Roadmap
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
- Scalability, performance, and enterprise-readiness
For a historical view of Alfresco's 2006 and 2007 product objectives and roadmap, please look here.
Alfresco Labs (formerly 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.
Alfresco Labs3c: Released December 5th 2008
The Labs3c release will include the following main enhancements:
- Alfresco Web Studio. A visual, drag-and-drop designer for building web sites with the Alfresco Surf platform. See Web Studio for more details.
- Alfresco Native MediaWiki Integration. The Alfresco Labs 3c release will include a native MediaWiki integration with the Alfresco repository. See MediaWiki for more details.
Alfresco Labs 3b: Released September 10th 2008
The following are some of the enhancements we are planning for our September 2008 release.
- New REST APIs based upon ATOM Publishing
- New look and feel for Alfresco Share
- Additional usability enhancements
- Additional collaboration components, including instant messaging
- A new properties framework for extended metadata
- New people and site search capabilities built around social networking
- Web views support for Microsoft Office SharePoint emulation
- Associated technical documentation
Alfresco Labs 3 Preview (formerly 3.0 Community): Released July 31, 2008
Alfresco Labs 3 Preview (formerly Alfresco Community 3.0) was released July 31st 2008. This release launches a new web development framework called Alfresco Surf 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
- Alfresco Surf - A new Web Script based web framework for componentized, flexible construction of custom Alfresco web client experiences
- Alfresco Share - A new application from Alfresco, providing social computing and collaborative content services built on Alfresco Surf
- Separation of the Alfresco web repository from the new Alfresco Share 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
- 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 multi-file actions and upload
- Support for rich subscription notifications via activity feeds
- Support for bookmarkable web client pages and page views
- Support for Wikis, Blogs, Discussions, Calendars and Document Library within the content of social networking 'Sites'
- Customizable Personal and Site Dashbords via drag and drop
- New services for thumbnailing and activities to support social networking
- Introduction of Public RESTful API.
- 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
More detail on the release can be found at Alfresco Labs 3. 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.
Additionally, please note that while Alfresco Share introduces 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's 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: Released October 31st 2008
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 October 2008.
