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Elite Collaborator
Elite Collaborator

ARCHIVED

Please refer to Product Roadmap for the current Alfresco product roadmap information.





As an Open Source company, it is quite natural for us to share what we are doing - you can see the code being added daily to know how real our progress is!  The roadmap presented here is a snapshot of our plans for the year and like all roadmaps it may shift slightly. In 2012, Alfresco will continue to deliver and enrich the same Enterprise grade software that our 1000s of paying and Community users and partners are familiar with. However, new opportunities and challenges for the Enterprise mean we will be dramatically extending our reach and range of products, namely Cloud and Mobile.
With the depth and breadth of our experience and innovation, we are uniquely placed to apply these to the expanding sphere of enterprise content. In 2012, we will have three pillars of activity built on the same foundation, with a well funded programme to grow the set of 3rd party application and solution providers that build or leverage the same platform.

The pillars and foundation are: 


  • Enterprise and Community - continued evolution of our core on-premise product that companies and organizations rely on for business critical content
  • Cloud - the same Alfresco experience available in a public cloud, allowing teams to work elastically, outside the corporate firewall
  • Mobile - focusing on the new tablet device workplace that operates with the Private Enterprise and Cloud
  • Platform and Integrations - providing a robust and reliable API, and customization framework for Alfresco and its customers and ecosystem to build on.

The Cloud offers us a new opportunity as a product company to develop and release new features on a continuous basis. These features will be rolled into the next Enterprise release, with some being made available as add-on modules that can be applied to existing releases of Alfresco.

For features and products already released in 2012, see Released 2012.


Table of Contents


Enterprise and Community


In 2012, we continue to enhance our highly scalable and reliable on-premise Enterprise Content Management products. There will be one major release of Community with the corresponding Enterprise beta this year; the full Enterprise release following early in 2013. Some capabilities will be made earlier than this as add-on components to the current Enterprise release. A key milestone has been the release of version 2 of the Records Management product, which has been made totally modular and extensible, and will continue along this path with a subsequent release later in the year.  We will also be bringing a new set of enhancements to the Share web client around handling rich media, including new views that make working with documents more visual. 2012 will also see the next phase in extending the scale and capabilities of the search engine.


Records Management (Add-On)


RM 2.1


  • Transparent (In-place) Records

Rich Media


  • Grid and Mosaic rich media views (Galleries)
  • Single item and Full Screen Views
  • Image Zoom & Pan
  • Image Manipulation: Crop, Rotate, Convert, Watermark….
  • Enhanced HTML5 Video Playback - Dynamic Streaming
  • Metadata reading/writing
  • Commenting & Annotation
  • Video Thumbnails & Transformation
  • Search

Hybrid Business Processes


In conjunction with the Cloud Sync feature, Hybrid Business Processes allow workflows to transition from on-premise to workflows in the Cloud and back. For example, you can prepare and approve a document prior to engagement with another party, then move the document to the Cloud for collaboration with that party, and finally bring it back within the Private Enterprise for final review and approval.


4.2 Community and Enterprise Server Release


4.2 is our next major Community and Enterprise release. It includes all the features released in Alfresco in the Cloud as well as the following features. 


Alfresco in the Cloud Integration


Allows you to seamlessly interact with your on-premise systems and Alfresco in the Cloud, including:


  • Tasks - View and action cloud task from on-premise system
  • Activities - View and action cloud activities from on-premise system
  • Federated Search - Search across both the cloud and on-premise

Share - Control


  • Fine-Grained Permissions - Control access to content, based on roles, groups, and users
  • Linking between sites - Create links to content across sites
  • Site Quotas
  • Guest (anonymous) access

Share - Smart Search


  • Metadata-driven, faceted searching
  • Geo-location - Find content based geo-location locating tags
  • Spellchecking for search terms - suggest alternatives for misspelled words.

