Identify Content Sources

In an organization, Content can be produced from a variety of sources.

For example Email transactions, Business Document productions, Images, Media file generation processes etc. Identification and listing of all these sources are quite essential.

There should be particular life cycle of each of these contents in the business, capturing these is also equally required.

Identify Actors

Similarly as there are number of different content sources possible in an organization, there can be variety of people and system actors involved in the production and maintenance of the content.

It is important to list down all such actors who contribute and participate in any phase of the content life cycle, along with their roles and actions they usually perform. This will also help to structure the permission model of the system.

Create Organization Taxonomy

This is probably the most important thing to do while establishing an ECM system. This involves

1. Creating standard and fixed set of content Tags for the business
2. Creating content categorization hierarchy and structure
3. Creating user folksonomy strategy
4. Create business specific content metadata, content types etc

Design Content Storage Structure

This is all about how different types of contents will be stored in the repository.

Answer the questions such as how many Sites will be created, what will be the default space (folder) hierarchy in each of the sites, what are the standard folder templates that can be re-used in the system etc.

Identify Document Management features

There are several standard document management features available in Alfresco ECM. For example

• Versioning
• Check-In, Check-Out
• Comments
• Manage Permissions
• Manage Content Types, Metadata
• Copy, Move, Edit
• etc

The business needs to identify which all features they need and how to use them.

Structure Content Business Process

In an organization, contents are not created without any processes behind them.

Identifying and structuring these business processes and workflows are one of the most important aspects of an ECM implementation.

Write and spec these workflows in flow chart format that can help developers to easily implement them.

Collaboration around Contents

Alfresco is not only a simple document management system, it offers rich set of Web 2.0 collaboration features.

In today’s social media driven world, users work in a very collaborative and connected environment. Alfresco offers all standard collaboration stuff which organizations must evaluate and implement accordingly.

Implement the above standard features

Deploy the above standard ECM use cases, run for a period, evaluate the performance and functionalities of the system.

Finally, identify and implement Customizations

At this point of time, the business owners should be pretty clear about what they need from Alfresco, as the ECM solution of the business. Now you can write down the business specific customizations, additional features they want. Implement those functionalities and you have a stable ECM solution in the business that will last long.

Some organizations have their own methodology, roadmap and plan of  actions for adapting and implementing an ECM system.

One way is that they chose certain platform(s) that is cost effective and probably technically understandable.

Then they manage to get some demonstrations or use the trial version of the softwares to figure out what they can directly use and what is missing in the system as per the current business need is concerned. They shortlist a few ECM systems and corresponding service providers and vendors.

Another typical way of implementing is – write down a few use cases of the business and call for bids from several vendors. Each vendor appears with their own solution, the selection method is typically how much customized use cases they can readily demonstrate and how much low cost they can offer.

The next thing what happens is, a specification is written, the development starts, the  engaged vendor(s) straight away  jumps into customizing the system for  the organization – at this point  neither the stake holder exactly know what their organization needs from  the ECM, nor the vendor knows how much the entire system is relevant  and suitable for the client.

The end Result

The end result, after certain time period is, the customization is definitely done as per the requirement specifications has been written and as per the business analysts has spelled it out; but the wide audience has not accepted the new system and the business adaption is very poor.

• The end users are confused about what to do with the system and how.
• Stake holders scratch their heads what went wrong.
• The vendors try to justify their position that they have not done anything incorrect.
• And the business owners declare the project is a failure.

What they have missed?

Content Management in an Enterprise must follow and implement certain basic and standard use case and functionalities, without these properly analyzed and in place, an ECM implementation cannot be complete.

These  standard use cases and functionalities of an ECM should  not be forgotten  and ignored while implementing any ECM platform in an  organization.  Whatever customizations and business specific  implementations the owners  have in mind and the business demands, can  follow after that.

If  the business specific custom functionalities precedes and given  more  importance than the standard Use Case implementation of an ECM,  the end  goal of having an ECM and KM system might not be met and  fulfilled in  the long run.

