Alfresco DevCon 2018 Highlights

By Bindu Wavell

Alfresco DevCon 2018 was held in Lisbon, Portugal and was, once again, packed with insightful presentations and networking with some of the industry’s thought leaders. Zia had four attendees and presentations from myself and Principal Consultant, Vijay Prince. Our team not only enjoyed the collaboration and learning, but also discovering the beautiful city, great weather, and excellent food.

The event started with a Hackathon and the team Zia was on had a project around Improving generator-alfresco Yeoman generator. There were also well received trainings offered although our team did not participate in them.

The next day started the full official conference schedule and started with a keynote presentation from Thomas DeMeo & Brian Remington titled Alfresco Product Direction & The Evolution of Alfresco’s Digital Business Platform which had great insights on the company’s roadmap and direction. With four tracks in most time slots, we missed tons of great talks. We are very excited to binge-watch videos from the missed sessions when they are posted on their YouTube channel in the next week or so. Our team went to a wide variety of sessions with some emphasis on ADF, AWS and Docker/Kubernetes. Two particular highlights were the talk by Jeff Potts about our joint customer Noble’s strategy for moving gigantic files and Vijay’s presentation on our work to extend the Alfresco Bulk Export Tool. 

On day two of talks, John Newton gave a keynote presentation on the Impact of Emerging Technologies on Content. His Star Wars themed presentation was well received and discussed the future of the industry. It had a lot of meat which our team will be considering for a long while to come. A few highlights of talks we were able to attend included Ray Gauss’ presentation on Digital Business Platform Extensions, Luis Cabaceira and Piergiorgio Lucidi’s joint talk on Apache ManifoldCF Output Connectors, and I enjoyed presenting about our work to make the Yeoman generator for Alfresco compatible with SDK 3. You can view presentation here, and the demo here.

Day three, which was post-conference, featured AWS Training to leverage the AWS Service Catalogue and accelerate production-ready workloads. This training helped to solidify the Alfresco idea that AWS and cloud-related services are critical for the new era of ECM.

One of the most interesting things to come out of DevCon has been the discussion on the future of Share and how ADF and the Alfresco Content/Process Apps can be enhanced to support use cases that are current filled with Share. Much of this discussion has been happening on Twitter. Attendees are attempting to move the discussion to a community area in order to provide a single place for people to catch up and contribute to the conversation. Join in here.

Read individual recaps from fellow attendees below.

The trip to Lisbon, Portugal to attend DevCon 2018 was a great experience. I attended the Hackathon to develop a new sub-generator to create a javascript root object for the Yeoman alfresco-generator. As a first time attendee, I really appreciated the fact that Alfresco brought a lot of engineers to DevCon to help us network. I was able to connect and attend some talks that will help us to provide better migration solutions to our clients. Connecting directly with folks like Luis Cabaceira, Richard McKnight, and Ray Gauss among others was very useful for me. As a developer, it was good to see that Alfresco was concentrating their resources on new technologies. The new architecture of using API and Event gateway to access the heart of Alfresco looks good. This also means that we might not be able to get down and dirty and customize/extend the components behind the gateway. The move to use docker, kubernetes, Helm charts, etc. to deploy and orchestrate Alfresco clusters is really interesting. The keynote by John Newton that talked about the impact of emerging technologies like AI on ECM was interesting.

Lisbon was a great choice for DevCon 2018. The city is beautiful with a lot of great food choices and mild weather. The Hackathon on day one was well attended and there was a lot of interest in Bindu’s Yeoman alfresco-generator project. I personally worked on creating a generator for Alfresco Share surf extension modules. As a Minecraft fan, it was great to see ContentCraft at the Hackathon, a project that builds an Alfresco repository that you can walk through. The conference was focused on the future of Alfresco development. There were lots of talks on the Alfresco Developer Framework (ADF) and the new vision for the Digital Business Platform (DBP). Lots of effort is being put into ADF to make it a viable tool for creating tailored user interfaces for clients. The future of Alfresco is going to be the DBP which changes the Alfresco architecture into a “microservices” driven structure which can be deployed into scaling production environments that use technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. We were able to interface with key Alfresco employees in these areas so that we have contacts to reach out for guidance. It was also great to meet big names in the Alfresco community like Jeff Potts and Axel Faust. The excitement for emerging technologies and the future of Alfresco from the Alfresco employees was evident and I look forward to seeing what they come out with this year.