Alfresco WCM followup

Last week in a followup webcast to an early February webcast, Alfresco hosted a question and answer session about their planned roadmap for WCM in 2010. Both are pretty informative.

Interestingly as well, there have been a couple of other recent announcements of Alfresco-based WCM offerings, some of which aren't using Alfresco's standard WCM.

Jeff Potts in a good blog post last year described the differences between the WCM and DM repositories. The fact that there are two and that they are not fully compatible has led to some headaches.

Vodori has a video out showing their product Pepper. The Pepper tag library integrates well with a standard JSP-based web site. WYSIWYG and templated page edits are possible. Pepper was implemented using Alfresco WCM to take advantage of the Alfresco WCM publishing capabilities, but they are migrating to the use of the standard DM repository as Alfresco plans to support DM publishing alongside the release of the CMIS 1.0 version.

Last week the Blue Fish Group hosted an Alfresco Webinar. They presented a very nice WCM solution, but one that doesn't use Alfresco's native WCM tools. Their comment was that Alfresco WCM is a bit of a challenge for non-techie people. Their goal was to create a system that would accommodate the needs of casual web content creators.

So while Alfresco has hit a home run with its standard DM capabilities, they still need to do some more work in the area of WCM. While that is a criticism, it's really hard to complain, considering how much Alfresco has done and gotten right over the last five years.

And based on the roadmap, Alfresco is strongly focused on Web Content Management this year. Starting with the recent 3.2r release and the planned 3.3, 3.4 and 4.0 releases, WCM seems to be a central component of their plan.