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Alfresco has been talking about cloud connected content management for awhile now, since we first launched a stand-alone SaaS offering last year. Cloud connected content management is all about using the cloud for applications, user groups and processes where it makes sense, but doing so in a way that doesn’t create additional, disconnected content silos or compromise content security or corporate policies.

This week at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit held in San Diego, analysts presented a vision for content management that reinforces what we’ve been seeing and speaking about at Alfresco.

In a session called The New Enterprise Content Management Scenario, Gartner ECM analyst Mark Gilbert presented his view on what he called ‘multi-verse cloud content.’  This was a spot-on analysis of the different ways in which enterprise content is moving to the cloud.  Mark distinguished between consumer-oriented file-sharing services, departmental line-of-business apps and traditional enterprise content management systems.

The reality is that most organizations have all three of these types of content systems, but the degree to which they are going to the cloud depends a lot on the type of organization.

Some organizations are way out in front of this opportunity, moving their content and apps to the cloud aggressively and encouraging users to innovate.  Others, particularly in highly regulated industries, are sticking to more traditional, IT-led approaches to content management and using the cloud only in very limited scenarios, if at all.

But most companies are somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, adopting cloud services for extranet-type apps or to enable easy access to content from mobile devices, but mostly still experimenting.  Most also know that the traditional ECM systems – which are fifteen years old or more in some cases – are in need of a refresh.  But will that refresh happen in the cloud?

Alfresco’s vision of cloud connected content is a forward looking one, but also one that can work for customers today despite being at different stages in this multi-verse world of cloud content.

To this end, we’ve created some scalable options depending on your content needs now and in the future as those needs change and evolve depending on your cloud comfort level -

Ready to put significant portions of content-centric apps in the cloud?  Check out Alfresco in the cloud, our own SaaS offering or how we’re working with AWS for private-cloud deployments.

Want to use the cloud for some apps or specific audiences without creating more content silos or worrying about loss of control?  Check out Alfresco’s hybrid model that enables content in the cloud, content on-prem and synchronization between the two environments.

Not interested in the cloud right now, but still need to think about an ECM refresh and how you’re going to meet demands for mobile access?  Alfresco Enterprise is a modern and open ECM platform for on-prem deployments with great support for mobile, business processes and collaboration.

We had some great conversations this week at PCC with customers and analysts that confirmed Alfresco’s approach truly resonates with solve real business needs.  There is no one-size-fits all solution in content management – there never really has been and the cloud, for all the benefits it offers, doesn’t change that.

Check out Gartner’s analysis of Alfresco and the ECM market in the Magic Quadrant. How are you enabling cloud connected content to do great work?

Market Leaders Sennheiser, Wilson Sporting Goods Co., San Jose SaberCats and CitySprint Choose Sugar to Create a Fantastic Customer Experience

CUPERTINO, Calif. — May 1, 2013 — SugarCRM, the company that makes every user a customer expert, today announced the addition of market leaders to its expanding roster of enterprise customers, including Sennheiser, Wilson Sporting Goods Co., San Jose SaberCats and CitySprint.

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By John Leonard

May 1, 2013

EMIS primary care software is used by 52 per cent of GPs in the NHS. The company's two data centres in Leeds host more than 39 million patient records, and its software makes these records searchable and available to GPs wherever they might be through secure data sharing across operational systems.

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CUPERTINO, Calif. — April 30, 2013 — SugarCRM, the company that makes every user a customer expert, today announced two award wins for innovation and thought leadership.  SugarCRM was presented with a Gold Stevie® Award in the Relationship Management Solution – New Version category in the seventh annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. It has also been named to CRN’s 2013 Partner Program Guide, and awarded a 5-Star Partner rating. 

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Tribloom is an Alfresco Gold Partner and has been implementing Alfresco on AWS since 2010. 

