Alfresco joins forces with Joomla! on CMIS project

Today, Alfresco announced a joint project with the Joomla! web content management system where Alfresco will act as the content repository for Joomla! web sites. Just last week we posted the special report, "Five open source content management systems you should know about" and both these companies appeared on the list. Alfresco believes the partnership will enable users to more effectively manage, preview and track increasing volumes of content and digital assets on collaborative Joomla! websites using Alfresco’s content library. This will also enable Alfresco users to search, publish, share, download and edit content directly on Joomla! sites.

John Newton, CTO at Alfresco says the two open source projects are working together because of requests from and requirements by common customers and common user bases. It turned into a very interesting exercise cross open-source community building, while also showing that CMIS could work in real-world applications.

"It was a real opportunity to demonstrate two open source projects working together," Newton says, providing a way for the two to take advantage of the strengths of each platform, and using CMIS to blend the two systems together. "The Joomla! guys have a built a way of accessing Alfresco to be able to search and browse from Alfresco using CMIS," Newton said.

While Joomla! does have content management capabilities, it will take advantage of Alfresco's more sophisticated, enterprise-class document management features such as meta-data extraction, content control and other services found in Alfresco's package. Joomla! will also get access to Alfresco's Flex preview feature that enables users to view documents online without opening a third party application such as Microsoft Word to do so. Newton says this gives customers capability, not unlike YouTube, for documents.

While CMIS is still not yet an approved standard, Newton believes it will be within a year, and he thinks it's better to use this capability now, and then tweak it later if it gets altered in the OASIS standards approval process. "Instead of doing a 180 turn later on, we'll do a few degrees turn to align it with the specification," he said. Regardless, this is an interesting project by two major open source players and it shows that open source cooperation doesn't just happen within projects and communities. It can move beyond that, to where communities can work together to produce better and more interesting hybrid products.

For more information:
- see the Alfresco press release

Related Articles:
Five open source content management systems you should know about: Alfresco
Five open source content management systems you should know about: Joomla!
One on One with John Newton of Alfresco