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Does Alfresco Share need an iPhone interface?
Posted on February 26th, 2009 3 commentsAlfresco ist currently designing an iPhone client for their collaboration platform Share. Thus I get an iPod touch from Alfresco as price for winning the Alfresco Developer Challenge a year ago I’m very interested in this stuff.
Here are the wireframes of the user stories at slideshare.
But I’m not sure if this is a real must for Share…I’m not sure if the user NEED this client. Of course Alfresco will gain a lot of marketing momentum offering an “iPhone-Enterprise-Collaboration” app. Does Sharepoint have sth. like that
BUT, from my point of view there are other 1st prio features enterprise customers really need:
- supporting custom Types, Aspects and Metadata (docLib & search)
- group based site membership (& more permission stuff like, SiteCreatorGroup etc.)
- combination of Share & MS Sharepoint protocol usage within MS Office
- Support of Rules inside of Share
Most of these features are part of the Alfresco roadmap. Specially the support of custom types & aspects within Share is a real MUST.
I’m doing ECM-Projects since a while and I cannot remember a project where we used only basis types and metadata.
To sum up:
It’s cool that Alfresco is always developing new stuff, that’s why I love it. But from my point Share is lacking some features which should be done before going onwards with other new apps.3 responses to “Does Alfresco Share need an iPhone interface?”
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You’ll be pleased to know that custom types/aspects and metadata in the docLib is part of the same release as the iPhone app (3E/3.2). The metadata editing will be using the first phase of our new Forms service.
Group based site membership is also coming, as well as moderated sites (request to join).
There is already links between Office and Share, which will continue to get enhanced (we’re fighting with getting tasks/workflow integrated currently).
Rules inside Share is going to have to wait a bit longer (we need to create a rules REST API first), but is definitely a priority.
We are scoping the iPhone work very much in light of everything else that we need to do – it certainly isn’t all about cool new stuff
Paul.
VP Engineering, Alfresco -
Paul, thanks for your quick reply!
I’m very excited regarding the new REST Form Service. I think this is the right approach solving this metadata issue in a generic way.I’m sure that you’ll manage the balance between cool & innovative features and “Enterprise Musts”.
But the current situation isn’t easy for the Alfresco partners, because customers of course want to use Share, but they certainly also want some custom enhancements (e.g. custom content models). The missing support of these features in current Share version forces the partner & customers to implement & override specific functions and thereby take the risk to get a non optimal upgradable solution…
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