Install and Test My Open Source ECM Family

Hello Folks,

Do you know one main advantage of OpenSource ECM Solution ? You can test it !

As ECM consultant / Integrator, I have to install, test, configure, use, modify many different solutions in differnt environment. But I have a BIG problem... I just have my XP dev machine and no test Server... Of course I can install all of this things in my computer... But I'm very limited by my hard disk space... And I prefer to dedicate my machine for dev only! I fed up sparing time... Futhermore I can't share my installation and best pratice configuration and my colleague can't help me and can't share their experience.

So what's the solution ? Virtualization of course!

That's why, since a few moment now, I start a collection of virtual OpenSource ECM Solution.

How ?

First, I have to find "Ready" VMWare Images. Indeed, I don't always have time to download and burn ISO images of operating systems and then create a VM image. It could be very long. So I was looking for a way to get VMWare images and then use them directly without having a VMWare Workstation installed on my computer. So I opted to retrieve images on sites like Http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ I have an external 320GB hard drive and a good ADSL internet connection.

Then to use them, I download VMWare (FREE) Player http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

I have all I want to start my collection. All of this for 0 € free of taxes and legally!

Now what's the menu boss ? SHARING !

Below, you can find presentation (or simple HOW-TO) to install my collection of OpenSource CM Solution. You will also find some important links.
PS : This installation is only for test purpose!

Configure Your Virtual Server

• Ubuntu 9.04
  

Simple Installation

• Alfresco
• EzPublish (Work in progress)
  
• Drupal (Work in progress)
• GateIn
• Jahia
  
• KnowledgeTree
• Nuxeo

Advanced Installation

• Alfresco (Work in progress)
• Nuxeo (Work in progress)

In a near future(If all goes right...), I will share other presentations on specific aspect...(LDAP Connexion, Database configuration, continuous integration, clustering...)

With all my CM family, I can create my private network! Test combination, configuration, new version or just create prototype and share it.

Of course, I can't start all of this virtual machine at the same time. But it's enough to me :-)

Hope it will help you!

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Interview : Daniel Tellez, CTO & Owner of Yerbabuena Software

Buenos dias a todo el mundo !

This time we make a travel to Spain.

Today, I have the honor and pleasure to interview Daniel Tellez, CTO & Owner of Yerbabuena Software.


Hello Daniel,

Hello Jean Marie. I'm very pleased to answer all your questions and to appear in your blog. I've been following your blog for some time because of your interesting posts about ECM, specially in the opensource world.

To begin this interview, I wanted to thank you for giving me a little of your time to answer this interview and to share your knowledge of open source ECM and specially Nuxeo.

First Daniel, what's the purpose and objectives of Yerbabuena Software ? What kind of services do you offer?

We, Yerbabuena Software, are a very young company, and we are very proud to count with a staff of young professionals who want to do very big things in their career. I tell you that because this is one of the main reasons because we have embarked in many interesting and great projects, like the one that will let us annotate semmantically and classify contents in Nuxeo, or access to its repositories through a smartphone.

Our mission and goals fit perfectly with all of these, and can be summarized in the next sentence: to be a leading and international company, reference in the field of development, research and innovation based on opensource enterprise content management solutions. This mission has not been chosen randomly, but has been the result of a hard but funny process or rediscovering of our ideas and goals. You can find a picture here, in the form of a roadmap that drives our actions to that goal:
http://translate.google.com/translate?client=tmpg&hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.yerbabuena.es%2F2009%2F04%2Fmapa-estrategico.html&langpair=es|en

Sorry, we still have to translate it. ;-)

About our services portfolio, I have to say that our company provides mainly consulting, training and development services over opensource ecm software solutions. It is in this field where we can add more value to our ecosystem, and where we can deploy more freely our ideas and innovation, to apply them to our customers.

As Owner and CTO can you describe your work in Yerbabuena Software ? What's your role and your work day after day ?

In Yerbabuena Software we have a very horizontal organization. We are all folks, in and out of the office, in the most of times. So, my daily work is mainly to help my colleagues in the three development teams we have, to care for the methodologies used (always agile) and to provide a seamless connection between development and comercial sides.

Why did you choose CM ecosystem ? Is there some opportunities ?

Well, as I said before, we have a small company that knows perfectly the problems of small companies. In the earlier days of Yerbabuena Software, we had to face with all these problems, decisions and investments like all the companies do. How easy it looks when you are in college !

We thought it will be a good way to earn money to sell ECM solutions to SMEs, because we are convinced that this is not a field of software that could only fit in great organizations. All the companies have to manage papers and documents. We have seen very little companies with whole rooms full of boxes full of papers. Yes, very hard.

Web content management and opensource is a good entry point to begin to work with SMEs. Basically because of the simplicity of the WCM concepts and the cheaper costs of opensource. It can begin publishing news, events and descriptive web pages, and sooner the need to share and generate documentation comes through this tool, as so does the need to deliver it with other departments, with companies, with customers. Very soon the need of applying workflows, auditing, etcetera comes.

Actually we are jumping from SMEs to bigger organizations with large amounts of documents and users, like Diputación de Malaga (regional government of Malaga) or La Salle colleges.

Definitively, in Yerbabuena we are always researching these gaps not covered for common ECM providers, from earlier days by offering ECM to SMEs, until today, when we develop solutions for problems like accesibility and usability in reading documents ( http://translate.google.com/translate?client=tmpg&hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.yerbabuena.es%2F2009%2F05%2Fprimera-beta-de-easyreader-desarrollada.html&langpair=es|en ), or increasing ubiquity in the access to the repository ( http://translate.google.com/translate?client=tmpg&hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.yerbabuena.es%2F2009%2F07%2Fprimera-beta-de-yerbabuena-ercp.html&langpair=es|en).

