ECM presentations at eDocument Japan

We are giving two presentations at the eDocument Japan conference:

- The place of Open Source in the global ECM market

- Social Content Management with Open Source software Alfresco

The presentations will be in English, translated to Japanese.

Tokyo Big Sight, October 13th, 10:00 AM and 12:20 PM.

Alfresco's CTO in person is coming to Japan for the occasion.

Organized by JIIMA (Japan Image and Information Management Association)

Alfresco accreditation

I just received the certificate for the Alfresco accreditation I passed a few weeks ago.

Three of my colleagues also managed to get it, so the whole company has just been declared an Alfresco Recognized Partner, allowing us to use the shiny green badge!

Just passed the Alfresco accreditation

Back in 2009, I was in Milan designing the future Alfresco accreditation tests. Those tests will be offered to anyone, starting from summer 2011.

Because my company Aegif is an Alfresco partner, we have just been subjected to the test! Some of the questions have been written by me (what? unfair?), but all-in-all it was a bit more difficult than I expected. There are 137 questions (some multiple choice, some multiple response) to answer in 60 minutes. Some questions are very specific (which file does what) and some more general (which feature is not available).

Now I can add "Alfresco Recognized Developer" to my titles ;-)
More importantly, my company becomes an "Alfresco Recognized Partner".

Organizing a Liferay seminar

We are organizing a seminar about Liferay, the open source Enterprise portal software described as visionary by Gartner. Liferay Portal powers large companies' public-facing websites with advanced content management features. Behind the scene, Liferay offers companies a "social office" where employees can collaborate efficiently.

Liferay's CEO Bryan Cheung will introduce Liferay, present the roadmap, in particular for the Japanese market.
Aegif recently became the first Liferay Service Partner in Japan.

The seminar will take place at Roppongi Hills, 49th floor, on July 15th 2pm. Free entrance. More info here.

Just released the first integration-oriented CMIS explorer webapp

In a lot of ECM projects, employees who are not back-office-power-users are offered a simple web-based interface to browse a portion of the documents.
Sometimes, clients are offered another web-based interface to check their bills, read their contracts or other papers.

Just released as open source by Aegif (Japan), Struts2CmisExplorer is a new way to build those kinds of web interfaces. It is a CMIS explorer application that focuses on simplicity. This means you can very easily get it running, and modify it to fit your extra requirements, or integrate it into your existing portal.

It should work with all CMIS servers (Documentum, Nuxeo, Open Text, FileNet, etc), for instance here is how to get it up and running on Alfresco:

1) Install Alfresco 3.3 (Community or Enterprise). Check that it is running well at http://localhost:8080/alfresco

2) Download Struts2CmisExplorer and put it in Alfresco's tomcat/webapps directory.

3) That's all! Use it at http://localhost:8080/Struts2CmisExplorer_0.1

Struts2CmisExplorer is not intended to be a full-featured explorer, instead it targets the usual need for a simple web-based documents access. The goal is reusability/ease of integration. Struts2CmisExplorer does not rely a particular framework, dependencies are kept to a minimum (Struts2 and OpenCMIS), which means you can easily integrate it in any IoC framework you might want.

More on Struts2CmisExplorer.

CMIS has been approved

CMIS has recently been accepted as a standard, so it is time to get some experience with it! Actually my company just delivered its first CMIS-based solution yesterday.

CMIS means "Content Management Interoperability Services". It is a protocol to access ECM (Enterprise Content Management) repositories. Why did I choose to use CMIS instead of JCR or WebDAV? Because CMIS better targets the needs of ECM projects, it is actually the first protocol designed for Document Management, with interoperability being one of the main goals. CMIS is a joint effort between IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, EMC, Open Text, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, Nuxeo and others.

Some client implementations already exist in beta versions, but their documentation is still very scarce. I chose OpenCMIS as a client library. Other solutions could have been chemistry-abdera, which is not as active, or using CMIS as Web Service or REST directly, which would have taken a lot of time.

Like for other CMIS implementations, OpenCMIS documentation is still scarce (I actually contributed a good portion of it). So I will explain how to get started with CMIS in the small OpenCMIS tutorial below, hope this helps someone. For the example, I will explain how to access Alfresco from an OpenCMIS client.

Using OpenCMIS to access an Alfresco repository

OpenCMIS has not been released yet, so you will have to compile it from source. Install subversion and maven if you don't already have them. Then get the source:
svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/chemistry/opencmis/trunk

... and compile it (in the root directory):
mvn clean install

This will create a bunch of JAR libraries, in particular those we need:

• chemistry-opencmis-client-api-0.1-incubating-SNAPSHOT.jar
• chemistry-opencmis-client-impl-0.1-incubating-SNAPSHOT.jar
• chemistry-opencmis-client-bindings-0.1-incubating-SNAPSHOT.jar
• chemistry-opencmis-commons-api-0.1-incubating-SNAPSHOT.jar
• chemistry-opencmis-commons-impl-0.1-incubating-SNAPSHOT.jar

If you don't have an Alfresco server ready, install Alfresco Community (version 3.3 or later) and start it.

Download my small Java demo file and edit the URL, user, password to match your environment.

Then compile with the libraries, run, and the content of your repository should appear :-)
That's it! To start doing actually useful things, check the OpenCMIS cookbook.

Got hired to work on Alfresco

I got hired by Aegif (イージフ) to work on the open source ECM Alfresco! I would like to thank my former Japanese employers W3C Tokyo and Expresso for the great projects and wonderful time I had with them!

For my first week, my company sends me to Milan, Italy for an Alfresco "Train the Trainer" training.

Alfresco's CEO in Tokyo

Today I attended the Alfresco seminar organized by aegif, at the 49th floor of the Mori Tower. Alfresco's CEO John Powell exposed the strength of the open source Enterprise Content Management system, and several Japanese integration companies demonstrated their Alfresco-based offerings.