Share - User Experience


  • Non-Flash based alternative for document previews
  • Site Directories
  • Drag-n-Drop support for upload new version
  • Space and Site Templates

Share - Office Integration


  • Support online editing in the repository view

Share - Conversations & Collaboration


  • Activity controls
  • Fine-grained controls for email notifications:
    • Opt in/out by Site
    • Event Type
    • Object
  • Conversations
  • Email-based commenting
  • @messaging

Repository


  • Indexing enhancements for scalability:
    • Index Sharding
    • Multi-store Indexing (Solr)
    • Search Slaves
  • Version policies & version pruning
  • Dynamic Constraints

Workflow


  • Process Definition (Modeling) GUI - simple process creation via browser UI
  • New out-of-the-box process definitions (such as distribution lists)
  • Updated UI components (simplification); backwards compatible

Administration


  • Authentication, Search, and Cluster Administration
  • Logging and Monitoring
  • Content Model Management GUI
  • Delegated Admin (such as groups and publishing channels)
  • Repository Dump and Load
  • User Rename

CMIS


  • Support for CMIS 1.1

Forward Looking


The following are candiates features for availability in future product releases:


6-12 Months


  • Remote Content Caching - high available and performance for distributed content delivery
  • Saved Search
  • Term highlighting in search results - show search term hits in search results
  • Capability and Application Management - UI tools for defining application capabilities
  • Share UI refresh - new styling and themes, pluggable views; backward compatible
  • Share Asynchronous Action/Event notifications
  • Enhanced native content authoring and collaborative content editing
  • Improved user profile extensibility
  • Request permssions against read-only content
  • Read-tracking

12 months+


  • Auto-summarization, find related content and images
  • Image OCR
  • Content and Usage Analytics
  • Dynamic Folders (query driven)
  • Secure IMAP support
  • Recycle bin for end users

Alfresco in the Cloud


Alfresco in the Cloud is the new online version of Alfresco that extends Alfresco Enterprise across the firewall to support you when you want to easily and securely collaborate with other organizations. It allows you to use mobile devices without VPN to access your content on the move, plus integrate with other Cloud services such as Google Docs. It can be used by itself as an online collaboration service, or in a hybrid model that users behind the firewall can selectively push and synchronize content between Enterprise and Cloud. You can work outside the firewall securely while still allowing your business to retain control of its content.  The service is Freemium, which means you can sign up by yourself to use a free version for day to day collaboration, while organizations can upgrade for additional administration, security and support. Some features in our roadmap are only available to upgraded users and are marked accordingly.  Due to the nature of Cloud, new features will be rolled into the product on an ongoing basis with very limited or no disruption to the service. 


SharePoint Protocol


  • Enables you to open and edit Microsoft Office documents in Alfresco directly in MS Office with one click. You can then edit and save changes back directly from MS Office without having to upload the new version.
  • Enables high fidelity editing of Microsoft Office documents using MS Office on the desktop without having to install any additional plugins.

LDAP/AD Integration - SAML 2.0 (Upgrade Feature)


  • Allows you, as a customer, to integrate your on-premise user directory with Alfresco in the Cloud using SAML so your users can log on to Cloud using their existing on-premise credentials and have Single-Sign-On with other company systems 

Advanced Search


  • Allow users to search documents by standard and customs aspects tagged to files.

Public Share Enhancements


  • Enable/disable download of a document by non-authenticated users
  • Password protection
  • Link expiry dates

Review & Approval


  • New Review & Approval workflow to easily send documents for approval
  • Review & Approval history UI for document that allows you to see if a document version has been signed off

Auditing (Upgrade Feature)


  • Captures audit events so Network Administrators can track user access to files in their Network
  • Allows you to see a history of who viewed or downloaded a file on Alfresco, along with other audit events
  • Provides rich reports for Network Administrators on activity across Network such as user logins, file uploads, and most active users

Multi-Language Support


  • Addition of new languages beyond English so you can choose which language to use Alfresco in
  • Enhancements to localization support in Alfresco so you can select which language you see in Alfresco by default

Forward Looking


The following are candiates features are planned for future development.


