Out of the Blue - Michael Trafton's Blog

Lisa Hill has just published a great article on how to customize the Rich Text Editor in Documentum Web Publisher. The Rich Text Editor is the WYSIWYG editor that is used by web page authors and editors to create content for web sites being managed by Documentum. The editor functions like Microsoft Word and lets you style your text (bold, underline, etc.), add tables, create bulleted lists and things like that.

From time to time, we get requests from our clients to customize this editor. Some want us to add extra toolbar buttons that provide some custom capability. Others want us to make the style of the editor match the style of their web site to give an even better preview of what the content will look like.

Lisa’s article shows how to do all of these things and provides some great tips on how to debug and troubleshoot your customizations. If you are thinking of modifying the Web Publisher Rich Text Editor, this article is a must read.

Read Customizing the Web Publisher Rich Text Editor.

Josh McJilton, one of the Project Managers here at Blue Fish, has just written an article on how to make Dashlets in Alfresco Share configurable. Dashlets are like portlets or widgets that users can include on various pages in Alfresco Share (Alfresco’s collaboration system). Typical dashlets might be document-oriented (like showing a real-time list of changes to your team’s documents) or they might pull data from some external system (like showing the weather in your favorite city).

To be useful, most dashlets neet to be configurable by the end user. For example, you might want to select which team’s documents to monitor or which city’s weather to display. Dashlets themselves are pretty easy to create (it only takes a little JavaScript and some XML files), but if you want your dashlet to be configurable, it can get a little tricky.

Josh explains it all in Making Alfresco Share Dashlets Configurable.

Blue Fish and Alfresco are hosting a Lunch and Learn to show folks some of the cool new features coming out in Alfresco 3.3 later this month. If you live in Texas, we’d love to see you.

The event will preview Alfresco 3.3, the latest release from the leading open source ECM provider. We’re hosting this two-hour session in five Texas cities, so hopefully you can find one to attend. All sessions run from 11:00 – 1:00 and lunch will be provided.

• Dallas – Tuesday, April 20
• Ft. Worth – Wednesday, April 21
• Austin – Thursday, April 22
• San Antonio – Friday, April 23
• Houston – Tuesday, April 27

Register for all Lunch and Learns on the Alfresco web site.

This session going to be great for CIOs, IT Managers, or anyone else considering Alfresco for an ECM initiative. During the event, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Sneak Preview of Alfresco 3.3 – Includes CMIS 1.0, enhancements to Alfresco Share, and IBM Lotus integration
• Major WCM Enhancements – Demonstration of some exciting new features for editing web content and deploying web sites

Space is limited, so please register early to secure your place.

I hope to see you there.

At Blue Fish, most of our business is related to either Documentum or Alfresco. Our clients that use Documentum are all companies you recognize – Wells Fargo, Southwest Airlines, Bausch + Lomb. Many of our clients that use Alfresco are great companies that you may not have heard of before - American Bureau of Shipping, Nanston Dental Group, Drilling Info.

Why is that?

The answer is that Alfresco is bringing the benefits of Enterprise Content Management to companies that don’t have millions of dollars to spend on ECM solutions. It’s also bringing ECM to smaller business problems that can’t justify big money to solve them.

Alfresco is a disruptive force in the ECM industry, similar to the way that SalesForce.com disrupted traditional CRM vendors like Seibel. Let’s look at how the two compare.

At Blue Fish, we use SalesForce, and we would never in a million years use Seibel. For a sales team of only 2 people, it’s just not worth it. But SalesForce gives us a world-class CRM solution for a price that we can afford. SalesForce isn’t just for small shops, either. Dell uses SalesForce, and they have one of the largest sales teams in the world. That’s true disruption, and it all but put Seibel out of business.

SalesForce did this by using a SaaS business model to dramatically lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of CRM solutions.

• SalesForce is cheaper for me to acquire (its per user pricing is less than the competition)
• SalesForce is cheaper for me to operate (I have no servers to maintain and no dependencies on databases, etc.)
• SalesForce is cheaper for me to support and maintain (no backups, no servers crashing, and I don’t have to do any upgrades myself)

Now, SalesForce’s customers don’t care about the cloud, SaaS, or any of that business model stuff – they just want it to be cheap. It is, and that changed the world of CRM.

Alfresco is doing something similar in the world of ECM. They are going about it differently, but they are shooting for the same result. Alfresco uses an open source model that lets their customers try before they buy and do so without ever talking to a sales rep. Eventually, companies who rely on Alfresco for their critical business data will want to buy an Enterprise subscription with a support agreement, and that’s how Alfresco makes their money.