At the same time, planning for these standard Use Cases in an   Organization is not an easy and short sighted job. Stake holders, many a   times, do not have the patience, time or budget for waiting so much   time for analyzing and planning for standard ECM implementation.   Specially since the standard use cases might not be the primary pain   areas of the business, thus investing time and resource for implementing   these in an organization does not seem to be an viable and efficient   option a CIO settles in with.

Thus without targeting the core problem and not having the ECM or KM system implementation in mind, the very nature and behavior of the system goes missing in the business, and the very purpose of Content Management is not solved.

What should have been done?

The core behavior and purpose of an ECM system is solve the content management problems in an organization.

These are, most of the times, pretty similar and standard problems irrespective of the nature and domain of the business.

• Various Sources of the Content
• Different Structure of the Content
• Identify suitable Storage pattern of the Content
• Actors who play various roles around Content
• Nomenclature and Categorization of the Content as per the business
• Standard business processes around the Content
• Content Retention and Reuse policies
• Collaboration needs around the Content
• Document Management features in need

Thus the business must first figure out what ECM problem they want to solve by the system, how people going to effectively use it and how their life will be more organized by using the system – and thus finally how the business will be benefited.

Without these properly thought through, you are not solving the content management problem of your establishment, you are merely deploying yet another customized software in the data center.

The beauty of the today’s ECM platforms are – most of the them offer many features, but organizations do not implement these features as per their business needs. Also each ECM system has its own characteristics, capabilities and way of implementing same use cases. Organizations need to critically evaluate how these features are implemented in the system and decide whether the pattern is suitable for the business or not.

Thus the ECM implementation plan should be:

1. You first implement a proper and standard ECM environment (not system) in your organization.
2. Evaluate how your custom requirements fit in the system, carve your requirements and implementation model as per the system, if required.
3. Carefully customize (so that its own flavor does not go away) and implement the system.

Most of the times it has been observed that if the stake holders can establish an ECM environment in the business and standard content management use cases are followed and in please, the custom implementations becomes much simpler and easier to develop and to adopt.

In the recent Indian movie Peepli Live, the village family is given number of sops by the government for free as gifts without really understanding the ground reality and the financial state of the family. It is soon clear that much of “free” offers were pointless unless properly used and having adequate resources and understanding to make best use of them.

The state of open source software is also shaped by businesses assuming something for “free” and combines a host of unclear assumptions about open source. Truth is that most of open source software is high quality but may not be ready for business use with free versions and requires on the part of business adopters a significant understanding of business fit to purpose with what is “actually” on offer and realistically possible out of the box using the open source software features.

It is also true that businesses are waking up to open source alternatives like never before with having an open source alternative increasingly becoming a norm for IT procurement decisions. The most important driver remains cost but mature IT managers realize number of other benefits such as flexibility and innovation using open source.

However just as the illustration of movie Peepli Live and the sops provided to farmers for free, it is also clear that not all businesses are treating open source properly and open source is not treating them well in return.

In this article we have outlined some reasons why open source may not be working (even failing) for many businesses (and in this process identify what will make it work)

Our own decade-long journey @InfoAxon has been around the open source model for developing software solutions for our customers. When we started out we made a classic mistake out of thinking that what is good as a development model is also great as a business model. This fact coupled with our own growth and learning from open source helped us identify why open source does not work for some businesses that initially started by adopting open source with a great promise.

The Trap of “Free”

The open source movement evangelists made it very clear in the beginning that open source is “Free as in Beer or Free Speech” (Find an excellent description here).  Still “Using Free Software” lays down a mental trap for most business decision makers persuaded by their IT managers about open source.

The trap makes the user adopt the free software and invest further into using it but very soon it is evident that more resources and architectural thinking is needed for a mature business solution to shape up. This puts a disillusionment with regards to open source economics in the mind of the open source adopter and needs a urgent course correction. The path to this correction is often really hard work and lot of misgivings. Sooner businesses learn the meaning of “Free” the better it is for a mature open source business decision to be taken.

