I’ve been working with alfresco platform for last 7 years. It’s incredible how Alfresco changed in that time. For the first time I had opportunity to join annual* alfresco conference – DevCon. The conference took place in Lisbon. It was also my first time in Portugal. I think I’ve liked this country from the beginning. Small streets, restaurants and bars made very cozy impression.
Day I
First day, participants could choose between Introduction to Alfresco Training – basics about Alfresco (it was a session for beginners), ACS Certification Training – training for those who wanted to get a certificate, and Hackathon – 8 hours of team programming. I chose last option. On the hackaton there was lots of interesting projects and ideas – from useful tools such as Better Trash Management in Alfresco to crazy projects like ContentCraft – visualizing and interacting with Alfresco content using Minecraft.
My team worked on Multi-tenant user – a tool that might be helpful for users who use multi-tenancy feature. Multi-tenancy allow you to create logically separated Alfresco instances on single server. Many business process outsourcing centers need that kind of separation. Sadly this mechanism has lot of limitations – features and components that are not supported i.e. Smart Folders, CIFS, IMAP, LDAP (at the Hackaton Axel told me that he created module that support LDAP/AD in MT). Full list of unsupported elements can be found in Alfresco documentation. What is important, Alfresco announce that in 6.0 version Multi-Tenancy will not be supported anymore. I think MT should be developed instead of dropping whole functionality. Maybe it’s good time for community to step in and to fork/create separated project for MultiTenancy.
Day II
Next day attendees could choose between lectures that took place simultaneously in 4 rooms. I chose ADF Basics and Beyond for the beginning. I spoke with Mario later that day about available components. I was very impressed how fast ADF is developing now. ADF team releases new version every month, and beta version every week. Each new version brings new functionality. ADF sources can be found on GitHub.
Next lecture was about Well Built Content Services Extensions but I didn’t learn anything new. After few years of working with Alfreco you’ll come to similar conclusions. After that I was on Using and Extending Activiti Engine at Manga Publisher. Speaker Daisuke Yoshimoto showed tools for transforming active workflow from one schema to another. It looked interesting.
After lunch Jeff made great lecture about Moving Gigantic Files In and Out of the Repository. I think I’ll use that knowledge in a future. I love IoT so I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t go to Process Services & the Internet of Things. This talk was a good example of using AWS Cloud, IoT and Alfresco together.
Day III
Conference on Thursday was started with John Newton talk about Alfresco and future technologies. John listed machine learning, cloud services, consumer friendly interfaces, and the block chain as the major technologies. It was a very inspiring lecture. Next after Lightning Talks there was a Hack-a-thon Showcase session. Hackathon attendees showed their projects. Unfortunately during the demonstration I couldn’t login to my ADF application – no WiFi connection made that problem as it turned out later. Later there was Mario’s talk about Unified Javascript API. It is solution for everyone that want to use JS framework other than Angular. Good example of using separate application to processing files was Mauro’s presentation about Content OCRing and Scoring at CERN. Sadly we couldn’t stay on the rest of talks, because of we had to be at airport on time.
Conclusion
I noticed that the major topics at the conference were ADF and integration with Cloud services (especially Amazon WebServices). This two elements seems to be the future of Alfresco development. If you are interesting all presentation can be found on Alfresco YouTube channel.
This conference was a good opportunity to meet interesting people. I really enjoyed it, and I liked Lisbon. Beautiful city and during the whole conference there was a great weather. See you in a year!
* – In last two years there was a conference called BeeCon. It was organized by community – The Order of the Bee organization. Now Alfresco decided to officially support again this kind of event (focused on developers).
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