Imagine the future… I have been imagining the not too distant future a lot recently. It all started when I attended AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last November. Werner Vogels, Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos painted a picture of their services: reducing costs, leading to more users, leading to economies of scale to further reducing costs. Reduced costs, to the point where you don’t think about the cost (like you don’t think about turning on a light switch), leading to massive innovation. Democratizing infrastructure, why spend time and money on things that don’t differentiate you in the marketplace?

My vision? In the future all of our computing will be done in the cloud. There will be no more desktop or laptop computers instead we will use devices like tablets and terminals (remember the days when terminals were commonplace)? A day at work for the average knowledge worker might start off by selecting one of many EC2 instances or even entire application stacks. When infrastructure is a service and can be started and stopped with an API call, an entire new paradigm opens up. You don’t have to “fix” failing servers, you can just replace them with new healthy ones. You can version your entire server stack by keeping your provisioning code in version control. You can duplicate a production stack of hundreds of servers in minutes instead of months.

The work day could involve many of these throughout the day – developing new code on the latest product, a customer demo for the latest production release and one for crunching data about customer usage, just to name a few examples. There is a corporate policy in place, automatically enforced, to shut down servers at the end of the day so any instances left running are shut down to save money. All access to the corporate AWS account is controlled by IAM roles so each individual can only access the AWS resources that are relevant to them. For example the test group only has access to the test servers.

Leaving work doesn’t mean leaving the cloud behind. At home, the kids are watching a movie on Netflix and listening to Spotify, both streamed from AWS. Dad wants to relax with the latest shooter style computer game. He goes to the AWS Marketplace, finds the game he is looking for, starts up an instance and starts playing from his tablet. He doesn’t have to buy the game, the cost is built into the usage charges for AWS. His buddy wants to join in the game so connects his tablet to Dad’s server and both play on the cloud. Mom is uploading the photos and videos that she took of the kids’ school play earlier in the day. The photos will all be available, safe and forever secure because behind the scenes they are stored in S3.

Do you think this is a distant reality?

I don’t think so. We are already seeing corporate IT fall by the wayside. Departments are asking for AWS now as a means to circumvent the slow and tedious process of asking IT for a server for their new software installation. We see this all the time with our Alfresco clients. Like AWS management says, why spend the effort on hardware and networking when it doesn’t bring you a competitive advantage? Hardware and networking are commodities.

Spend 5 minutes provisioning an AWS EC2 instance, one with Alfresco already installed on it from the AWS Marketplace perhaps, instead of 5 weeks ordering hardware and setting it up. I personally already do this for development and customer demos. This past weekend, I needed a Drupal server. Rather than installing Apache, Drupal, and PHP, I just found an AMI and started up an instance, saving me valuable time.

The fact is that almost everything described here is already possible. The only thing that needs to change for this to be a reality is how we think about and use our computing resources. I am excited for that change to occur!

I will be attending the AWS Summit today in San Francisco. Every time I attend an AWS event, my vision becomes closer to reality. AWS is increasing their product and service offerings rapidly and usually have a few new announcements at each event.

Please stop by to say hi and if you would like to learn more about AWS and Alfresco you can check out our webinar or Alfresco’s new CloudFormation template!

Scott Reynen has done some fun things in the Drupal community. Some notable examples:

• Coordinated many meetups in Denver ensuring they happen, with interesting topics, and tasty pizza options
• Helped to organize several Drupalcamps in Colorado (which will be June 29th/30 in 2013)
• Presents on various topics at Drupalcamps
• Helps as one of the 3 site maintainers for groups.drupal.org
• Is an active Project Application queue reviewer heavily interested in new-contributor-onboarding and project quality
• Takes care of abandoned projects and ownership requests in the Webmasters queue
• And does a pretty darn good job as the maintainer for modules like @font-your-face.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

About 4 years ago, I took a job as a developer with Aten Design Group, where we do mostly Drupal projects. At the time, I was pretty skeptical of content management systems, after frustrating experiences with both WordPress and Joomla. But I quickly grew to appreciate Drupal’s modular architecture.

