Utah Open Source Planet

The press has been good.  Take a look at what they are saying:

Analyst Blog - Kyle McNabb @ Forresters : http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2007/11/facebook-alfres.html

“Alfresco, which continues to demonstrate a bit more edge thinking in the world of ECM than their commercial counterparts IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Open Text.”

FR - Toolinux: http://www.toolinux.com/news/logiciels/alfresco_penetre_le_reseau_social_facebook_ar9854.html

Sweden - CIO: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.131089

Sweden - Computer Sweden: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.131387

The article opens with “In five years we’re going to try to remember what the world looked like before Alfresco took over”

UK -Techworld: http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=10664&pagtype=all

“Newton said that the company had had many conversations with Facebook in developing the integration and he had been told that there was no other company developing a business tool for Facebook … not yet anyway.”

UK - IT Week: http://www.vnunet.com/itweek/news/2203577/alfresco-extends-content

UK - PC Pro: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/139563/facebook-adds-enterprise-application.html

UK - ZDNet: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39290851,00.htm

Alfresco formally launched its Facebook integration yesterday.   The press release goes into why we think that this is significant and what we think the future of the enterprise and social networking has in store for us all.

Some highlights:

Employees are increasingly communicating on social-networking platforms – outside the control of the corporate IT department. Corporations must choose either to ban social software use or to harness the potential to communicate more effectively with their community of customers, partners and employees.

From an enterprise perspective, organizations must have the ability to publish to a Facebook audience as effectively as to a Web site audience. From an employee perspective, forward-looking enterprises believe that social networking provides a ready-made knowledge-management platform for their workers, which will increase adoption rates to the levels that knowledge management was always meant to achieve.

Agree or disagree, social networks will/are having an affect on the enterprise.  Phil Windley, pointed out yesterday on BTL, the power in integration between search and facebook type social network platforms.  He said,

Facebook has more than a good record of my personal traits and attributes. They also know about my relationships.  Would you be willing to reveal your social network to Yahoo! or Google? For most of us, the answer depends on what we’d get in return. How about friend recommendations on products?

Imagine a system that knew what your friends were buying and ordered product search results accordingly. You could tweak it, perhaps, with information about who’s recommendation you trusted in what categories.

Now an ECM could also take advantage of this, sharing your content with your friends, and others in your extended networks.  Your personalized search engine could be pulling back content target at your employees, customers and partners, placing content at the finger tips of those whom you trust, associate with and sell to.

This last week I did something I thought I wouldn’t do. I signed up for a Facebook account. Why? Partly to see what the hype is about. Partly because we are starting to do some work around and with Facebook.

So far, I am OK with Facebook. I haven’t had to experience a lot of the silliness that deterred me in the first place. (throwing food, biting people, turning them into zombies, etc.)

For those of you on facebook and using Alfresco, there is a new Alfresco User Group. (The image is linked to join.)

You can also find in the Alfresco dev tree work that we started on a Facebook-alfresco integration. You can upload and share your content stored in Alfresco with your Facebook friends from within Facebook.