dbi Blog

BeeCon? Beacon? Bacon? Is it some kind of party where you eat some bacon the whole day? Well… Sort of but it is much better! So let me present you the reason behind the BeeCon first.

Back in the Alfresco Summit 2013, the idea of an organization, a group or people from the Alfresco Community came up. This idea grew up and finally in 2014, the Order Of The Bee (OOTB) was created. You can find more details about this community on the website directly. In case you never noticed, the logo of Alfresco really looks like a flower and therefore we are all bees around the flower ;). I joined this community one year ago because I’m working with the Alfresco products (including the Alfresco Community Edition) for years now and I’m still loving it!

Last year, Alfresco cancelled its Alfresco Summit (3 days annual event) because they rather wanted to focus on small events all over the worlds, the Alfresco Days (0.5 or 1 day event in a lot of cities over the year). Since these Alfresco Days are, in my opinion, more sales oriented, the Order Of The Bee started to talk a few months ago about the possibility to create its own Community event, completely oriented on technical topics. And finally here we are, the first BeeCon is taking place in Brussels, the city of beer. You can find the agenda and some other information on the dedicated website too.

For the first day of this first edition, I attended some really nice sessions. The day began with a short introduction by key members of the OOTB and then a one hour keynote from John Newton, the CTO and Founder of Alfresco (as well as co-founder of Documentum) about the journey to a digital world during which he made a few announcement regarding Solr 6, AngularJS, aso… AngularJS is a JavaScript framework and apparently Alfresco is working with that to give the ability to Afresco Administrators and Developers to create their own Application (UI for Alfresco) just like “Share” (the default one). They only started to work on this topic a few weeks ago but we should expect a first prototype to be released to the community in the next month or so. I can’t wait to be able to play with this new tool to create my own Application on top of the Alfresco Repository! Some information:

After that, I attendee some presentations about how to better use PostgreSQL for Alfresco and another one regarding the AAAR module which is basically a simple way to use Business Intelligence in Alfresco using data stored in Alfresco (metadata from your database) but also data from other locations.

The Lightning Talk #1 (7 presentations of 5 minutes with a common slideshow for all presenters and with a timer that never stops) was also really interesting because we got several presentations showing that the community is very busy: new add-ons are constantly in development to create some auditing reports on Aikau or to enable the automatic recognition and classification of your documents thanks to a Machine Learning engine.

Finally, this day ended with a Q&A session with the head of Alfresco and a presentation of Thomas DeMeo (VP of Product Management @ Alfresco) regarding the RoadMap of Alfresco products for the next months. Here are two photos taken during the day to show you what is coming in the next few months/years regarding Alfresco (1st: John Newton // 2nd Thomas DeMeo):