The European leg of the Alfresco developer conference was a 2 day event held in Paris (20th-21st October) which I had the benefit of attending.
Overall impressions were that it was well received by everybody there, the technical sessions hit the right note between giving introductions to some of the technologies and giving advanced users a deep dive on some topics. I’m told there were ~220 attendees which felt a reasonable turnout, although I’m not sure what Alfresco were hoping for. One surprise for me was the nationalities of the attendees, I had expected a roughly 50-50 split on UK based and Europeans (although I’ve no idea how I came to that conclusion). The split was closer to 90-10 in favour of Europeans, although the opposite was true of the speakers. Another take away was just how many different ways there are to extend/modify Alfresco, most of the attendees were technical types who already have installations (mostly community) which they are adapting to meet their own user needs; examples of which are – inline editing of office documents (no check-in/check-out cycle), implementing user defined workflow, content modelling and bespoke site skinning.
I also got the chance to meet a good number of the Alfresco engineers, who all came across as really switched on and passionate about Alfresco.
Wednesday’s keynote was a double act between John Newton (Alfresco CTO) and Brian Behkendorf (CollabNet founder and president of the ASF). John Newton talked about where Alfresco was positioned and a lot of numbers on clients. The more interesting part was Brian’s recount of how the US Government instigated use of Open Source for a major health care project where the role played by the government was on of a facilitator rather than a director. They put the infrastructure (physical and intellectual) then stepped back and it was commercial organisations which formed the majority of commits.
Thursday’s keynote was another double act, John Newton again but flanked this time by a VP of architecture at Oracle, Luke Kowalski. This time it was John Newton’s that was the interesting one, the Oracle guy simply rhymed off all of the OSS commitments they have – OpenSolaris, Java, glassfish, linux, netbeans, mysql, ….. zzzzzz. John spoke about what Alfresco is pointing itself towards strategically, a lot of which was drawing the comparison between enterprise and consumer IT, and combining the best of both worlds which lead to the phrase ‘Social Content Management’ being repeated many times, which he and Gartner believe Alfresco is best placed to make inroads into.
The slides were promised, although there was some confusion of how/where they would be made available, general consensus of Alfresco engineers is that they would be available on the Alfresco website but not until after the New York conference (3 – 4 November).
