Alfresco
Drupal and Alfresco
Alfresco and Optaros, in conjunction with Acquia, have made available a set of Drupal modules that integrate Drupal with Alfresco using the CMIS APIs. See the CMIS module and the CMIS Alfresco module on drupal.org.
It all started with my Amnesty blog post a year or two ago. A lot of people mailed me asking me if I could find out more about Amnesty's Drupal Alfresco integration. I've had ongoing discussions with Alfresco ever since, and Matt Asay (VP of Business Development at Alfresco) assigned Yong Qu to do the initial integration work. Optaros, who has extensive experience with both Drupal and Alfresco (they are partners with both Alfresco and Acquia), saw a similar demand in the market and joined the integration effort. They have since built on top Alfresco's initial implementation and released the two Drupal modules on drupal.org.
Jeff Pots from Optaros provides a lot of details in his blog post.
These modules mark a first step towards enterprise-grade document management support for Drupal -- something enterprise users have asked for a lot. What is also cool about this approach is that different Drupal sites can share a single repository of assets. Images and other media assets from one site could be shared with different sub-sites, for example. Futhermore, the CMIS interface, which operates independently of the Alfresco integration, enables your Drupal site to connect with different content repositories. As indicated in a previous blog post, this could be a big deal if enough vendors adopt CMIS.
It is still very early and there is plenty of work left to be done. The high level roadmap for the modules is available in the module descriptions on drupal.org. Now that the foundation of the integration is in place, the goal is to improve the work based on customer demand, and if available, with help from the community.
Amnesty using Drupal
Rob Purdie just announced that Amnesty International relaunched on Drupal. Check it out at http://amnesty.org ...
It looks like Drupal's localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n) features were used to translate the website into 3 languages; an Arabic translation is available as well. (Arabic is written predominantly right-to-left which, frankly, is funny to watch but hard to implement in a CMS.)
Roughly a week ago, Wim Mostrey from CivicActions already gave a sneak preview of the new Amnesty Interational site at Barcamp Brussels. One remarkable fact that I'd would like to learn more about is the integration with Alfresco, an Open Source document management system written in Java.
SharePoint 2007
Bert Boerland predicts: Within 3 years the acronym "CMS" won't mean "Content Management System" anymore but will be redefined to "Community Management System".
Markets are more likely to fragment than to consolidate so I think both will co-exist and inevitably overlap. That said, I agree with the notion that community software will continue to emerge and that content isn't king. And to contribute to the disorderly jumble that is the CMS acronym, may I suggest a third term: Collaboration Management System. It might be a better match.
Especially the introduction of SharePoint 2007 might have significant impact on this particular market. SharePoint 2007 adds features like forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, news aggregation, surveys, issue tracking ... but also install profiles and custom content types. Clearly, Microsoft decided to play catch up. And rumor has it that the improved integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook is jaw-dropping.
Then what is the leading open source alternative for SharePoint 2007? Because of its strong document management functionality, Alfresco comes closest, I think. (It makes them an interesting acquisition target. By RedHat? It could complement JBoss.)
Drupal's document management functionality and integration with tools like Microsoft Office and OpenOffice is severely lacking. As it stands, Drupal is not a good SharePoint alternative, yet there is quite a bit of overlap in terms of functionality. It sure makes for an interesting situation.
I wonder what impact the introduction of SharePoint 2007 will have. What was once an important Drupal differentiator (i.e. bundling a wide variety of functionality into a single platform) will finally become commodity in 2007. Instead, seamless integration with other applications might become essential to compete? Interesting times!