May be some humor can put the point across better

Q: Using Open Source? A: Because it is there and looks good

Choosing open source software and adopting it because it is there and available for free is one of the worst possible strategic starts that a business can adopt with open source.

Our experience shows that open source software leads to significant business benefits because it is better quality software with a rich community behind its open source roots and the level of support that can sustain long term business interests. With thousands of open source options available today, businesses can easily fall into the trap of using an immature open source option. Many such options have great marketing buzz and appear cheaper or free compared to the proprietary option.

Many businesses in particular start ups, early Cloud service providers and IT product manufacturers tend to select different open source components and make them work assuming that integration and fitment to business purpose can be achieved simply by using or selecting the right free open source component.

Most of the time such projects lead to a successful prototype that raises expectations but does not quite comes together in the long run.

Not all Open Source is Mature for Business Use

Only a certain kind of Open source software has matured to be used for business and production use and help businesses scale for thousands of users.

Apart from certain categories of open source software such as Operating Systems (Linux flavors), Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) ERP, CRM, Content and Document management, Business Intelligence etc. already have some very mature options. The landscape is continuously changing with many companies launching a dual open source licensing with paid and free versions. For business adoption the sheer scale of such offerings today can be daunting and actually deter business adoption.

Enthusiastic technical leaders and IT managers get excited by what the free version of open source says it offers and quickly assume it to be fitting their business requirements. Most decision makers however lack resources to fully test and evaluate the open source option making naive assumptions in the process.  This leads expectations to sky rocket and inaccurate business expectations to eventually find that a proper platform is needed and required around the open source software.

Some scenario indicators about inaccurate use of open source in businesses are:

1. The open source choice is a hurried one and a alternative is selected and then pushed as the solution within business without due diligence.
2. Open source software installation works for a few months in trial environments and achieves a initial use adoption but struggles when customization or integration required.
3. Usability and other issues crop up and the source code are though available is not well supported and soon become a bottleneck for a longer term use adoption. IT teams of the business try to fix things but are reluctant or under funded to reach out to open source experts or get into spending professional consulting arrangements.

Mistaking Open Source Software with a “Business Solution”

Choosing the right open source software is a software decision leading to a less cost options compared with a proprietary alternative or developing the software from scratch. It is a start but often the business needs full scale adoption by business users through a well supported, continuously enhanced and well integrated “business solution”.

Most businesses assume that selecting the open source software will lead to increased adoption but soon find out that additional investments are required to achieve a business solution. Potentially this is driven by the initial free or low cost argument of the open source software itself.

For a business solution to emerge, the open source software requires:

• Multiple business integrations required of the open source software with existing legacy and other IT systems
• An open source systems integration partner that can “platform” the open source software integration.
• Build the right support and product enhancement processes that augment the open source advantages.

Not engaging Open Source Integrator Vendors

Empowered by open source software many business adopters end up integrating or customizing the open source software themselves. Most of such efforts are disconnected from the open source community developments and the same enhancements available in commercial or community versions or being worked upon by other code developers are being resolved or developed by the open source adopters. A better approach that mitigates risk and saves time and cost eventually is to engage a support or open source integrator or consulting company. Until now one of the common problems was that customization and enhancement of open source was achieved by small consulting and development shops. However this landscape is fast changing now.

Trends show that the size and number of open source vendors and the overall system integrator ecosystem is steadily increasing. In a recent study conducted by 451 CAOS – A leading Open source research company it was made clear that

Apart from growth in open source vendors, proprietary software vendors have recognized that the true benefit of open source software is not only in disrupting markets through open source software licensing, but also through collaborating with partners, customers, and even competitors on non-differentiating features (something that many so-called open source specialists have failed to do) while continuing to generate profits from complementary products elsewhere in the value chain and also retaining their influence with those responsible for software purchasing.

- From 451 CAOS report mentioned here.

