The 2014 Alfresco Summit was held in San Francisco and London, and several members of the Blue Fish team attended the San Francisco conference. The San Francisco Alfresco Summit ran from September 23rd to the 25th. The first day of the Summit had a full day of training classes available, and Alfresco also hosted a “Hack-a-thon” as a separate track. The remaining two days were devoted to technical and business sessions.
In this post, I’m going to focus on some of the technical sessions that were highlights for me. Some of these technical sessions provide updates on new features in upcoming Alfresco releases, while others provide details on development on the current platform.
Alfresco has now posted recordings, along with the slides, for many of the conference sessions. So, even if you could not attend the conference in person, you can review the recording and the materials and learn more about the Alfresco platform.
The following list are some of the sessions that were really important to me. There were many valuable sessions during this conference, but I’m going to limit my list to a few highlights that I feel are really important to review. The list is in chronological order (the order in which the presentation occurred during the conference):
Presented By: Thomas DeMeo, VP of Product Management at Alfresco
This session provided a really good overview of upcoming features in Alfresco as well as Activiti. This session was extremely useful for me to see, as it did a great job of introducing all of the new enhancements available in AlfrescoOne 5.0. I definitely recommend watching this if you want to get insight into the 5.0 release.
Presented By: Mike Farman, Director of Product Management at Alfresco
Alfresco 5.0 is moving from SOLR 1.4 to SOLR 4.x, and this will provide many new search features for Alfresco 5.0. This talk covers in detail what these changes will look like in the new product. This includes features like “Live Search”, “Filtered Search”, and management of search filters. In addition, this talk covers some of the changes between the underlying architecture of SOLR 1.4 and SOLR 4. At this time, only the slides are available for this talk (no recording), but the slides are definitely worth downloading and reviewing. One of the most important things to know about moving from SOLR 1.4 to 4.x is that a full re-index will be required.
Presented By: David Webster, UI Engineer at Alfresco
If you are interested in the Aikau framework for Alfresco Share, this topic provides an in-depth review of the framework. This session also focused on debugging and testing when developing with the framework. There is also a companion talk that was presented by Kevin Dorr of Alfresco that is available here: Dynamic UI Generation with Share 4.2 and Aikau
Presented By:
Gabriele Columbro, Global Manager, Expert Services at Alfresco
Maurizio Pillitu, Technical Consultant EMEA at Alfresco
Unfortunately, this talk came during the same time that I was presenting my own talk, so I’ve only been able to review the slides. However, Blue Fish are big proponents of Maven, so I always keep up with the latest news on this front. This session focuses on tools that increase the reliability and reproducibility of project deployments to the cloud.
Presented By:
Joram Barrez, Activiti Developer at Alfresco
Paul Holmes-Higgin, General Manager, Activiti Product at Alfresco
Tijs Rademakers, Activiti and Alfresco Workflow Project Lead at Alfresco
This session was also during the same time as my presentation! Although only the slides are available for this talk, there is a separate webinar that was also provided a few weeks later. That has been recorded and is available here. I was able to attend the webinar, and I got a lot out of it. If you are interested in the Activiti Workflow Engine, it is definitely worth watching: Alfresco Activiti in Action.
Presented By: John Iball, Director, Product Management at Alfresco
This session describes the upcoming features in the Reporting and Analytics Module for Alfresco. The recorded session has demonstrations of many of these new features. Many of our clients have been asking for these types of features, and this is a great overview of what is coming up in this module. This session has both the slides as well as a video recording available.
Presented By:
Derek Hulley, Senior Developer at Alfresco
Michael Suzuki, Senior Developer at Alfresco
Here at Blue Fish, we have really been making use of the OpenCMIS libraries in some recent projects. In fact, my talk at Alfresco Summit was about building your own CMIS Toolkit. So, this talk was really useful for me. Several test scenarios are presented, with different sets of operations attempted in each one. For example, a scenario might run through the following: 1) Get test folder, 2) Create folder, 3) Upload file, 4) Download file, and 5) Delete folder. Results are analyzed for a variety of session loads (for example, 30 sessions and 240 sessions) and session intervals.
In addition to the topics above, Blue Fish presented two different sessions during Alfresco Summit. I have provided information about each of those below, and I hope that you will take a look at the recordings for each of them:
This is a talk that I presented that talks about putting together a set of tools in Java and Python that can be used to perform basic CMIS operations against Alfresco. The Java code utilizes OpenCMIS, and the Python examples use cmislib.
I had the opportunity to take part in one of the Lightning Talks at Alfresco Summit this year. These are short Ignite-style talks where you cover your material in only a few minutes. This Lightning Talk has seven different topics. My session was: “Automatic Capture and Storage of Tabular Data leveraging Ephesoft and Alfresco”. These are really fun, and very well attended, sessions.
