IT Manager's Journal

Against this backdrop, Alfresco has announced a full-tilt foray into social networking outside the firewall, allowing its document-management system to integrate with public social networking platforms, most notably Facebook. Facebook users can share documents with their friends and updates appear in their friends' Facebook news feeds whenever documents are uploaded or updated.

John Newton, chairman and CTO of Alfresco, says his is the first enterprise content management (ECM) vendor to use Facebook in this way and that integration with other platforms is a top priority for his company, which recently received $9 million in Series C venture-capital funding. One of the firms involved, Accel Partners, also invested $13 million in Facebook in 2005.

Make no mistake -- Facebook is talking to Alfresco, not replacing it. Getting them to talk requires a working, Internet-facing copy of Alfresco's newest version and basic development skills with Alfresco. Complete instructions are available at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Facebook.

The net effect is to have Facebook handle authentication and user membership in groups, while Alfresco handles simple document upload, download, and sharing tasks. The Facebook application is not full Alfresco. The sample integration application includes only documents, not Web content, and does not support more advanced features of Alfresco such as rules and approval chains.

However, Newton expects that this full integration will come. "Our plan is to use that [sample application] to make our own content community resources accessible in Facebook," he says. Other integrations include MediaWiki, Liferay, and JBoss Portal. Others are in the works, such as Google's OpenSocial.

Newton singles out OpenSocial as a "strategic" integration because OpenSocial is meant to be a common API that multiple social sites will implement. Google currently claims support from Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. Integration with OpenSocial would give Alfresco access to all OpenSocial sites with a single code base.

Luis Sala, senior director of solutions engineering for Alfresco, says the end goal is to turn Alfresco into a fully "mashable" application that can participate in two-way mash-ups with such diverse social platforms as iGoogle, Facebook and WordPress. The current integrations with Facebook and other platforms, he says, are meant to lay the groundwork for bringing the key benefits of social computing inside the corporate firewall.

"If you look at Web application projects on SourceForge," he says, "you'll notice the most popular ones are PHP-based" because PHP is a straightforward and easy-to-learn scripting language. Alfresco's development team is focused on making the Java-based ECM programmable by non-Java programmers. "Java has a lot of overhead associated with it -- not technical but intellectual," he says. Alfresco's move to a modular, widget-oriented and Adobe Flex-based user interface is intended to flatten this learning curve.

Newton calls this "content as a service," a play on the "software as a service" mantra that forms the core of Service-Oriented Architecture, or SOA, a software development model to which many enterprises are trying to align.

Newton says software itself is changing, with computers increasingly facilitating personal contact through content-sharing rather than just doing rote calculation tasks. "Content needs to go wherever content needs to go," Newton says. In this model, companies could publish their information to appropriate users as they see fit, whether those people are inside or outside the company. It's perfect for a mash-up world." He notes that individuals are already comfortable with Web 2.0 technologies outside the company but find themselves working around companies' enterprise software, not with it, to share information. Often the only way for team members to share useful information found on the Web is to e-mail the links to their compatriates.

A 2007 McKinsey study had IT executives evenly split on the value of social networking, with 37% viewing it as something to use and 39% as something to avoid. In August, enterprise IT security firm Sophos released the results of an online survey in which half of respondents reported that Facebook was banned in their organizations.

More recently, UK security firm MessageLabs reports that such blocking might be much less prevalent than suggested by media articles based on the Sophos report; accounting for just 5% of blocked web traffic MessageLabs says blocking of such sites is on the rise, though. Meanwhile, in a late 2007 report, Forrester Research coins the term "tech populism" to describe a trend toward employees' ad-hoc use of public web tools to enhance productivity, not waste time.

Widespread or not, the blocking of social-networking sites like Facebook would be an obstacle to Alfresco's content-anywhere model. Newton says that walling off too much of the Internet has a negative effect on the desirability of working for a company and that worker demands often result in popular sites being unblocked. "I think it's going to be up to the employees themselves," he says. "Talent just goes elsewhere."

Dion Hinchcliffe, writing for ZDNet.com, predicts that this cross-firewall model will make security "a fast growing concern." He says this year will be marked by companies casting about for security solutions for the "increasingly porous" corporate firewall.