This clearly shows a trend to engage the emerging landscape of OSS vendors and integrators that is fast emerging. Business adoption of this trend within the context of open source will create competitive advantages for businesses that can move fast in achieving their objectives by the right combination of a partner and business focus with open source.

We realized this gap (of a credible open source integrator) in the market very early on and channelized our engineering strength and investments in creating OSSExpert Tool Kit to provide predictable outcomes to our customers.

Avoiding Commercial Open Source

Most open source software available today has a free version and a commercial version. Like any other business this is done to make money and at the same time pass on the advantages of the open source model to customers. The commercial open source companies use the open source model to maintain, manage and distribute their software. It also acts as a great marketing tool for the commercial enterprises. However businesses adopting open source start projects using the free versions without thinking critically about following:

1. What limitations does the free software with a commercial open source option provide down the line assuming the software has been adopted and put into production?
2. What support does the free version has compared to the commercial open source version?
3. Whether investigation has been done to understand the advantages of adopting just the free version?
4. What return on investments will the free version lead to for business and whether the costs for maintenance of the free version internally or through a supplier have been determined in detail?

Free versions are “Great Starters, but Poor Finishers”

In summary using the free version will start your project and take you fast on the path of self discovery but rarely will it turn into a comprehensive business solution. For this to happen, using commercial and more stable versions of the open source software will help greatly. This clearly means that while businesses may have time and skill to maintain and support the free versions of software they will find harder to maintain them because of the changing trend of how open source code is now committed in free versions.

The free version though backed by the open source community in most cases has the largest number of developer of the code from the company behind the open source software itself. Some of the leading open source CMS and ERP for example has 99% of its code generated from within the core developers of the company. These are paid employees of the company writing code to the free version and the commercial version at the same time. In most cases, the commercial open source version is not only feature rich but much better tested and enterprise/business ready than the free version.

Business adopters of open source technology with decent IT programmers within their teams may want to resolve bugs and usability improvements on the free version itself but a close analysis says that the effort and time spend on this can easily be replaced with purchasing a commercial open source version and focusing internal IT skills on developing the platform around the open source core technology.

Summary

Open Source holds great promise and is an amazing disruptive model that is turning the software paradigms upside down. It is seeding the cloud computing revolution and clearly helping a lot of businesses save a lot of money. However it needs a fair deal when it comes to a mature business adoption. Like any other IT initiative it requires proper considerations, processes and investment for the projects to succeed. The arrangement that it seeks is where everyone wins. The business wins because of cheaper but not free or the cheapest option is selected and a balance of quality and cost is maintained to achieve competitive advantages. The integrator wins because there is revenue achieved in creating a business solution in partnership with its customer. The open source software gains because it releases more budgets to invest in further improving the quality of software.

Here are a few Open Source Technologies to watch out for in the year 2012.

1. Hadoop

Big Data has really gone BIG this year. Hadoop and NoSQL are just about household names in the tech world.
Everyone is jumping on the big data bandwagon. Not just Web 2.0 type of companies like Facebook and Twitter, but 2012 will be the year that big data comes to the enterprise. All of this big data will drive more NoSQL in the cloud, in the enterprise and everywhere in between.

2. Andriod

Android is ranked as being the top mobile platform over the next 24 months. This open source platform based on Java and XML offers a much shorter learning curve, and this contributes to its popularity with IT professionals. iOS remains strong in the U.S. and other developed countries.

3. Alfresco, Drupal, Liferay

Open Source CMS continues to dominate the market.

2012 will see major market share being grabbed by the Open Source CMS systems such as Drupal, Alfresco, Liferay, Joomla!, DotNetNuke etc.

4. WordPress

WordPress’ meteoric rise is far from over. WordPress 3.3 just managed to release near the end of the year, and WordPress 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6 are likely to release in 2012. WordPress has tried to make it easier for developers to use the CMS with each release, and we can expect great things from it this coming year.

