I attended the first of Alfresco’s Tech Talk Live sessions for this summer and much of the discussion was demonstrations, though I did get to ask some pointed questions about Alfresco’s road map with regard to web content management.

By the way, a recording of the talk is available here. The next one is on Friday, June 13th, at 12:00 EST, so if you’re interested in technical discussions about Alfresco, definitely check it out! I personally enjoyed having the chance to interact with some of the members of Alfresco’s technical team.

After the talk, I took some time to set up a VM with a build environment for Alfresco SVN so that I could take a look at some of the new features in Community 3 for myself.

First up was a demonstration of Acrobat Share, a rich web application from Adobe for sharing documents that has Alfresco as its back-end repository. I haven’t used it yet, but I was impressed with what I saw of the interface; there are clearly advantages to having many standard ways of integrating the repository with front-end web applications. It’s also a publicly-accessible example of a large-scale deployment of Alfresco, so it should be interesting to see how it all works out.

Next up were demonstrations of Slingshot. Slingshot is the codename for the new web client interface that Alfresco is working on for 3.0. Visually, it is leaner and cleaner, easier to understand, and delightfully AJAX-y, but what impressed me most about the demonstrations is much deeper than that. Right on the dashboard is a section called “My Sites”, and creating a new one is as easy as clicking a link and filling in some fields. Putting new site creation right on the dashboard is just one sign of Alfresco’s commitment to making web content management a first-class citizen in future releases.

Also included in the UI (but not fully implemented yet) are collaboration features for each site, including a wiki and blogs, as well as the calendar features from 2.9. As it turns out, the “My Sites” functionality isn’t just for top administrators — creation of new sites can be delegated to others within the organization, making it possible to use Alfresco to easily create sites, both internal and external, for each project the organization undertakes. Paired with the new collaboration features, this could truly enable the vision of Enterprise 2.0 as it relates to WCM. That’s just from what I can see at the current SVN revision, but there are more ambitious plans listed on the Roadmap page of the Alfresco wiki.

One more interesting thing about Slingshot before I end this post: Slingshot is apparently intended to be a site, like any other, managed through the WCM system of Alfresco. Thus, you’ll be able to deploy it to another server, where it will communicate with the back-end Alfresco instance via Webscripts. Slingshot will then become a sort of example site for Alfresco WCM, and customizations to it will ideally be as simple as editing some Webscripts. For lack of better words, this sounds incredibly cool.

If you’re looking to build and work with Alfresco SVN yourself, look no further than the Alfresco SVN Development wiki page, which walks through most of the process of creating a build environment for Alfresco SVN and even includes some information on setting up Eclipse.

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