OpenCms Days 2008 Report

The OpenCms community just finished its first user/developer conference (OpenCms Days 2008) in Cologne Germany. Thank you to our hosts Alkacon Software and the sponsors for putting on such a valuable and fun event.

OpenCms is primarily used in Europe so Cologne (home of Alkacon) was a good choice of venue. If you ever have an opportunity to visit Cologne, you should. It is a beautiful city. Many of the 110 attendees were mostly from Germany but there was also representation from Italy, Spain, Denmark, Czech Republic and there was one attendee from Japan.
The only Americans there were speakers but maybe that was just the weak dollar talking.

Since OpenCms is essentially a commercial open source project (owned and developed by Alkacon) aimed at enterprise buyers, the feel was different than some of the other open source conferences I have been to. It was more corporate, less kumbaya. But there seemed to be a genuine interest in collaboration and community across corporate boundaries. The main question was where to begin. Having the conference was a great start. I saw many first face to face meetings turn into what looked like closer relationships over the two day event.

There were also promises of better inter-company communication - in particular between Alkacon, module developers, and systems integrators. Several attendees had expressed frustration that they had built modules that were quickly either broken or made obsolete by a new release of the the core. The community wanted Alkacon to be more transparent about their roadmap but Alkacon was concerned about making promises that they couldn't keep (Nonetheless, Alkacon CEO, Alexander Kandzior's keynote did a nice job of describing the next few releases of OpenCms at a high level). There were commitments to fix this through sprints (first is July 21-22 2008 in Cologne) and better general communication but, of course, the real proof will be when people return their jobs.

Another observation I had was that the community that I saw seemed much less wrapped up in social media and networking. Most of the conferences that I go to advertise keywords that everyone should use to tag their photos, blogs, and tweets with when they post them on the social networking sites. I got a sense that few within the community used these services. Granted, my expectations for social media use are probably set overly high by the types of projects and people that I follow and the conferences that I attend. I think it is safe to say that Web 2.0 will not be high on the list for OpenCms enhancements. I think that most OpenCms adopters are fine with that prioritization.

The sessions fell into 2 tracks: business and technical. The technical track covered techniques for integrating and customizing OpenCms. The business track showed OpenCms being used in large companies like Bayer, Qimonda, GARDENA, and OEV Online Dienste. Many of these clients have used OpenCms to replace commercial products and are expanding their use of the OpenCms after initial successes. The sites include Intranets, Extranets, Corporate marketing sites and other forms of traditional web content management. They had requirements that are typical of enterprise buyers: large volumes of content, many users with a wide range of technical abilities, and complex organizational structures that require content sharing and access control. Two very good examples were Qimonda's intranet and OEV which hosts mult-tiered websites for 15 insurance companies.

Overall, it was a great conference and (hopefully) the first of many events like it. I will be keeping my eye on the mailing list for follow through on the promises of more community collaboration and communication.

OOXML and Microsoft Office 2007

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I thought ISO adoption of Microsoft's OOXML was a good thing because a practical standard that everyone followed was more valuable than a noble standard that everyone ignored. Well, it turns out that OOXML is actually the standard that no one follows. As Stephe Walli points out, Microsoft Office 2007 does not support OOXML. So what good is a standard that no one supports? No good at all. At least OpenDocument is supported by multiple applications.

But complex layout standards are a tricky business because it is difficult to write a complete and clear specification that covers so much detail. Just look at the HTML standard and browser compatibility. Joel Spolsky writes eloquently on that topic here. And HTML is designed to be much simpler than an office format.

If the ultimate goal is to allow people with different software applications to collaborate on layout intensive documents, I don't know if we are ever going to get there. As an experiment, I took a report written in NeoOffice and opened it and saved it in Apple TextEdit (which claims ODF support). When I re-opened the document in NeoOffice, much of the formatting was stripped out. I am still waiting for Lotus Symphony's promised Mac release. That will be a better test of round-trip collaboration.