But that’s not really disruptive (it’s a clever marketing strategy, but it’s not truly disruptive). What’s disruptive is the price of their Enterprise license – it’s dirt cheap. You can get a fully supported version of Alfresco that can support hundreds of users for less than $20,000 a year. Compare that to the traditional players like EMC and IBM who would charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a similar solution, and you start to see what I’m talking about.

Alfresco is also cheaper and easier to operate and maintain than traditional ECM solutions. Because of its open source heritage, it can operate on an open source stack, with open source operating systems, databases, and application servers. That reduces the cost of the infrastructure required to run it.

And Alfresco is easier to implement and extend. Because it has come to market recently, it uses modern application development and deployment technologies. Alfresco runs in a Java application server, so you don’t have to learn new deployment or monitoring procedures. Developers extend it using web services and lightweight web scripts, which are easier to learn. And most importantly, you have access to the source code (even for the Enterprise Edition), so it’s a thousand times easier to find a defect and fix it or to follow Alfresco’s patterns when developing your own extensions.

There are places where the big traditional ECM players still make sense. If you want to run your ECM solution on a mainframe, IBM is the only game in town. If you are a pharmaceutical company with regulated content, Documentum is the strongest bet. If you’ve standardized on Microsoft throughout the company, SharePoint might be for you.

But if you are looking for the best value – a full-featured ECM solution that won’t break the bank, Alfresco is the best bet.

As a result, companies that never considered ECM solutions are looking at them for the first time.

Alfresco has just released a new version with some improvements on the WCM side of the house. The version is 3.2r, a dot-release (sort of) that adds additional features to the 3.2 release.

• Repository Access from Alfresco Share – The most frequently requested product enhancement is now available. The Document Library in Alfresco Share now allows users to quickly move from working within a project site to full access to the general document management repository.
• Web Content Deployment Options – This release sees Alfresco include the ability to deploy web content to an Alfresco DM repository. This can be used to serve personalized content and can be clustered to achieve maximum performance and scalability for Alfresco-powered websites.
• Enhanced Document Browsing Options – This allows users to browse the document repository using folders, Cloud Tags, Category lists or by Favorites. These new options make it even easier to find the correct content.
• Faster, More Stable Document Conversions – The new OpenOffice transformation subsystem sports the ability to create pools of fully managed OpenOffice services to dramatically improve document conversion speed, reliability and overall system stability.
• New Portal and Portlet Development Options – With this release, Alfresco includes support for portals and portlets, meaning developers can now create new Alfresco-powered portlets and deploy them into a portal with support for single sign-on (SSO) built-in.
• Records Management-ready – Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2r is ready to accept the fully certified, DoD 5015.02-certified Records Management module.

I’m most excited about the improvements to Share. We’ve been using Share a lot lately, and it’s becoming my preferred UI for WCM projects as well as DM projects. It’s evolving quickly, and I love it when they release a new version.

You can download a trial version here: http://www2.alfresco.com/e/1234/ry/GIEWE/177864364.

Yesterday, I presented a webinar with Josh Toub describing how we have customized Alfresco Share to streamline the content creation process for web sites. Josh leads our Alfresco team here at Blue Fish, and he’s created a really great solution that fills in some gaps in Alfresco’s WCM offering. Some of the features included in the demo are:

• In-Context Editing - Create and edit content right from your web site (no need to log into a WCM system)
• Sexy New Web Page Forms/Templates - We’re using the fancy new forms service in Share, which makes our templates really pretty and easy to use
• An Easy Way to Preview Changes Before They Go Live - You can put your web site into “preview mode” to see what the site will look like when the new pages are approved
• An Easy Way to Approve Changes - Reviewing and approving changes is a breeze

You can see a recorded version of the webinar here: Making Web Content Easy with Alfresco Share 3.2.

Big news out of EMC this week. They have purchased a large stake in FatWire, a competing Web Content Management company. Even bigger news is that Documentum Web Publisher, EMC’s web content management solution, is being replaced by FatWire’s “Web Experience Management” (WEM) solution.

The deal looks like this: FatWire will resell EMC’s digital asset management software, and EMC will resell FatWire’s WCM software.

What’s So Great About FatWire?

FatWire is the largest independent WCM (or as they like to be called, WEM) software vendor. They have over 500 enterprise accounts and 200 employees. Most analysts consider FatWire to be one of the best solutions for WCM/WEM. So they have a lot of credibility behind them.

The FatWire solution is much more holistic than Web Publisher. While Web Publisher is focused only on the creation, approval, and management of web content, FatWire also focuses on delivery and presentation of that content to end users (web site visitors). With FatWire, you get a much more sophisticated solution “out of the box”, while getting the same types of features with a Web Publisher-driven solution would require thousands of hours of development effort from your web team.