5. Google Chrome

Google Chrome has now surpassed Mozilla Firefox in usage and it is likely that it will keep growing. For good or bad Google is continuing to push the envelope of web applications. Native Client, which allows one to write code for web apps in native languages such as C++ is maturing and can greatly improve web app performance. Google’s Dart might also make it into the browser in some from in 2012.

6. HTML5, CSS3

A number of standards are emerging that make 2012 an interesting year for web standards. The Mouse Lock and GamePad APIs aim to improve the state of web games. As usual we will see a number of new standards make it into browsers, especially with the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 10, Firefox 10 to 18, Chrome 17 to 24.

CSS3 has added a number of new specifications; CSS3 Exclusions allow styling arbitrary shapes around which text can flow; CSS3 Regions allow text to flow between multiple isolated sections of a page; CSS3 Flexible Box make it easier to develop user interfaces; and CSS3 Paged media allows pagination for better access than scrolling on devices; and more.

7. jQuery, Node.js

If you’re a web developer it’s a given you’ve heard of jQuery. JQuery Mobile is a jQuery-based framework for developing websites that work well on mobile. The framework makes it easy to create good looking, touch-friendly websites for mobiles without even needing to touch JavaScript or CSS. It can automatically enhance your HTML site if you give it a few hints. jQuery Mobile had its first major 1.0 release just recently and 2012 should see more releases now that the basic stuff is done. Combined with Apache Callback above, it is a great tool for making simple web applications.

JavaScript being the only supported client-side web programming language has gained considerable popularity, such that not it is possible to write not only client side web applications, but using Node.js it can also be used for the server-side logic. Node.js allows the server-side of web applications / sites to be written in JavaScript, and runs on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine with added libraries to extend its functionality. With Microsoft’s support behind it, Node.js is now also available on Windows and even on Windows Azure, and more exciting developments are likely to lie in 2012.

8. OpenStack

While Amazon Web Services get increasingly popular, they are still a closed solution and not suitable if you want to run your own personal cloud. That is where OpenStack, an open alternative to Amazon, steps in. OpenStack lets you create your own cloud infrastructure and manage it like you would Amazon’s. You can also offer you cloud infrastructure to others, like Rackspace does. Currently it offers compute, storage and imaging solutions.

9. Ubuntu, Linux Mint

Ubuntu 12.04 will be an important release for a number of reasons. First, it’s the first long term release since their new desktop environment Unity, so significant work will go into it to stabilize and refine it. Secondly, it will be the first long term desktop release from Canonical to get a 5-year support period, up from 3 years. Canonical is also working on mobile / tablet versions of the OS, which should also see some activity in 2012.
Linux Mint 12 has already shown that it’s possible to have a good compromise between the old Gnome 2 and the new Gnome 3 user experience. Now they have gone their own way with their own replacement for Gnome Shell. As Gnome 3 matures and becomes more capable, it will be interesting to see the direction Mint takes. It has already attracted a large number of Ubuntu users who were unhappy with the new Ubuntu UI.

10. Apache Flex

Flex is Adobe’s solution to developing applications for the web, desktop and mobile using a declarative UI development language (MXML) and scripting language ActionScript 3. The content then runs in Flash or AIR. Adobe recently decided to shift development model from being driven by Adobe to one developed by the community under Apache.

2012 should be an interesting year for Flex, not only because it will be its first year outside Adobe, but also because Adobe plans to overhaul the compiler, and it is researching on making it possible to convert ActionScript code to JavaScript for making HTML projects.

Jenkins is used to build, configure, test, validate, deploy and promote most of our solutions and frameworks in InfoAxon development environment.

Many plugins has been used (thanks to Jenkins community to provide such huge library of plugins). Some important plugins used are -

1. Build Promotion plugin (http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Promoted+Builds+Plugin) – for deploying and promoting builds to QA, UAT, LIVE server automatically.
2. JIRA plugin (http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/JIRA+Plugin) – for automatically updating JIRA tickets whenever a build has been made.
3. NAnt plugin (http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/NAnt+Plugin) – in order to compile and use Microsoft .NET applications as well.
4. Visual Sourcesafe plugin (http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Visual+SourceSafe+Plugin) – to retrieve code base from VSS database.
5. SSH Publisher plugin (http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Publish+Over+SSH+Plugin) – to publish and deploy build artifacts on another server over SSH. Heavily used for Promotion purpose.
6. Violations Plugin (https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Violations) – to report and display all code level rule violations.