What do you do with Drupal these days?

Most of my Drupal time is spent building websites for clients. I’m fortunate to be able to work on projects I really care about, like the International Center for Transitional Justice, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and the United Nations Development Programme. Apart from client work, I use Drupal as a platform to explore new ideas. With a wide variety of code and a huge active community, Drupal serves as a great incubator.

You’re involved with the Drupal community locally and internationally - can you describe some of the things you do and why you like them?

I co-maintain Drupal Groups (groups.drupal.org), deal with abandoned projects on Drupal.org, do some work on project review applications, help organize the local Denver Drupal meetup, actively mentor a few people, and contribute some modules. I think I like all of this because I feel like I’m actively building the future, either through directly improving the web, or by enabling other people to improve the web.

What got you started in the project application review process?

I didn’t go through the application review process to get my own Git (previously CVS) access, and didn’t realize the process existed for a long time. So I think some feeling of debt played a part in my getting involved. But I also believe the future of Drupal depends on people who aren’t yet involved, and the application process, if not handled well, can very easily be a point where we turn away this next generation of contributors.

What are some of your favorite moments from that process?

It’s always nice to get thanks from new contributors for my feedback, or to discover a cool new module before it even has a release. But I think my favorite moment was when klausi arrived. Before that, I felt like I had to stay actively involved or the whole process might fall apart. When klausi started doing a superhuman number of reviews, I could comfortably step away from the queue for a short (or even long) period of time and avoid both catastrophe and burnout.

Read a previous Community Spotlight about Klaus Purer (klausi).

Are there any cool projects you’ve learned about through that process?

Commerce Registration is, I think, a great example of why the review process is important to the wider community. After some quick minor bug fixes in the review process, that project was approved and is now part of the Conference Organizing Distribution, used in every DrupalCon site. And the maintainer has gone on to contribute several other modules, a few to Drupal Commons that will be part of the next version of the Drupal Groups site. A more frustrating project review could have easily meant the Drupal community losing all of this.

What changes do you hope will come in the project review process?

Mostly I think we just need more people with the right mindset. Right now, the “needs review” backlog is gradually disappearing, largely thanks to a lot of new reviewers. I think we just need to keep more of these reviewers involved and make sure they know, as jthorson recently wrote, “the role of reviewers in this process is that of a 'mentor', not 'traffic cop'”.

What is your favorite part about the Drupal community?

It’s rare to hear someone say “I don’t care” in the Drupal community. There’s plenty of work that goes off the rails on passionate debate over what color to paint the bike shed, and that can grow tedious. But our bike sheds are the best-painted on the web (12 coats!), because people really care. I like that.

Tell us a little about your background or things that interest you outside Drupal?

When I was young, I hit myself in the forehead with a boomerang. I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concept, but I’d never had one actually come back. This one did, just as I was turning to see where it had landed. Stitches weren't great back then, so I still have a scar. I still have problems with tools doing what I say rather than what I expect.

Scott Reynen has done some fun things in the Drupal community. Some notable examples:

• Coordinated many meetups in Denver ensuring they happen, with interesting topics, and tasty pizza options
• Helped to organize several Drupalcamps in Colorado (which will be June 29th/30 in 2013)
• Presents on various topics at Drupalcamps
• Helps as one of the 3 site maintainers for groups.drupal.org
• Is an active Project Application queue reviewer heavily interested in new-contributor-onboarding and project quality
• Takes care of abandoned projects and ownership requests in the Webmasters queue
• And does a pretty darn good job as the maintainer for modules like @font-your-face.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

About 4 years ago, I took a job as a developer with Aten Design Group, where we do mostly Drupal projects. At the time, I was pretty skeptical of content management systems, after frustrating experiences with both WordPress and Joomla. But I quickly grew to appreciate Drupal’s modular architecture.

