Opinion: Successful systems add new function to processes that users already understand.
Users rarely behave as planned unless thats the easiest thing for
them to do.
Alfresco
Softwares enterprise content management platform,
released
today, applies this basic lesson in an open-source,
service-oriented architecture approach that makes content management a
path of least resistance -- instead of creating a parallel process that
asks users to do extra work.
"You need to fit within the paradigms that users are familiar with.
Files, they understand. E-mail, they understand. Searching with Google,
they understand. We want it to look like a file system to add stuff in,
like e-mail for process, and like Google for finding stuff," said John
Newton, Alfrescos CTO and chairman, during our pre-release conversation
in mid-October. The companys site offers
a users-eye view
of the system in action, and I think youll agree that its a pretty
intuitive approach.
Alfresco gets considerable leverage from both its basis in
open-source technology and its service-oriented model. Alfrescos
Newton was co-founder and lead designer at
Documentum, the content
management powerhouse
acquired
almost two years ago by EMC. "There are loads of things that Documentum
wouldnt have to write anymore," observed Alfresco CMO Ian Howells, a
distributed database Ph.D. who also spent time with that company. "We had
to develop a whole document model, but now theres
Hibernate. Whats happened is
that modern tools change the whole level of productivity of what you
can do."
Being designed with the SOA model in mind makes Alfresco highly
extensible on the inside without adding complexity on the outside.
"Its about a content life cycle," Howells explained: "Youre changing
the security of the document, where its stored, perhaps it goes into
readable PDF for public use, but you shouldnt have to know that. It
should just happen."
Making things "just happen" is also a crucial goal for
multicore
CPUs, which wont just make old code run faster in the manner of
the new CPUs that weve seen ever since the Intel 386. Youll find my
notes on that challenge, as described by Microsoft architect Herb
Sutter at last weeks Fall Processor Forum in San Jose, with links to
additional resources on the
Inside eWEEK
Labs blog and in my commentary in this weeks
eWEEK Podcast.
Tell me what paths youre making -- and following -- at
peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis in programming environments and developer tools.
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