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Alfresco Enterprise Content Management, a Foreword by Alfresco CEO John Powell |
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BOOK  Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation See More |
Alfresco Enterprise Content Management, a Foreword by Alfresco CEO John Powell
Late in 2004, it struck John Newton (Alfresco’s CTO) and I that all the fastest growing software companies were Open Source. It was particularly clear to us that the operating system, database and application server market were being consolidated by open source. There are literally hundreds of open source content management systems on the market, but none address the requirement of enterprises small, medium and large to manage, share, control and reuse content across the company. So we asked ourselves: "Why would anyone care about another open source CMS?" The answer to this question was deceptively simple. John Newton was the co-founder of Documentum which makes him probably the single most influential person in the history of ECMS, inventing many of the concepts we take for granted today. He said to me in November 2004: "What if we had a real Open Source ECMS that was 10 times faster and free?" ECMS was a well defined software category (around $4billion) with no credible open source enterprise scale projects and dominated by expensive, complex, hard to deploy products. Despite exponential growth in the volume of content the ECMS market was growing at only 15% per year and over 50% of that revenue was in maintenance. There were few new customers for the closed source ECMS vendors. Within John Newton’s simple question we also had the specification:
It was now clear that the market was looking for an open source alternative to monolithic, legacy stack vendors. In order to succeed we needed to have a product that was not just free but was also demonstrably better. John Newton and I, along with an exceptionally experienced team of ECM engineers, started Alfresco in January 2005. After six months of hard work we had created a completely new content management system based on modern, advanced open source architecture. The big question was: would anyone care? With a great deal of trepidation we loaded the code to SourceForge and waited. We thought we could get a couple of hundred downloads rapidly but on a long term basis we simply hoped for maybe 10,000 in the first year. In fact we had 10,000 in the first week. At that point we knew our original hunch was right: there were thousands of people out there searching for easier content management solutions. In June 2005 we announced the preview release and received $2 million in new development funding. In January 2006 we went GA with version 1.1. We had our first production release, our first six subscribing customers and $8 million to secure the permanent future of Alfresco. On the publication of this book we now have 500,000 downloads, 5,000 community sites running on Alfresco and hundreds of subscribers to the Enterprise Network. With customers such as E*TRADE, US Department of Homeland Security, UK Ministry of Defense, McGraw Hill, Boise Cascade and two top ten global investment banks; spread across the US, France, Australia, Venezuela and the UK, Alfresco is now justifiably a major force in the ECMS market. After reaching 30,000 downloads a month, publisher David Barnes spotted Alfresco and was surprised to pick up the phone to another Englishman (and one who knows Birmingham well, having been to University there). We quickly agreed that a book on Alfresco would be a great way to provide our community with the team’s expertise at a very low cost of delivery. I was impressed that Packt as a publisher had a track record in Open Source publishing. Importantly we agreed the book should be written by someone independent of the company who had the book writing experience our team lacked! It took another 4 months to find the right person but I’m pleased to see that Munwar has more than stepped up to the challenge. The task has been complex given that Munwar has had to juggle his full time role as CTO at CIGNEX, a dynamic US based systems integrator, with racing against the speed of evolution within the Alfresco Community. I hope that you will agree this is a great result.So what is better about Alfresco? Alfresco solves the 2 key problems in implementing ECMS:
We solved the first problem by enabling Alfresco to run inside the file system. We figured that if the user could use the Windows Explorer/File Manager, he could become a content contributor. This was done by providing the ability to mount Alfresco as a shared drive. The result is that the system can implement any content behavior (versioning, transformation, workflow) by the user just dropping the file into the shared drive folder, from any PC (or Mac) on the planet with no training and no client software installed. Magic? Well actually the CIFS protocol as a Java Server. We solved the second problem with the help of Rod Johnson, and the Spring Project. Rod’s team has created Spring, the most popular open source framework, implementing Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). AOP comes from Xerox Park; the birthplace of object oriented programming, and solves a key problem for any widely deployed ‘horizontal’ application. It allows systems to get flexibility and extensibility without imposing on all users the burden of all functionality (whether it is used or not). This enables the Alfresco Community and customers to innovate and add capabilities with ease while retaining a fast and easy upgrade path. So in two years Alfresco has evolved to cover the four major pieces of Enterprise Content Management - Record Management, Document Management, Image Management and now Web Content Management. At the time of writing Alfresco is the fastest JSR-170 repository on the market today. I hope this book will enable you to participate in the open source community and the Alfresco journey. There is still much more to do. John Powell
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