What do you do with Drupal these days?

Most of my Drupal time is spent building websites for clients. I’m fortunate to be able to work on projects I really care about, like the International Center for Transitional Justice, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and the United Nations Development Programme. Apart from client work, I use Drupal as a platform to explore new ideas. With a wide variety of code and a huge active community, Drupal serves as a great incubator.

You’re involved with the Drupal community locally and internationally - can you describe some of the things you do and why you like them?

I co-maintain Drupal Groups (groups.drupal.org), deal with abandoned projects on Drupal.org, do some work on project review applications, help organize the local Denver Drupal meetup, actively mentor a few people, and contribute some modules. I think I like all of this because I feel like I’m actively building the future, either through directly improving the web, or by enabling other people to improve the web.

What got you started in the project application review process?

I didn’t go through the application review process to get my own Git (previously CVS) access, and didn’t realize the process existed for a long time. So I think some feeling of debt played a part in my getting involved. But I also believe the future of Drupal depends on people who aren’t yet involved, and the application process, if not handled well, can very easily be a point where we turn away this next generation of contributors.

What are some of your favorite moments from that process?

It’s always nice to get thanks from new contributors for my feedback, or to discover a cool new module before it even has a release. But I think my favorite moment was when klausi arrived. Before that, I felt like I had to stay actively involved or the whole process might fall apart. When klausi started doing a superhuman number of reviews, I could comfortably step away from the queue for a short (or even long) period of time and avoid both catastrophe and burnout.

Read a previous Community Spotlight about Klaus Purer (klausi).

Are there any cool projects you’ve learned about through that process?

Commerce Registration is, I think, a great example of why the review process is important to the wider community. After some quick minor bug fixes in the review process, that project was approved and is now part of the Conference Organizing Distribution, used in every DrupalCon site. And the maintainer has gone on to contribute several other modules, a few to Drupal Commons that will be part of the next version of the Drupal Groups site. A more frustrating project review could have easily meant the Drupal community losing all of this.

What changes do you hope will come in the project review process?

Mostly I think we just need more people with the right mindset. Right now, the “needs review” backlog is gradually disappearing, largely thanks to a lot of new reviewers. I think we just need to keep more of these reviewers involved and make sure they know, as jthorson recently wrote, “the role of reviewers in this process is that of a 'mentor', not 'traffic cop'”.

What is your favorite part about the Drupal community?

It’s rare to hear someone say “I don’t care” in the Drupal community. There’s plenty of work that goes off the rails on passionate debate over what color to paint the bike shed, and that can grow tedious. But our bike sheds are the best-painted on the web (12 coats!), because people really care. I like that.

Tell us a little about your background or things that interest you outside Drupal?

When I was young, I hit myself in the forehead with a boomerang. I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concept, but I’d never had one actually come back. This one did, just as I was turning to see where it had landed. Stitches weren't great back then, so I still have a scar. I still have problems with tools doing what I say rather than what I expect.

CUPERTINO, Calif. — April 29, 2013 — SugarCRM, the company that makes every user a customer expert, today announced that it will be participating in the Gartner Customer 360 Summit May 1-3 in San Diego, CA. Larry Augustin, SugarCRM’s chief executive officer, will lead a session titled "SugarCRM: Death, Taxes, & Sales Forecasts: Transforming CRM for Real Users.” SugarCRM is also a platinum sponsor and exhibiting at booth #106.

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Organizations can now integrate their existing user directories to our cloud service, allowing your users to login with their existing company credentials. This feature is available to all Standard and Enterprise Network subscribers and we welcome any organizations to upgrade for a free 30 day trial if they wish to test the functionality today.

