Hello,
This sounds like a very well organized effort. I'm impressed with what I've read
on the wiki.
I had a few preliminary questions about how separable the current custom CM implementation
is. Alfresco provides a well defined public REST API which seems to be the ideal
integration point. It's pretty good today but is also our main area of focus as we
move forward. It seems like if some kind of pluggability is to be offered, it should
abstract in such a way as to be able to call through to Alfresco's REST methods.
Is this the thinking of the team as well? If so, how separable are things? I'd
speculate that there may be a good bit of refactoring but am curious how much.
In terms of Alfresco providing developer help, that's always a possibility. We have
some near term deliverables which will tie us up for the near term but I agree with Lee
that we are well suited to aim in the same direction. If we can get in sync, then I bet
there is a good deal that we could contribute to each other's projects.
For now, though, I'd like to get a feel for how much rewrite is necessary to
accommodate a pluggable CM provider (or perhaps just to accommodate Alfresco).
Michael
Michael G. Uzquiano
Director of Alfresco Web Content Management
Alfresco (Open Source Enterprise Content Management)
Mobile - 512.917.6954
Email - uzi(a)alfresco.com
website.
http://www.alfresco.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lee Faus" <lee.faus(a)alfresco.com>
To: "Michael Uzquiano" <uzi(a)alfresco.com>
Cc: "fedora-isv-sig-list" <fedora-isv-sig-list(a)redhat.com>, "Matt
Asay" <matt.asay(a)alfresco.com>, "Matt Mattox"
<mmattox(a)redhat.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 11:12:21 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Building a Better Network
Uzi,
I wanted to open the lines of communication outside of Alfresco about the discussions of a
*CompanyName* Network. I had this discussion about 18 months ago with Rich Friedman, Mark
Lugert, Matt Mattox, and some others inside of Red Hat about using Alfresco as the
foundation for an Open Source Network to be used by all Open Source companies. Since this
time, Red Hat has started opening up the code base that makes up RHN under the code name
SpaceWalk on the Fedora Projects. This is meant to be built as a potential replacement for
Red Hat Satellite, but it will be some time until this happens. I have created a bullet on
the Fedora Hosted site to represent this concept to the SpaceWalk developers:
https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/BrainBox. I know that this is not an immediate fit
for us, but I am thinking larger scale. I know that JBoss had JBossON, Red Hat has RHN,
JasperSoft has theirs and now we are doing it again. There has to be some economy of scale
here so we all don't waste our time. I think building us into the SpaceWalk project
makes great sense as they currently have a home grown Content Management System that is
deeply integrated into Oracle :(. Replacing this with Alfresco would allow for them scale
out very quickly. There are also discussions about SpaceWalk integrating JasperReports for
Reporting and GroundWork or some other Monitoring tool to replace the custom development
being done. Red Hat has the most experience doing this work as they have run their Network
for over 6 years now. We should leverage this knowledge and how we scale out with them
instead of working against the grain IMVHO. I have included the other Open Source ISVs in
this mailing as well as Matt Asay and my old boss at Red Hat, Matt Mattox, who is in
charge of ISV development as a whole at Red Hat that I think would be interested in
leveraging this for both Commercial and Open Source ISVs. Let me know what you think.
Lee Faus
Director of Solution Engineering
Alfresco
lee.faus(a)alfresco.com