Roadmap
From AlfrescoWiki
Contents |
Introduction
In 2008, Alfresco will focus on five key areas:
- New and enhanced team and enterprise collaboration services
- Publishing and management services for dynamic, Web 2.0-enabled websites
- Web client usability
- Scalability, performance, and enterprise-readiness
- Standards
For a historical view of Alfresco's 2006 and 2007 product objectives and roadmap, please look here.
Community Roadmap
Alfresco's latest and greatest is available in our publically-accessible, Community codeline. Community is a fast-changing laboratory of new and evolving Alfresco features. Community releases are first-to-market with new capabilities, and recommended for evaluation, testing, and Community contributions. Production-suitable capabilities from the Community codeline form the basis for new tested, certified, and supported Alfresco Enterprise features.
Community releases are not supported by Alfresco. For supported releases, please see the Alfresco Enterprise Roadmap.
2.9 Community: Next update June 2008
Our next 2.9 Community release is targeted for June 2008. This update to 2.9 Community will be inclusive of all bug fixes on our 2.1 Enterprise branch up to our latest 2.1 release, 2.1 Service Pack 3 (2.1.3).
This release will also include all feature improvement in our 2.2.0 Enterprise release, including key enhancements to our WCM add-on module and our base ECM platform.
3.0 Community: July 31, 2008
Our next major release, Alfresco 3.0, is slated for Community release at the end of July. This release launches a new web client development framework and out-of-the-box user experience targeted for knowledge workers. This release brings the following major enhancements:
- All functionality / bug fixes available in our June 2008 2.9 Community update
- New Freemarker-based web application framework for componentized, flexible construction of custom Alfresco web client experiences
- Change management and source-code control of any customized or custom-built Alfresco web client (hosted in our WCM repository, for easy development, testing, staging, and deployment)
- Separation of the Alfresco web repository from the new 3.0 Alfresco web client (now a separable web app independently deployable via WCM to a second server with all client-server communication over HTTP(s) via Web Scripts
- Simple packaging, installation, and updates of Alfresco templated sites and site components (for easy migration of web client customizations across servers or sharing of web client customizations amongst the Community)
- Out of the box web client templates for creating social networking sites leveraging enhanced Alfresco collaboration and document management services
- Support for themes to more readily customize look-and-feel
- Support for simple invitation to external users to an Alfresco templated social networking / collaboration site, with auto-registration and mixed authentication for internal users via LDAP/ADS and external users via Alfresco itself
- Support for enabling a look-up of external users to invite to Alfresco via popular social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook
- Support for multi-file actions and upload
- Support for simplified download, edit, and check-in process (reduce number of clicks; eliminate end-users learning curve with Working Copies)
- Support for delegated administration of social networking / collaboration sites
- Support for integrated presence, IM, and teleconferencing (via Skype)
- Support for rich subscription notifications via activity feeds
- Support for simple sharing of any single asset or collection of assets via human-readable URLs or ZIP attachments
- Support for bookmarkable web client pages and page views
A full list of features and timelines can be tracked via our JIRA. Please do review; we've a substantial number of enhancements targeted for this release.
In addition to JIRA, you can also review emerging documentation for the release on our Alfresco 3.0 category page.
Please note that detailed wireframes for our pending 3.0 release will be posted upon completion of our first development milestone, Timebox 1.
Additionally, please note that while Alfresco is launched a new, simplified, easy-to-use and adopt knowledge worker UI, the current JSF client will still be available and unchanged. Based on Community adoption and self-migration to the new web client experience, Alfresco does intend to migrate over the next couple of years to the new UI. Once again, this migration will be paced by the Community and by the Community own self-migration to the new UI infrastructure and user experience.
Enterprise Roadmap
Alfresco's supported releases. Enterprise releases are available to customers with an enterprise subscription. Enterprise releases are tested and certified for customer deployment. Enterprise releases include a maintenance release train of Engineering-led and customer-driven bug fixes to ensure successful operation in an enterprise environment. These bug fixes will periodically be made available in the Community codeline, where they are mixed in with upcoming features and other product enhancements.
Please note that this roadmap highlights major feature releases only. Maintenance release schedules are driven by Alfresco Support.
3.0 Enterprise: Early October
Our next Enterprise release will be based on our 3.0 Community. Our current plan is to have a certified, production-ready version of Enterprise no later than the first week of October 2008.