For Users

If you already have a central login/password for your organization, you probably don’t want to remember a new username and password for all the different cloud services you use. With this feature enabled by your administrators, you will now be able to use a single login with your existing credientials seamlessly. In order to get started, here are some user best practices:

1. Your administrators will give you a specific URL for your organization to bookmark when you want to login to Alfresco in the cloud.
2. When you access that URL, you will automatically be redirected to your organization’s login page to login using your existing credentials.
3. On successful login, you will automatically be redirected back to Alfresco and logged into the application

Even better, if you’re a first time user to Alfresco and your organization already has Alfresco with this feature enabled, you don’t need to sign up, you can simply login straight away and you will get a new account on Alfresco automatically. This feature really makes it easy for users to access Alfresco without requiring new usernames and passwords or having to sign-up when enabled for your Network.

For Administrators

For the more technical, this new feature uses the SAML Single Sign-On (SSO) 2.0 protocol to integrate your existing Active Directory/LDAP server with our cloud service. Using some simple configuration on your Account Settings page, any of your Network Members will be able to go to a unique URL for your Network, which will redirect them to your own login page where they can sign in. On a successful login, they will be automatically redirected back to Alfresco and logged into use the service.

This means a couple of things:

• Your users only need to manage one password for your organization and no longer need to create a separate login to use the Alfresco in the cloud service.
• Since you control the login process and policies, you have complete authority over how users are provisioned and managed using your existing security infrastructure.
• You can onboard users easily by just letting them login to the cloud service, automatically creating a new account for them if its their first time accessing the service

You can find our full documentation on how to get setup using SAML SSO with Alfresco in the cloud here.

Supported Identity Providers (IDPs)

We have built this to conform with the SAML standard so this feature should work out of the box with any SAML SSO enabled IDPs. However; in practice many IDPs have their own quirks, which means we have to certify each provider to ensure they work and are fully supported by our service on every release. At this time our official support is limited to PingFederate, but we will be looking to expand this list to other IDPs such as Centrify over time based on customer demand.

Get started today and let me know if you have any feedback or questions by leaving a comment here!

Last year was my first time to Alfresco DevCon. I was six months in to working here and had heard of DevCon before having been one of Alfresco’s partners in a previous life.

But for some reason I was always under the assumption it was this strange geek thing lead by the mysterious Jeff Potts. I was only half right. With no expectations, I showed up in Berlin for Day 0 with Trainings and the Hackaton.

The one thing that immediately stood out was passion. I mean, what else explains 17 grown men sitting around a table working in teams to build the best applications that will actually help make every day work easier and more productive?

The trainings were packed with a smart audience asking great questions around how they can get the most out of our powerful platform. Having eight hours to focus on understanding how to put content to work and get the most from employees really sets you on a good path to a more calm content existence. If I would have gotten one of these crash courses when I first started in PR, it would have saved me literally years of version control press release nightmares.

The next couple of days were a complete whirlwind, each one building on the other and opening my eyes to the heart of Alfresco. I have never had the chance to be in a room with a smarter, more passionate and innovative group of people looking to solve real work problems and enhance the flow of global content.

At the same time, I also sort of felt that DevCon was the best secret conference I had ever been to, which is saying a lot considering I’ve worked SXSW Interactive for the past eight years in some capacity. More people would come if they were aware and we opened it up to industry heavy weights and customers who can share unique perspectives that others can learn from to empower great teamwork.

This year we are doing just that with Alfresco Summit!

I’m so excited that Jeff along with an internal team of event ninjas is taking the best of what makes Alfresco’s entrepreneurial community unique and letting more businesses take advantage of learning how to put our critical content to work.

We also put out the Call for Presenters due June 15,2013 so get submissions in early! We will stop accepting ideas once all the speaking slots are filled. We couldn’t be more excited for what 2013 will bring and can’t wait for our November reunion in two really vibrant cities – Boston and Barcelona…won’t you join us?

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and use #SummitNow to let us know you are coming!

During the month of August, Openbravo Education offers its flagship courses at a price of only 499EUR. Seize the opportunity and learn more about Openbravo today!

The new version offers mobile capabilities at the point of sale with a fully web based application