What are the main trends in ECM in Spain?

Well, in the last months we are hearing very much noise around ECM like some time before, at least in Spain. This is good. The market of ECM is becoming bigger in Spain. And the companies that did know ECM before, are replanning its resources to change to a more opensource scenario. In these crisis days, harder in our country, the companies are realizing that it is not easy to justify licenses costs.

Now, we can see how many companies knows about the leading ECM providers in the open source side, like Nuxeo and Alfresco. The first mainly because of us ;-)

Now, let's talk about Nuxeo. Why did you choose to use Nuxeo for CM problematics?

When we began to plan our business strategy around document management, more or less in 2006, Alfresco was a little toy, while a french company called Nuxeo few years working with a very cool document management and web content management tool. We loved it. And we did many projects with that foundation. And we continue doing it. (Nuxeo CPS)

After, Nuxeo decided to switch to JavaEE technologies. This was a full reimplementation of the previous tool, maintaining all they learned before about ECM.

But we are an independent consultancy company, so we didn't take the JavaEE option given by Nuxeo 5, but we decided to take a look at the tools around ECM in this year. I will not go into much detail, but we couldn't find no one platform that fits so well than Nuxeo: we loved its architecture, we loved the real opensource policy, we loved that all of the CPSLovers like me didn't have to face many troubles to understand Nuxeo 5 concepts.

On the technical side, what are the advantages and disadvantages of this solution ?

The more important technical advantage of Nuxeo over any other document management system is its transparency and easyer way to fit it in any existing information system. This can be checked in many aspects, like:
- It is totally and really open source, like no other ECM application in the market.
- The active participation in CMIS technical committee of specification, in which the other big players in the ECM world participates also, like EMC, Microsoft, Alfresco, etcetera.
Nuxeo participates also in the development of Apache Chemistry, in partnership with Day Software.
- Nuxeo 5 provides different types of APIs, making easier the integration with third parties software.
- The use of standars and wide used technologies ensure the interoperability with other systems, the easy of access to the system to software professionals, the low chance to get into a vender lock-in strategy, etcetera.

Is very difficult for me to find a technical disadvantage over other content management systems. Maybe we could go into the typical discussion about the systems needed by JavaEE based technologies, more expensive than in others like Python or PHP.
But JavaEE has shown that it is a more reliable framework, resolving common problems for enterprise software.

Did you make some contribution ?

We started to contribute to Nuxeo 5 in the typical starting way: reporting issues and providing translations to the system, like iberian languages: castilian, gallego, catalá, euskera, portuguese and from others places like vietnamese.

Today, we have a very interesting project, commented before. We want to build two great components to Nuxeo 5: one rich interface to access document management repositories and most functions, and another component to annotate semmantically the contents and to automatically classify docs in Nuxeo 5. This is being the most important contribution for us in the project.

Like a non-technical contrib, we have to say that Yerbabuena have been, and still is, the main driver in the spanish-speaking community for Nuxeo 5 and one leader in evangelism of open source content management in this community and also in others like Viet Nam. To do it, we have participated in events and programs like Open Source World Conference last summer in Málaga, FOSS Bridge program or Open World Forum in Paris.

Personally, are you part of another open source community? Do you have examples of participation (Animation, articles, forums ...)?

Me and my colleagues have participated actively mostly in Nuxeo 5 and Nuxeo CPS projects. The main proofs of it can be viewed in the mailing lists of both projects.
Although Nuxeo CPS has lost great part of its strength as a community in favor of its elder brother Nuxeo 5, it continues to be an interesting project and a very powerful option for ECM and WCM, competing greatly with more popular platforms. So I participate yet in this project all the times I can by reporting new incidences or patches.

Our contributions feed also our blog posts, so I recommend you to visit frecquently ;-)

In the other hand, we have an own product, Bluesearch, that can be viewed as totally independent of ECM business line. This is a project oriented to marketing, which relates user profiles of mobile phones, so if they match in preferences or likes, it lets them connect to talk or so. This product is also totally open and our other great contribution to open source community.

To conclude this interview, what's your favorite blogs and links on IT in general?

Well, I follow many ECM related blogs, although in the latests days I prefer to use twitter to be in touch with the latest technologies and news. I know you also like twitter ;-) Here I can link you and interesting resource to follow the list of the main ECM gurus:
http://jonontech.com/2009/07/21/follow-forty-twitter-cms-gurus-in-three-clicks/

... BTW, Jean Marie... you are also here ;-D

In the blogsphere, I follow specially and recommend the Nuxeo one, the John Mancini's blog ( http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog ), and the Word of pie ( http://wordofpie.com/ ), the three highly recommended, and of course yours ;-D

One last word before leaving?

Don't forget to visit our blog. We are starting publishing our only english blog, in the way you do it with http://www.open-source-ecm.com/ , and where we publish very frecquently our contributions to the community.

It's in http://blog.yerbabuenasoftware.com (english)
http://blog.yerbabuena.es (spanish)

And, of course, that the world of opensource ECM continue doing great!!

Thank you again Daniel for this interview and we wish you a nice and exciting journey on Open Source ECM Road!

Ps: As usual, you can download this interview at this url : http://www.scribd.com/doc/21070811/Open-Source-ECM-Interview-ENG-Daniel-Tellez-Yerbabuena

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