Interview of John Newton, CTO and Co-founder of commercial open source content management provider, Alfresco. We discuss failures of traditional ECM solutions, the race to complexity and return of simplicity, agile development, and a host of other topics.
MP3 File
Complete Transcription Follows:
Dan Keldsen: This is Dan Keldsen from BizTechTalk, and I am speaking today with John Newton, who is the CTO and co-founder of Alfresco and formerly of Documentum, so quite the experienced guy.
Today, we are talking about "ECM (Enterprise Content Management) does not equal expensive/complex or at least it shouldn't." John, thank you for joining me today.
John Newton: My pleasure Dan.
Dan: Yeah. It's always great to talk to somebody who has been around and understands what the pains are that people feel in ECM, since you have been involved in this a very long time.
Why don't you give us a quick story about where Alfresco came from and how are you attacking the ECM world?
John: First of all, Alfresco is based in Europe despite my American accent.
Dan: Right.
John: It just came from the fact that the enterprise software industry is very, very different today than it was even just a few years ago. What is successful in enterprise software, and open source is one of the few things that is successful. So given my background as the co-founder of Documentum, it just made a lot of sense to take a look at enterprise content management and open source.
I felt this was inevitable, but there was really nothing out there that you would recognize as a traditional enterprise content management system.
Dan: Sure.
John: We figured that we would just go ahead and take advantage of that. We being John Powell, who was the former CEO of Business Objects and the team that built Documentum's web development kit, the Java based web development kit and also the web top client.
So we went out and built Alfresco, using open source components. There is a lot of stuff out there that is just absolutely amazing in terms of its capabilities. It made it a lot easier for us to be able to build a new system from scratch having all the capabilities of object relational mapping, searching, and frameworks.
Being able to weave together complex job applications and make them scalable and distributable as well.
Dan: Right.
John: In about ten months' time from standing start, we were able to get a production enterprise content management system out there focused primarily on document management. We were able to attract then some of the core developers from Interwoven as well to start to work on some web content management.
Dan: Right. So you're purloining from the open source movement and then from all of the deep enterprise experts.
John: Well, I wouldn't use purloin.
(Laughter)
I would say it's more community development.
Dan: There you go.
John: I think it's a more collaborative development of software. It's kind of interesting because a lot of people are coming out of the woodwork that were put off by the closed model and like the idea of an open source model where they can help work with us on development of a scalable repository. They can have the features that they need that they may not have in the system.
Dan: Right. Okay. So some of the key aspects of your solution and I agree that existing open source ECM, well it doesn't seem to exist really. I mean it's pretty much web content management only or blog and that's about it. They're pretty light-weight as it is.
John: Yeah, a lot of them say that they are enterprise content management just because they have some enterprises that might be using it. What enterprise content management really means is maybe about twenty percent of the market today is web content management. The rest are things like document management, image management, records management, compliance applications, publishing applications and things like that.
So we're trying to run the whale gamut and use the open source model to help us in adding those additional application capabilities.
A lot of these things we don't have to do ourselves. For instance, it's a large pharmaceutical company that's building the wiki capabilities for Alfresco.
Dan: Really?
John: Yeah, so it makes life a lot easier for us. Also things like forms management will be coming out in the summertime as well so we'll have ¬¬¬¬X1 support and the ability to store information as XML. The vast majority of that is just upgrading the existing open source tools that already existed.
Dan: Right.
John: That are pretty robust. They have been around for about five years.
Dan: Right. Interesting. I almost fell off my chair there when you said a pharmaceutical company was going to be working on the wiki aspect?
John: Yeah. They're building a sort of next generation collaboration environment around medical imaging so they can capture medical images. Things like x-rays, CAT scans and stuff like that and then to allow the doctors and scientists to be able to comment on those using wiki.
Dan: Huh. Okay, well that makes more sense. I can get back on my chair. I have been talking about wikis for a while and to be honest, at first, I didn't understand it. I thought, like most people, that it was total chaos and it would never work. I don't know what the attraction was, and even though it's free it's just bizarre. Now I've come around to it and it's not the solution to everything but when I try to tell people about it, especially when it's anybody that knows anything about traditional ECM, they are horrified.
I would have thought of a pharmaceutical company as being one of the last people, along with a financial services company, that would want to have anything to do with it. That makes a lot more sense.