The Project Dashboard shows (snapshot below) all information related to the particular job.

The Build Dashboard shows (snapshot below) information relevant for that particular build. You can see all the JIRA tickets are automatically linked here.

Build Promotion screen helps you to promote/deploy any build to any server such as Development server, QA server, UAT server or LIVE server.

Automatic checking of Best Practices Adherence, Coding mistakes, Potential Bugs etc are done by PMD, Checkstyle, Findbugs etc. All these tools are integrated in the project Ant build script (code segment below) – thus each time build is executed, these checkings are performed automatically, and alerts us in case of any issues.

<target name="sonar">
<property name="sonar.sources" value="............." />
<property name="sonar.projectName" value=".........." />
<sonar:sonar key=".........." version="............" xmlns:sonar="antlib:org.sonar.ant" />
</target>

<target name="checkstyle">
<cs:checkstyle config="checkstyle.xml" failureProperty="checkstyle.failure" failOnViolation="false" xmlns:cs="antlib:com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle">
<formatter type="xml" tofile="checkstyle_report.xml"/>
<fileset dir="..........." includes="**/*.java"/>
</cs:checkstyle>
</target>

<target name="findbugs">
<findbugs home="${findbugs.home}" output="xml" outputFile="report.xml" jvmargs="${jvmargs}">
<sourcePath path="..........." />
<class location="............." />
</findbugs>
</target>

The Violation screen displays the list of code rules violations in the current build.

We use Sonar to analyze the quality of the full source code.

Thus the full Continuous Integration eco-system in InfoAxon development environment provides us full flexibility and automatic execution on the compiling, debugging, testing, code validations, deployment, promotion tasks.

InfoAxon has been adopted a few more activities in the Development and Maintenance of an Open Source Framework or an Open Source integrated stack which are probably different from a standard bespoke project.

Continuous Integration has been one of the major component in the development practice within InfoAxon. And as part of the Continuous Integration process we expect to perform a lot more tasks, such as -

• Automatic or Scheduled build trigger
• Getting the right or latest source code from code repository
• Validate the code against configured rule set
• Compile and build the code
• Build the target database
• Run automated Unit Test scripts
• Generate Documentations
• Deploy the binaries and other files
• Update Jira Tickets
• Promote the build to QA server, UAT server, Staging server etc – as and when required
• Tag the build in source control repository
• Archive and Store Build Artifacts
• Notification of build activity
• etc

Technologies Involved

For achieving the above activities in a collaborative and automated way, we have chosen to use a number of open source tools, technologies and frameworks.

• Jenkins – as the Continuous Integration Server
• Sonar, PMD, FxCop – for Code validation, quality and profiling
• Ant / NAnt – for build scripts
• JUnit, NUnit, Selenium, TestLink – for Unit, Regression Testing, Test Cases
• Jira – as the Ticket Management system
• JavaDoc, NDoc – for the Code Documentations

As maintenance of Open Source products and frameworks grew more complex, our CI environment has also became one big eco-system with Cruise Control being replaced with Jenkins.

Final installment of this series will demonstrate how we are using these technologies together in our CI ecosystem.

As per Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration), the recommended practices in a CI environment are -

1. Maintain a centralized Code Repository
2. Automate the Build – no manual interventions
3. Make the build self-testing
4. Everyone commits to the baseline everyday
5. Every commit to the baseline should be built
6. Keep the build fast and quick
7. Test in a clone of the Production environment
8. Make it easy to get the latest deliverables
9. Everyone can see the results of the latest build

The pros and cons of having a CI server is well known and published. As Wikipedia says “Many teams using CI report that the advantages of CI well outweigh the disadvantages“.

