Alfresco

Alfresco provides further proof that open source is mainstream

Alfresco has been on a roll lately. Word on the street is that Alfresco just nailed another quarter (That's eight straight quarters of growth and hitting its plan). This week Alfresco came out with some other cool news that I was forced pry out of of Matt Asay, as we both try to not shill for our own companies.

First, Alfresco and Adobe announced an extension of their previously announced partnership around Adobe Livecycle, with Alfresco now at the heart of Adobe's Acrobat.com document service. Acrobat.com combines the ability to create PDFs, share documents, host files, integrate web conferencing, and work with Adobe's web-based word processing system, Buzzword. It's a pretty cool service, and great that Alfresco is the core repository for it all.

Second, Alfresco got tipped by The 451 Group as the primary (I would say the only) competitor to Microsoft's ubiquitous SharePoint product:

Alfresco is ahead of the ECM pack with its SharePoint integration, says Kathleen Reidy, senior analyst at research firm The 451 Group. The most compelling short-term news is that they have that Office-level integration, Reidy says. That makes it a lot more viable for IT management to say, 'We're going to pull out the SharePoint Server or complement the SharePoint Server with Alfresco.'… Read more

For those end-of-quarter, highly stressful days...

This week has been highly stressful. Actually, every end of quarter has been stressful. My company has yet to miss a quarter in eight straight quarters, but that doesn't mean it's always a pleasant experience, whatever I might say to the contrary.

I had just finished a call with a particularly difficult customer, and needed to get my negative energy out. So Bryce Roberts and I headed up to bike Dry Creek, finishing up on The Bobsled (Watch out - it will make you dizzy), one of the best rides anywhere.

I feel better. Actually, halfway through the … Read more

You know you need new software when...

...you start leaving out-of-office replies like this one that I saw today:

Wow. This guy has serious job security. It sounds like SharePoint problems are a matter of "when," not "if." Whatever the system, if you're creating out-of-office notes like this one, it's time to start searching for alternatives.

Anyone else seen similar out-of-office replies? Your answers can include problem open-source products, too. I want to see one that says something like, "[Insert product name] is about to self-destruct. While I'm away, first take a Valium. Then call my mobile."

Disclosure: … Read more

Alfresco opens up SharePoint to Java, Linux, Oracle, and more

As an employee of Alfresco, I'm somewhat biased in reporting that Alfresco yesterday announced full SharePoint integration with the Alfresco 3.0 Labs release. Even so, I think it's highly significant precisely because of what it says about the importance of Microsoft's continued battles with the European Union over proprietary protocols.

Most that reported on the release missed this. OStatic, however, got it dead on:

As part of complying with the EU's demands, the company has released the specifications for the Microsoft Office interfaces, and now we're seeing some of the benefits spill over into open source. Alfresco, which makes open source enterprise content management (ECM) software, has added SharePoint interoperability....This looks like a good move from Alfresco and lets hope the EU's two-fisted stance toward Microsoft results in more of this kind of sharing.

Bingo, and bravo to Microsoft, whatever its intentions and pressures that resulted in opening up the SharePoint protocol. The net result is a huge win for customers. Why?

Well, for the first time enterprises can get the benefits of SharePoint-esque functionality and interoperability without having to adopt Microsoft technologies wholesale. This is the other big news in Alfresco's release, also mostly missed by the media. CMS Watch, however, nailed this aspect of the release, and points to the critical importance of getting out of the SharePoint thicket that Forrester criticizes before SharePoint and Office merge at the next release:… Read more

Proprietary software is a...services business

Interwoven, a leading web content management vendor, just announced really good financial results. Vignette, another competitor, did not.

In both cases, however, I was fascinated to see how little of their revenue stemmed from license sales. License sales are supposed to be the lifeblood of the proprietary software model: Write the software once, monetize forever. Yet in Interwoven's case, license revenue accounted for only 37 percent of the company's revenue. For Vignette, it was even worse: 21.6 percent.

Compare this to a recent IDC survey of open-source vendors, which found that 63 percent of open-source vendor revenue stems from software, not services. In Alfresco's case, an open-source competitor to Vignette and Interwoven (and my employer), the percentage of software revenue is much higher. Much higher.

This would imply that open-source vendors spend much more time writing great software, thereby creating room for a healthy ecosystem of value-added resellers and system integrators to grow up around them. Proprietary vendors may increasingly be competing with their partners in an attempt to goose revenue upward as license revenue deflates (as Oracle's recent earnings suggest may be in full swing).… Read more

Facebook applications finally grow up

I've long been a critic of Facebook: too noisy, too superficial, too cluttered. This week, however, Facebook revealed plans to promote a range of new applications that are (gasp!) useful and not designed to simply occupy one's time for a few seconds. According to a New York Times article:

Frustrated (by "trivial applications that have clogged the site"), Facebook has tried to counter that and put more emphasis on significant and trustworthy applications...Facebook announced a series of new incentives for developers to write what it characterized as "meaningful" tools for the service. It … Read more

Skype: The ultimate collaboration tool?

At Alfresco, we've stumbled upon an ingenious way to keep the company together. We're highly distributed, with no US offices. With everyone working remotely, people can feel a bit isolated at times.

I read in Businessweek months ago about how IBM requires remote workers to congregate (online, over-the-phone, or in-person) every three days to improve happiness and productivity. In trying to figure out how to apply this practice to Alfresco, I thought of Skype.

Being a company with employees spread across the United States and Europe, Alfresco has long used Skype to cut phone costs and as our … Read more

Forrester calls out Alfresco and Drupal as the top-two open-source WCM systems

Forrester Research just released a great report detailing the open-source web content management market. In it, Forrester analyst Stephen Powers highlights a shift to open source for managing websites:

As organizations embark on next-generation Web content management (WCM) initiatives, they want to avoid the mistakes made in earlier, more costly WCM projects. As a result, information and knowledge management professionals increasingly show an interest in open source WCM as a way of controlling software costs and increasing their access to product-specific expertise in the marketplace.

That's great: Enterprises should move to open-source web content management offerings. But which ones?

Out of the wide pool of open-source web content management projects (There are, quite literally, hundreds), Forrester says there are two to which CIOs and CTOs need to pay particular attention:

Alfresco and Drupal (Acquia).

In answer to the question, "Why these two?" Forrester answers: Relevance. As Powers writes:… Read more

Adobe embeds open-source Alfresco in its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite

Adobe and Alfresco announced a significant partnership today to embed Alfresco's content management software into Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. The inclusion of Alfresco enriches the Adobe LiveCycle experience, as Adobe's Brian Wick notes:

For example, if a user is filling out a loan package, the application would go into the repository to package together other content related to the process.

"It's much easier, much quicker for our customers to build LiveCycle apps with the content services piece built in," Wick said.

I'm biased, but I see this as one more step to facilitating content as the center of the web/software experience. As Adobe customers like the State of Louisiana are suggesting, it makes it easy to link content to a process or application. It has wide applicability to governments, healthcare organizations, and other enterprises that need to wrap business processes around content.

It's also a great addition to Adobe's previously reported work with Alfresco, the Adobe Share product that integrates Alfresco.

Adobe notes that Alfresco was a clear choice:… Read more