John: Yeah. I worked on this concept around knowledge management when I was at Documentum. I spent a year and a half just talking to different companies about how they manage knowledge in their organization. What they actually call knowledge management, whether it's product development or whatever.
There is this very chaotic cycle that happens prior to the formalization of content. Traditionally ECM has been involved in that formalization process. But the collaborative process up front is where you really want to capture all of that information. There is a ton of interest in wikis connected with Alfresco right now because they want to use it the same way that we use wikis at the moment which is all of our product documentation and specifications and things like that is done in a wiki.
Dan: Right.
John: What they want is to be able to take the output of the wiki and to be able to formalize the output, to be able to publish it out. There is a large credit card company that wants to take all of their standards and build their enterprise standards specifications in a wiki and then be able to formalize and publish it out.
They are in contact and working with this pharmaceutical company to see how they can share their development tools in developing these wikis. It's not a crazy idea at all. It's a natural progression of collaborative developmental content and it's just a lot easier to collaboratively develop this stuff and have a formalization process on the other side. You know, review and approval process.
Dan: Right. That's interesting. That's a far more enlightened approach than most of the people that I'm running into. If they know anything about wikis, all they know is wikipedia or one of the horrible experiments like was it the L.A. Times or something? Where they rolled it out and it was total mayhem.
(Laughter)
John: Yeah, yeah.
Dan: Okay, so that's interesting. I've been following the blogging world and the blogging engines for a couple of years. To me, since we've been following enterprise content management at Delphi for however long it has existed, basically since you guys first started Documentum at least, the blogging world understands usability, ease of use, lightweight code, and lightweight displays, things like that, understanding how to feed search engines and things, but they don't necessarily expand well beyond that.
On the flip side, traditional ECM didn't understand the blogging world and they were already too complex to strip down to basics.
John: Yeah.
Dan: Sounds like you're doing a nice balance of the two.
John: Well, we're trying to. I mean, the advantage that we have over a lot of open source products is that experience. Having worked on these systems for fifteen years, we know what some of the problems are and how to solve some of the problems.
But I do think the open source movement itself helps quite a bit. Things like Ajax interfaces are being developed more in the open source world more than they are in the closed commercial world.
Dan: Sure.
John: The fact that the end users are actually participating in the development of the system means that we can overcome some of the usability features that people like bloggers have been able to develop.
Dan: Right.
John: Taking the experience that we had as well, we did see that as far as ECM is concerned a lot of people are just actively avoiding it. They were just using their shared file drive as a replacement for ECM. Really, our competition is more of the shared file drive than it is ECM which actually represents a much, much larger potential market.
We were able to find the only job implementation of the Microsoft shared file drive protocol. We hired the people behind that and they source coded open source. So when you use Alfresco, you're using the paradigms that end users are familiar with so things like shared file drive, Google-like interface and being able to browse through hierarchies the way you would through Yahoo.
Just try to work the way that end users want to work and that will solve a lot of usability problems of enterprise content management.
Dan: Right. Trying to force everybody to understand the usually pretty horribly complex interfaces of traditional ECM means, I mean, you probably have better stats than I do since you lived it so thoroughly. So most of the content, probably 80% of the content in an enterprise probably still doesn't set in an enterprise content management system.
John: No. No, it doesn't.
(Laughter)
And it needs to in an increasingly regulated world that the Feds are going to come after you if you don't do something about it.
Dan: Right. Right. Findability and usability.
John: Yeah. I think the other way that the open source movement can help in this process as well is we've tried to make an open architecture that uses rules engines to be able to apply business logic down at the repository layer. The whole idea is to automate as much as possible.
So using rules, there's a lot of things that if you just apply them intelligently and take advantage of all of the people's knowledge and expertise on how to develop these rules, I think what you'll find is that a lot of things that people are doing manually can just be completely replaced by automated processes.
Dan: Sure.
John: That's what we're really looking forward to, really simplifying ECM and going forward in the future.
Dan: Right and that's certainly something that aside from programmers in the open source world, end users of open source have not seen anything like that so far.
John: Yeah. So we've been able to add quite a bit and I think in the next year or two it's going to be absolutely incredible especially as the academic world is helping us in developing some of these capabilities.
Dan: Right. Well, I realize that we both have busy schedules here, so thank you for your time and hopefully we can touch base as this continues to move along and see where open source and ECM continue to take us.
John: Okay, thanks Dan.
Dan: Thanks a lot.
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