybe) in on it...

Have fun !

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