Towards the end of last year, I was advisory solution architect on a project where I assessed that Alfresco was the right base product to build on. This was a very large project for the Danish public sector (high 8 digits at the very least in Danish kroner), and the bid team understandably wanted commercial technical recourse. Making a long story short, I got in touch with Matt Asay who got us on the phone with the European representatives (one of whom was actually on vacation), and pretty soon we had technical and economic estimates from Alfresco. All within 120 minutes, at 8 in the evening. I think that anecdote obviates the need for any superlatives; if I ever have my own company, that will be my benchmark for responsiveness.

I must confess, I'm writing this as part of a conspiracy with Roberto Galoppini. Alfresco is on our maps, enterprise open source is on our maps, and public sector open source is also. I have not seen much Alfresco in the European public sector and none in the Danish public sector, and this is an unfortunate misrepresentation of what Alfresco could represent.

The SharePoint jungle

I believe Alfresco could be far more important an element in European public IT, and it is a puzzle that this isn't so. Denmark is a SharePoint forest, a system which requires a disproportionately high degree of effort to come close to satisfying requirements - mainly because Microsoft oversell what would otherwise be considered a reasonable document repository. Couple that with the fact that developers who actually like developing in SharePoint are rare (I think these people are usually rounded up and institutionalized pretty quickly). Without descending into a feature parity concours d'elegance, without SharePoint compatibility Alfresco should be considered a superior base technology than SharePoint; with SharePoint compatibility, we shouldn't even be having this discussion.

But we are, aren't we.

In Roberto's blog post (which is better informed than mine) he takes a good hard look at the influence on product growth and viability from a licensing perspective. I am interested in the community perspective, and here I think Alfresco the company has missed the plot.

The community

Alfresco Ohloh statsIt's more common today to disregard the role of the indie developer in commercial enterprise free sofware; here's an excellent rationalisation from Matt Asay on the matter, just to be incredibly topical. Is this community irrelevant? Possibly, but I've been seeing a scenario over and over again which ought to make Alfresco think twice.

It is the scenario of an organization with an IT requirement, with a budget, and with technical people who are in influencing roles who advocate what they know, what they believe in. This isn't some free software idealist's daydream, it is the reason Fortune 500s were already using Linux by the time management became interested in the option.

These people - an MBA might call them key influencers or champions - would be the community. I don't need to pull statistics out of mailing lists like Michael Meeks did for OpenOffice.org to know that there is a paucity of this form of community. If there were, we'd be seeing far more Alfresco adoption. Alfresco has a community, but it isn't the kind which generates the kind of business growth which the potential of their product would merit.

Again, I know that Alfresco has a solid list of European customers. But I don't need to contrast that with a list of who uses SharePoint, do I? SharePoint ought to be struggling against Alfresco and it isn't.

The Alfresco contributor agreement (pdf link) is quite reasonable in the sense that the terms are quite standard for a commercial open source project. Documentation looks pretty good. But then surprisingly, matters look a bit sparse when you examine Featured Contributions, Featured Articles, and as a matter of fact the whole developer wiki. None of this is surprising given the lack of directed attention to business development via community development, and none of this necessarily detracts from the quality of the product itself.

Measuring the gap

Red Hat's open source activity mapI think an interesting key performance metric Alfresco might set for itself is what the awareness level is of Alfresco as an option amongst IT professionals in theit target market, and then to compare this percentage with the level of awareness of the Firefox option amongst desktop users in general. It doesn't matter one bit that the two products are apples and oranges; what matters is that Firefox is a good example of product growth through community prioritisation. This metric could give objective form to the large awareness gap which is slowing the adoption of what could be one of the most influential open source products in the market.

Higher ambitions

Let me paint a picture in primary colors. An ECM with Alfresco's featureset would inevitably be a central element of most IT infrastructures it would be deployed in. With an open system as a central element, integration and deployment of other open source systems would become orders of magnitude more viable.

Now, the same picture in black and white. It isn't OpenOffice.org (with its unsustainable codebase and community) which has the potential to dislodge proprietary software from European enterprise IT, it's Alfresco. The bad news is the company behind Alfresco is not growing the product fast enough; the good news is I know for a fact they're smart enough to listen.