I didn’t say that yesterday but the BeeCon is a two days event. Yesterday was the first day and therefore the BeeCon is now officially over… I’m quite sad because these two days were really great and I would have wanted them to continue a little bit more.

 

I was finally able to meet some people from the Order Of The Bee with whom I had quite interesting discussions over the past few months and to see again some others which usually went to the Alfresco Summit, just like me. So in conclusion, if you are interested in Alfresco, I can only encourage you to join the OOTB and participate as much as possible. Trust me, I know it can be difficult because time is a wanted resource and contrary to the Dalton Brothers (Lucky Luke, Belgian, yes I know that was easy), you can’t really catch it whenever you want but just do what you can and it will be fine ;).

 

If you are reading this, then you probably read the title of this blog (if not, shame on you ! 😉 ). So let’s talk about the first session of the day presented by Joram Barrez (co-founder of the Activiti Project and Engineer @ Alfresco). As you probably already understood, his session was about the next evolution of BPM Awesomeness: Activity 6. Activity is the BPM engine included in Alfresco and starting Q4 2014/Q1 2015, Alfresco also deliver it as a separate server for you and your business architects to be able to design your own workflow from A to Z using the graphical interface only. As shown yesterday (see photos from this blog), Activiti 6 isn’t yet released since it is planned for Q4 2016. Therefore that was a pretty good taste of what will come soon with basically the presentation of what has been changed on the core product. One important point repeated during this session was that Activiti 6 will be fully backward compatible which is really cool. There are also some performance testing going on but so far Activiti 6 is always faster that the version 5.

 

In addition to that, there were two sessions about the Alfresco Software Development Kit (SDK) and the Alfresco Software Provisioning Kit (SPK). The first one, presented by Ole Hejlskov which shown the good, the bad and the ugly about the SDK because yes that’s true that the Alfresco SDK made some really huge improvements over the past few years but the destination is still far away… Ole also presented the past, the present and the future of the Alfresco SDK, introducing the SDK 3.0 which should come in the next few months (first release you will be able to play with will come around June). The second presentation has been given by Enzo Rivello. The Alfresco SPK can be used to automate the creation of images and systems ready to be deployed/used. It appears to be a really promising tool so take a look at that in the near future too!

 

I also attendee two sessions talking about migration tools. The first session was related to general considerations when using an ETL approach to perform your migration. This is actually what we did years ago when we migrated our old & crappy DMS to Alfresco (of course we are using Alfresco, that’s the best 😉 ). The second one focused on Move2Alf which is an open-source software solution to migrate to Alfresco that allows error handling, reporting, scheduling and a few other stuff. That was also quite interesting because even if you have your own way to migrate your content, comparing solutions can only bring new ideas and the solution to use will depends on the use case.

 

Now last but not least, zombies… Yeah, I know… I was also questioning myself when I saw in the agenda a session presented by Jeff Potts with the following title: “Would the commercial open source software you depend on survive a zombie apocalypse”. If you are a little bit interested in Alfresco, then you probably know Jeff. His session was actually quite fun because the whole reason for this presentation was: what would happen if all employees of Alfresco were attacked by zombies. The idea is simple but Jeff really made us think about it and takes us to his imaginary world. How would the community react in such case? Would we be able to take the code of Alfresco and make it lives? What are the strength of the community and Alfresco and what can be done to improve that in the future?

 

I also attendee some others sessions like the following ones but I can’t talk about all sessions even if I would like to:
– Lightning Talk #2
– What to think about when you’re planning to install Alfresco
– The product vision for Community Edition
– …

 

Still not convinced by the BeeCon? Well take a look at the few goodies everybody got and I’m sure you will be there too for the next one because yes there will be a next one!

BeeConGoodies1

Especially the glass and the M&M’s marked “BeeCon 2016”, that’s soooo cool :D.

BeeConGoodies2

I wasn’t able to attend the last two sessions because the Brussels’ airport is quite a mess at the moment… Instead of ~ one hour to go through the security, it actually took me a little bit less than three hours so plan accordingly… Even then, my trip to Brussels was a success and I’m looking forward to do it all over again next year (in Spain :D)!

See you around ;).