Here are some of the features FatWire has that will be new to Web Publisher owners:

• Drag and Drop Authoring - FatWire’s user interface allows web page authors to drag rich page components from a “library” into a web page. For example, you can drag a “slideshow” component into a web page and configure it to cycle through a set of images. FatWire has a bunch of built-in components for things like this, so you don’t have to be a web design expert to create a rich user experience.
• Personalization and Segment Targeting - FatWire has robust targeting and personalization features that can target certain content to certain segments of your visitors. These segments can be defined based on “known” profile information (like a customer’s address from your CRM system) or they can be created based on the visitor’s behavior on the site. So not only can you offer, say, coats and snowshoes to someone that lives in Alaska, you can keep track of the color of other items they’ve looked at on your site and then show them coats and snowshoes in those colors.
• User Generated Content - FatWire has built-in support for user generated content such as ratings, reviews, and comments. And it comes complete with a set of moderation features that allow your content managers to approve the user generated content before it goes live on your site.
• Analytics - FatWire includes rich analytics that help you understand what content is most popular and is driving the highest conversion rates, etc. It can do this not only at the page level, but also at the component level, so if you have a rotating set of product images on your home page, you can see which image is doing the best job of catching your visitor’s attention.
• Edge caching - FatWire includes built-in edge caching servers called “satellite servers” that allow all these fancy targeting rules to work in a high-performance manner.

Integrating with Documentum

FatWire has its own architecture, repository, and technology stack that differ from Documentum’s, so it breaks Documentum’s vision of a single integrated repository for all enterprise content. And since EMC didn’t fully acquire FatWire, there are no plans to replace the FatWire repository with the Documentum repository.

However, FatWire does have an integration with Documentum that will synchronize content from Documentum into FatWire. When you make a change to the content in Documentum, it will automatically update in FatWire (and on your web site), or optionally launch a FatWire workflow to be approved before it goes live. The main use case I see for this is the ability to embed into your FatWire web pages the digital assets (videos, etc.) that are stored in Documentum’s Digital Asset Management solution.

Later this year, there will be an integration that goes the other way, allowing FatWire content to be replicated into Documentum as well.

What is going to happen to Web Publisher?

Peggy Ringhausen, an old friend of mine and the WCM product manager at EMC, says that the new FatWire solution is the wave of the future and that they will be retiring Web Publisher, Page Builder, and the other products in the WCM product line. No date has been announced for this, but it probably won’t happen for at least three years.

EMC says they have some licensing deals that allow existing Web Publisher owners to get their hands on the new FatWire solution, but you shouldn’t expect it to be a free upgrade.

It will be interesting to see how existing Web Publisher owners react to this news. On the one hand, their existing investment is in jeopardy, but on the other hand, the replacement seems like a much stronger solution.

Josh Toub leads the Alfresco team here at Blue Fish, and he’s just written a new article that can help Alfresco developers improve the maintainability and supportability of their Alfresco solutions.

When a developer customizes Alfresco to add a new webscript or portlet or modify an existing class, the common practice is to create new source code files in the same directory structure as the out-of-the-box Alfresco source files. This can cause maintenance problems because it’s hard to tell which files have been modified and which ones were original. It makes troubleshooting and upgrading much more difficult, and it’s harder to share your code or reuse it in other solutions.

Josh’s article shows how you can configure Alfresco to look in a special place for your custom code so that you can keep it out of the main Alfresco directory structure. Read Painless Alfresco Development: Improving Supportability through Source Code Organization for more information.

To help ring in the new year and help folks understand some of the benefits of Alfresco’s latest Enterprise release, Blue Fish is hosting a Lunch and Learn session at our Austin offices on Jan 27th.

This session is a must for CIOs, Senior IT Managers, Enterprise Architects and anyone evaluating ECM solutions. We will cover the following topics:

• A comparison of Alfresco Community, Alfresco Enterprise, and Traditional ECM
• A review of Alfresco Enterprise 3.2
• Alfresco implementation Best Practices

Space is limited to 25 people, so book your place as soon as possible. Click here to register for the Alfresco lunch and learn session.

The session will last 2 hours, from 11am – 1pm, and of course we’ll provide lunch. Blue Fish is located in Downtown Austin - here’s a map to the Blue Fish office.

There’s a nice article on CenterStage over at CMSWire. It’s got several screenshots and a good overview of the features. CenterStage is EMC’s replacement for eRoom and they are hoping it will help reduce the number of customers who are defecting to SharePoint. I’ve seen CenterStage at EMC World, and I was impressed. EMC isn’t known for creating the best UIs and front ends (they are more well known for scalability and their solid back end), but CenterStage has a lot of features I like better than SharePoint.

Read it at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/centerstage-how-emc-is-taking-on-microsoft-sharepoint-005310.php.