There are several popular CI softwares have mushroomed looking at the demand, adaptation and usage of CI processes in software organizations. Wide spreading of Open Source softwares has made this demand even more increasing.

Some of the popular CI server softwares are (not in any particular order, choosen randomly):

1. Apache Continuum
2. Bamboo
3. Cruise Control, Cruise Control.NET
4. Hudson / Jenkins
5. Team Foundation Server
6. etc

Each of these systems has their own advantages and disadvantages (hell, is it new? It is same as any other software system). An Organization must choose the one that suits the scenario most.

Currently we are using Cruise Control server for Continuous Integration purposes. However, we are in process of replacing this with a more powerful, robust and flexible CI system.

Part-2 of this series will spell out our ever increasing demand for a CI system, analysis of our expectations, goals, implementation models etc.

Google definitely is going into the market big time, and with huge investments and long term planning.

First, they might have missed the first bus of Social Media to Facebook (and Twitter etc), but Google+ (https://plus.google.com/) is a serious threat to Facebook. By July 24, it had already touched 25M worldwide active users – the rate is much higher than Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Mr Mark Zuckerberg is feeling the heat.

Second, they made Andriod almost the one-stop shop for Smartphone OS, second to only iOS, which is not Open Source. Windows, RIM and Symbian seems to be lagging far behind.
Now, they can build an integrated and super powerful device with Andriod and Motorola Hardware. Another driver of purchasing Motorola is to increase its patent portfolio and resolving the Patent woes on Andriod ecosystem. Motorola holds 17,000 issued patents worldwide and has another 7,500 patents in progress. Google and Andriod will use these to compete with Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung and others.

This move can also give Google TV a fighting chance since Motorola is one of the biggest players in the set-top box space.

It will be quite interesting to see which Andriod version is shipped as Open Source and available for players like Samsung, HTC, Dell, Sony Ericsson and other Andriod vendors. We should not be surprised if the market sees launch of a new smartphone from Google with a special version on Andriod bundled and packaged with Motorola hardware – which looks more like the latest iPhone!!!

Another affect on the market is, the shares of Nokia and RIM has jumped up all of a sudden, everyone expecting same acquisition move by companies like Microsoft.

Chapter 1, Getting Started
Chapter introducing alfresco with brief demonstration of the alfresco Explorer application. Get alfresco downloaded and installed in your machine, and finally be acquainted with the default distribution and architecture of alfresco.

Chapter 2, Creating and Organizing Contents
Understand how to use alfresco as the Content Management System, how to upload or create contents, how to apply tagging or categorization of content, understand content metadata, use the document versioning capability of alfresco.

Chapter 3, Securing and Searching Contents
Be familiar with another important aspect of the Content Management System – Security. Understand how to secure your contents and folders. How to create users and user groups – and assign permissions for who can do what. You will also know about the search capabilities offered by alfresco, how to search contents and how search works in alfresco.

Chapter 4, Rules – the Smart Spaces
Learn how to make your alfresco repository dynamic, how to implement your business requirements that works automatically in the repository. You will understand how to create and apply rules in the repository; you will also be familiar with different actions that can be performed via a rule.

Chapter 5, Administering Alfresco
Chapter with recipes for administering alfresco, demonstrating how to manage users, user groups, create taxonomies, manage content categories. You will also be aware of how to use the alfresco Node Browser to view and search contents stored in the repository. You will also know how to manage your alfresco explore r dashboard.

Chapter 6, Customizing Alfresco Web Client
Alfresco offers customization of the Web Client application via a number of XML configuration files. This chapter elaborates various recipes for changing the view and appearance of the web client, customizing the application as per your requirements etc.

Chapter 7, Alfresco Content Model
Designing and modelling the content properties and architecture is one of the important requirements in a Content Management System. Alfresco offers pretty much dynamic capabilities for designing the content models. Using these recipes you will be able to understand the core architecture of alfresco content models, create your own custom content models, use your custom models in the alfresco explorer application.

