Open Source Ecm - Interview Eng - Nancy Garrity - Alfresco

Interview : Nancy Garrity, Alfresco Community Manager Hello readers! Today is a special day! I am glad to present you my first english interview. A real adventure! The subjects I focused on for these interviews are 1. To introduce men and women playing a role in ECM environment 2. To discover the ECM community 3. To explore ECM Solutions 4. To learn more about technologies and content management practices. I am delighted to interview today Mrs Nancy Garrity, Alfresco Community Manager. Hello Nancy! First of all, let me thank you for the time you take to share your ECM experience and knowledge with us. We all appreciate it! So Nancy, tell us more about your position in Alfresco Company. What's the role of a Community Manager ? Federating Alfresco world community... Communication... Organizing Events... Facebook representation... ? The Community Manager nurtures the community. We provide whatever resources the community needs to be successful but even more important; we create an environment that encourages members to contribute. The end goal is that the community “feeds itself”. What was your previous position? What made you choose your current role for Alfresco Company instead of Documentum ? Is it a new way of working in ECM ? Before Alfresco, I worked for ten years at Documentum, a closed source content management vendor. I started my Documentum career as a consultant designing and developing content management solutions for our customers. Later, I was given the opportunity to start the Documentum Developer Program, which I ran for 5 years. When John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco and also the co-founder of Documentum, contacted me about the Community Manager role at Alfresco, I didn’t hesitate to accept. It was a chance to join a group of tremendously talented individuals, most of whom had experience in the content management arena. Have you always been working in the ECM World? Tell us more about your first experience with content management and ECM ? I started my IT career as an application developer for the research computing department at a major pharmaceutical company. My job was to manage research data that was stored in both relational and molecular databases. After a few years, I moved to the software company that provided the molecular database management tool. http://www.opensourceecm.fr http://www.open-source-ecm.com

Interview : Nancy Garrity, Alfresco Community Manager Later, I was fortunate to be invited to join Documentum when it was still a very small company. I had no previous content management experience but was intrigued by the business model and the broad range of applications. Let's talk about Alfresco itself. How would you define Alfresco ? An Open Source Social Ready Alternative for Enterprise Content Management ? Yes, that‘s a great description! It is social-ready but also collaboration-ready, webdevelopment-ready and enterprise-ready. It is a great alternative to the large, expensive closed-source vendors especially in these times of economic crisis. Can you tell us what are the strengths and weaknesses of this solution for you? One thing that stands out in my mind is the robustness of the Alfresco foundation. Most other leading ECM vendor’s base technology was designed more than ten years ago. Our engineers, many of whom had ECM experience before coming to Alfresco, were able to start with a blank slate. With their collective experience and the best development tools available like Spring Source, Lucene and Hibernate, they were able to produce a high-quality product in a short amount of time. What's new in Alfresco 3? There is a ton of new things in Alfresco Labs 3. We have a new web development platform called Surf, a new Surf-based collaboration client called Share, support for the SharePoint protocol, improvements to the repository layer and the first implementation of the draft specification for content management interoperability, CMIS. You can learn more on our wiki, http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Labs_3 This version seems to me to be the killer-app of Sharepoint, Am I right? I’m not sure that I would go that far but the Share social computing and collaboration client has some great features. You can find the entire feature list on our wiki, http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Labs_3_Share_Feature_List. Now let's continue with the Alfresco community. Do you have any statistics about the Alfresco community (Members, distribution, partner...) ? Yes, the community is experiencing tremendous growth. We now have more than 74,000 register community members, 7,300 members on the forums and 1,300 members on our Facebook group. Both of our recent community meetings (DC, Munich) were so popular that we had to turn away people. Alfresco created competitions/ events like the Alfresco Chumby Awards for Community Achievement , Alfresco Contributor of the Month, Alfresco Developer Challenge... Can you give us more explanation about them? What are they for, what's their purpose and value for the community? Our awards program is a way to recognize community members for their contributions It ‘s critical to the continued success of Alfresco that not only do we have a large community but we have an active community that participates at a high level.

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Interview : Nancy Garrity, Alfresco Community Manager Do you have other ideas to promote work community in the future? Yes, we have had barcamps in the past where community members shared experiences and best practices with each other. Starting in November, 2008 we are going to have a series of codecamps across the US and Europe where community members will learn to develop on the Surf platform. Can you advise us on public meeting/ event or conference we must not miss in the near future ? The community meetings are a great way to learn about the new products and features, to provide your input to the roadmap and to network with other community members. Developers should check the forums and Facebook for codecamp details. What would you say to conclude this interview? I’d invite all of your readers to download our Labs 3 release and try it, http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Installing_Labs_3. We’ve also put together some great 5-minute videos , you can find them on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=alfresco101 and on Vimeo at http://vimeo.com/videos/search:alfresco. Then, join the community and participate! Many thanks, Nancy, for this interview. We wish you a nice and exciting journey on Open Source ECM Road! To find out more about Alfresco : www.alfresco.com Nancy Garrity's blog : http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/nancy/ or on Facebook : http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=6063383762

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