My true hope is that less collaborative content development is done in documents and more through server based tools such as wikis. I think the average knowledge worker is moving in that direction. Tools like Zoho Office and Google Docs are helping here a great deal. These tools allow the collaborative process to happen in a storage neutral way and then give options as to what format the content is published in (PDF, ODF, OOXML - or whatever MS Office really is).

Registration no longer required to comment

I re-configured my blogger account to not require registration for commenting. Comments are still moderated to prevent link spam. However, all non-spam (and non-offensive) comments will be accepted.

Alfresco releases Enterprise Edition 2.2

They are a bit behind schedule and there was very little publicity about it but Alfresco Software has released version 2.2 of Alfresco Enterprise Edition. While this is just a point release, 2.2 introduces a couple of big improvements over 2.2. Probably the most welcome enhancement from a user perspective is the introduction of search within web projects. While web projects were always indexed for search and the API supported it, users can now search for web content from within the user interface. Developers will appreciate that the deployment mechanism that came with 2.1 now has a GUI that allows developers to define deployments to push code or content to different environments.

While it still suffers from some core usability issues, with version 2.2, Alfresco has reached a point where it is a useful tool for web content management. Many systems integrators work around Alfresco's usability limitations by using Web Scripts to rapidly develop custom user interfaces. Expect bigger UI improvements in Enterprise 3.0.

For more information on Alfresco 2.2, you can buy the 19 page Alfresco evaluation from Open Source Web Content Management in Java or buy the whole 160 page report to see how Alfresco stacks up against other options.

J. Boye: Wiki in the Enterprise

Because of the inherent simplicity of the technology, wiki projects are less likely to fail in implementation than WCM or ECM projects. However, many companies still struggle to get the desired value out of their wiki initiatives. Purely managed and abandoned wikis have become yet another set of silos for information to hide in.

Janus Boye and Dorthe Jespersen's new report Wiki in the Enterprise contains a very well conceived and written analysis of what it takes to successfully implement a corporate wikis. Their research is based on interviews with enterprise wiki adopters and personal experience. It covers:

• the positioning of wiki's in the content technology marketplace and the benefits that they promise
  
• real world experience the impact and challenges of adopting wikis
  
• recommendations for executing a wiki initiative

Their advice covers the cultural and organizational aspects of information management that are so often overlooked in technology-oriented projects. If you are considering using a wiki to support collaboration or information management in your company, and rightly understand that success is not a matter of technology, you should definitely read this report.

A test framework added to core of Drupal 7

Dries reports on a 2 day sprint in Paris where they added a test framework into the Drupal 7 core. Drupal leadership is stressing automated testing for two main reasons: automated testing will allow the developer community to efficiently scale and will allow more development to occur in a release cycle. The idea behind the former, is that automated testing can remove the some of the manual overhead from the committer and help maintain quality as more contributors submit code.

As for the latter, today code freeze happens less than half way through the release cycle. Drupal 6 was developed for 5 months and was in code freeze to fix bugs for 7. By shortening the code freeze period, Drupal can either release more often or get more functionality into each release.

It remains to be seen how actively the rank and file Drupal development community (especially the module developers) will embrace the test framework. Historically, Drupal has had a fast and loose development style that has been both productive and chaotic. Dries' passion around the subject and the presence of Acquia will certainly help but only time will tell.

Critics rave about Open Source Web Content Management in Java

My report "Open Source Web Content Management in Java" is receiving enthusiastic praise. Thanks Sandro Groganz, Steven Noels, and James Robertson for the kind words. I have posted some quotes here. But don't just take their word for it. Read it for yourself!

Gartner acknowledges open source before Bush accepts global warming

... only just. Or maybe it's a tie.

Matt Asay reports on a Gartner prediction that 90% of SaaS vendors will use open source components in their products. I find it hard to believe that most SaaS vendors are not already running Linux, MySQL, or some open source programming language/framework/component.