Last week, aety was represented at the annual Alfresco community conference. The conference was held in Zaragoza, Spain, and although it’s an exciting and tasty city, it’s the professionalism we’re talking about today.
Alfresco is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform(you can read more about ECM here), which is available in an open source version that a community has grown around. In fact, the “Order of the Bee” is so strong that they are able to organize the BeeCon conference, after Alfresco itself deprioritized holding developer conferences.
We gathered around 200 attendees to learn and get inspired, and the conference did not disappoint. I won’t go through all the talks I attended, but instead summarize and highlight selected goodies. The program and talks with slides can be found on the BeeCon website.
The overriding theme this year was tools for developers. We saw examples of how easy it has become to develop new applications on top of the platform. Alfresco has recently invested a lot in making it easy for developers to get started by making it possible to work with standard tools and frameworks. The starting point has typically been a standard interface that had access to the full range of functionality, but was also very generic in nature. And with customization came the usual problems of complexity and high upgrade costs that you see in all kinds of other systems.
But now there is an SDK for developing new services, well-defined service layers, and a brand new front-end framework based on Angular 2, which means that the barrier to entry for new developers has become a lot lower, and at the same time, with the new tools you can build applications quite quickly (think days instead of months), and thus support getting functionality out to users quickly, who can then provide feedback.
But what can you do with Alfresco? The different talks gave an insight:
- Alfresco as a foundation for patient records – in the Spanish province of Galicia, there are 20,000 users managing almost 5 million records with an average response time of 1 second for document downloads (take that, Health Platform!)
- Text and image analysis via machine learning and AI. For example, for automatic classification
- In the same category, we saw examples of sentiment analysis (assessing the “mood” of a document), which can be used for customer satisfaction analysis, for example
- Integration with the company’s ERP system
- Integration with cloud services and deployment on e.g. Amazon Web Services
The range emphasizes Alfresco’s status as a platform that has many uses, of course especially in relation to what we can broadly call “documents” and the processes related to them.
Beecon is very much a cousin-cousin party where old acquaintances meet. But people are open and friendly, and it’s very easy to talk to the experts, as the attendees include both Alfresco employees and people who have been working with the platform for years. That access is extremely valuable and attending BeeCon is highly recommended.