Chapter 8, Alfresco JavaScript API
Alfresco offers the repository functionalities in form of JavaScript APIs. In this chapter you will understand the API structure and available features offered. Several example recipes would help you implement various functionalities. You will also learn how to write and execute scripts, how to debug scripts written using the APIs.

Chapter 9, Freemarker Templates
Freemarker Template is the presentation layer technology used in alfresco applications. The recipes of this chapter would help you understand the technologies and model behind the Freemarker templates in alfresco. Several template examples are included for commonly used functions such as displaying folder contents, showing workflow tasks, showing contents recursively, displaying content properties and details etc.

Chapter 10, Web Scripts
Alfresco Web Scripts provide RESTful APIs of the repository services and functions. The chapter elaborates all related concepts, knowledge and how-to recipes that would help you writing, deploying, debugging, using web scripts. You will also know the usage of default web scripts library that come with alfresco. Several sample web scripts are included, for example sending emails using templates, searching and displaying documents etc.

Chapter 11, Working with Workflows
Workflow implementation is one of the major requirements in a Content Management System in a business. This chapter would help you understand alfresco business process engine in detail. You will understand how the workflows are implemented in alfresco repository along with various components of the workflow engine. Several detailed examples and recipes are included to guide you create custom workflows, custom task models, specific resource bundles, customizing the web client to render the custom tasks and workflows properly. You will also be able to use the alfresco workflow console interface which is useful for debugging the task execution within the BPM engine.

Chapter 12, Integrating with MS Outlook and MS Office
Alfresco can be used from several other applications and interfaces. Being a content management system it is quite important to have the alfresco repository accessibility from some popular content authoring applications such as Microsoft Office. This chapter helps you integrate the alfresco repository with MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Recipes are also included for communicating with repository directly from any standard email client application such as MS Outlook.

Chapter 13, Configuring Alfresco E-mail and File Servers
The alfresco repository can act has file servers as well and you can expose the repository using several other standard protocols such as FTP, CIFS, WebDAV etc. These recipes are step-by-step guide to configure these protocols and using the content repository from different systems. From this chapter you will also be able to use alfresco as email server, and emails sent to some specific address will be landed directly into the repository.

Chapter 14, Building Alfresco
Until now you have used Alfresco as the binary bundle provided and downloaded. Now you can compile and build alfresco source code also. Recipes in this chapter will guide you to get the source from alfresco source code repository, compile and build the source code. You can modify Alfresco source code as your will; of course as per Alfresco license, you should contribute your changes back to alfresco community.

The book is a collection of knowledge articles and recipes stating and demonstrating the most important, useful and imperative concepts and functionalities of Alfresco.

The book is designed purely for Alfresco Developers and System Integrators – from beginner to advanced level.
 
 
 
 
 
 

• If you are a software developer, interested in content management systems, want to work in alfresco or already experienced in alfresco, you need very objective set of instructions on how to perform certain tasks in Alfresco.
  Alfresco 3 Cookbook is a developer’s friend to start working on alfresco quickly, getting complete understanding, writing custom implementations and achieving the expertise very easily.
• As alfresco administrator and architect, you will know how to compile, deploy, install, configure and customize alfresco.
• If you are a system integrator, you will be able to establish alfresco as a corporate enterprise content management solution.

The book is written for software developers who needs to know more on Alfresco, write applications and extensions on alfresco, very quickly, in order to implement their own ECM system.

The book is structured as a collection of recipes for real-world problems and requirements. Each recipe includes the problem/requirement definition, step-by-step instructions to fulfill the requirement (How to do it) and a complete analysis (How it works) of the solution. Corresponding screenshots and complete code segments are also included.

Step-by-step instructions are given on how to compile, build, deploy, install and configure alfresco.

As a developer or architect you can follow the guidelines, implement the scenario by yourself, understand how it is working and finally gain expertise on mostly all aspects of alfresco development and customization.