6-12 Months


Automated Billing

  • Allow users to use self-service to upgrade packages and pay by credit cards.
Social Publishing

  • Allows you to push content out to social channels such as YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, and FaceBook
  • Great for distributing completed and approved marketing content online and viewing basic usage data within Alfresco 
User Experience Refresh

  • New up-to-date look and feel for Share with UX improvements across the application 
My Files

  • User home directory that allows collaboration and sharing of content without the creation of Sites 

12 Months+


The following features are candidates for this year's roadmap. 


New Activity Feeds & Notifications

  • Enhancements to Site and User Activity feeds to make them richer and more useful to you with more granular Notification controls 
Site Features

  • Enhancements and addition to Cloud of current Private Enterprise Site features such as Calendars, Wikis, and Links
Search Enhancements

  • Improved Search user interface and features such as hit highlighting and faceted search results

Mobile - Tablet and Phone


In 2012 we will rapidly expand the capabilities of our mobile apps, with particular focus on the tablet as a workplace for today and tomorrow's workers. As well as providing out of the box tablet and phone apps that work with Alfresco in the Cloud or on-premise, we are making Software Development Kits for iOS and Android available as Open Source. We will be working closely with a number of established mobile app vendors to use these SDKs to integrate Alfresco content services into their applications. 


Alfresco Mobile iOS


1.5


  • MDM Integration
  • Additional security features

Alfresco Mobile Android 1.0


  • Built on the Alfresco Android SDK
  • Will be Open Source like Alfresco Mobile iOS

Forward Looking


Possible future product releases:


6-12 Months


  • Alfresco Mobile for Android update to match the latest iOS feature set
  • Alfresco Mobile SDK Updates to match latest mobile app releases and offer easy to implement Alfresco User Interface elements
  • Alfresco Mobile for Android and iOS major updates including new User Interface and Alfresco Mobile SDK code base for both versions
    • Collaboration
      • Workflow
      • Board Packets
    • Personal Productivity
      • Rich notes everywhere
    • User administration
      • User and Devices
      • Policies
  • Windows RT will be considered during that period; we will monitor demand from our users and overall impact in the tablet world

12 Months+


  • Alfresco Mobile vertical solutions for select industries

Platform


In 2012, the Alfresco Content Management Platform will once again move the productivity of developers to a new level. A blend of Public APIs and greatly enhanced documentation and tutorials will help every new developer get going quickly, and ensure that what they develop will continue to work in future releases if they follow the API guidelines. 


Module Management Tool (MMT)


  • Refines and extends the MMT in a variety of ways, including:
    • Significantly enhanced validation of AMPs, prior to installation
    • Ability to declare an AMP valid for specific Alfresco editions (Community, Private Enterprise, Cloud or any combination thereof)
    • Ability to declare that an AMP contains repository extensions or Share UI extensions (prevents incorrect installation of an AMP into the wrong WAR file)
    • Support for embedding MMT into external Java tools, such as Maven

Forward Looking


The following are candiates features for availability in future product releases:


6-12 Months


Developer Portal


  • Subsequent releases may include:
    • Feedback mechanisms (rating / commenting on all content, surveys, etc.)
    • Surfacing of content from Alfresco blogs, forums, IRC, twitter, and newsfeeds
    • Samples, both API usage snippets and fully fleshed solutions
    • In-browser execution of API usage snippets
    • Integration with PaaS for execution of fully fleshed out sample solutions

12 Months+


Integrations


We will make full use of our own platform to integrate with a wide range of 3rd party software systems and services, extending our ecosystem and showing best practice in action.


Google Docs 2.0


  • Provides the ability to create and edit documents, presentations, and spreadsheets in the Alfresco document library using the Google Docs editors
  • Will be available for both Cloud and Private Enterprise through separate releases

Yammer


On hold due to Microsoft aquisition


  • Exposes a Yammer activity stream as dashboard dashlet in Share
  • Will be available for both Cloud and Private Enterprise through separate releases

Other Potential Integrations


  • Salesforce
  • Sharepoint
  • Google Apps (calendar, emails, Google+, Google Drive, etc.)
  • SAP
  • Streamwork
  • Aspera
  • Web Conferencing
  • Other CMIS repositories
  • YouSendIt
  • Evernote
  • Email
  • Confluence
  • Instant Messaging

Roadmap