Project Proposals

[resplin]

Note: This page could be a useful list of project proposals, but hasn't been updated since before 2010. It would be interesting to see how many of these still apply today.

• Introduction
• Proposing Your Own Project
• Currently Proposed Projects
• Accepted Projects
• Incubating Projects
• Graduated Projects
• Community Development

Introduction

Welcome to the project proposal page.  Here you will find a list of projects that have been proposed as candidates for community development.

Proposing Your Own Project

Should you wish to propose a project then add a page to the list containing its details.

A project proposal should include:

• A brief description of the project
• The project requirements
• Overview of the design approach including details of any custom models, service, action, compoents, ect that you invisage might be created
• Any other information that is relevant for that project

A project proposal does not have to be complete, you may only have an idea and not understand how this can be implemented in Alfresco.  By using this community to record these ideas it will allow other people with the relevant skills to contribute directly to the suggestion with design and implementation ideas.

The more detail that is placed into the project proposal the more likely it is to attract interest from the Alfresco developer community.

These could be good projects for ‌.

Currently Proposed Projects

Please try to keep this list in Alphabetical order:

• Alfresco for Publishing - Alfresco for Publishing AMP.

• Alfresco Amazon Machine Image - Deploy Alfresco to Amazon EC2.

• Alfresco Cafe - A type of space that offers a simple AJAX-based chat interface.

• Alfresco Widget Extensions - Allow for the creation of UI widgets that can be 'syndicated' to any remote website/app. Look at WidgetBox.com for inspiration.

• Alfresco Micro-Formats - Define ATOM and/or RSS-based access to common Alfresco functions.

• Alfresco Notification Service - An abstract service offering per-user notification queues that can be delivered via multiple channels such as IM, E-Mail, RSS, SMS, etc.

• Alfresco Subscription Manager - The ASM allows users to subscribe to events or schedule Search Agents both of which are capable of using the Alfresco Notification Service to notify users of said events.

• Alfresco XUL Client - Use Mozilla's XUL interface language to create a rich Alfresco desktop client.

• Amazon S3 File-Store - Create a new file-store/content-store that can leverage Amazon S3 for storage. You can then create an Alfresco image that runs on Amazon EC2.

• Backup system plugins Backup plugins for systems such as Veritas to support full and incremental backup and restore regardless of the storage engines we are running in the background.

• Blog Publishing - Use Alfresco to manage and publish content to blog applications such as WordPress & Movable Type

• Content Addressable Storage (CAS) support - A new contentStore implementation based on a CAS system.

• Decompose webclient into smaller apps The webclient is composed of many functional parts that could be each one, a separate application.  It may be possible to decompose the application into smaller applications that could be reassembled in different arrangements to best serve the needs of clients. Portal and the next spec with inter portlet communication offer a standards based solution to this problem. 

• import and query of medical images - Add Functionality to import and search for(series and sequences of) medical images (DICOM -conformant files containing CT, PET or MRI images). All DICOM metadata attributes like image modality type, equipment number, acquisition parameters, image resolution and clinical trial study data should be parsed and stored as Lucene indexes. Also create, store and show Thumbnails of the DICOM files. Build an advanced search form for querying all the metadata. Interface with DICOM visualisation software.

• Diff Tool Plugins Develop functionality around diff between different files in the repository and versions of the same file

• Dynamic Spaces Spaces are a form or way or organizing content. Spaces are usually organized around a strong taxonomy within an organization. Dynamic Spaces allow content to be viewed ways which are different then their primary organization.  This feature would allow business units to organize the same documents in several different ways. Plone calls these smart spaces

• JCR JNDI adapter - Alfresco JCR JNDI adapter

• knowledge base - Alresco based knowledge base, like wiki and forums could leverage federation etc

• Liferay-Portal Extension

• Limited Download Tickets Extension - allows limited download tickets to be handed out from the repository

• MAGE-ML Metadata Extractor - a metadata for MAGE-ML (microarray) files

• MS Office and OpenOffice Plugins - Access common Alfresco functionality through the popular office suites.

• OpenID integration with OpenID authentication

• Publish Subscribe Content Notifications A Publish Subscribe mechanism by which clients could could issue a query to the repository indicating the domain of content in which they are interested in, in addition to what type of events are of interest would enable a host of exciting integration capabilities including deployment, federation, etc.

• Permission that can be delegated Allow the owner of an object to grant visibility and access to other users, roles and groups in the system.  Access that changes based on workflow, object state, folder etc is also important. These can be emulated by the process which can take ownership or temporarily grant access to users, roles, and groups.  Access granted to spaces is important but seems to fall short as the basis of the security scheme.

• Permissioned metadata Provide the capability to permission the metadata assigned to an object.  Having visibility to an object therefore does not automatically give access to the metadata. Groups that share the same object can have private metadata applied to the object.  They can use delegation capabilities to grant access to others.

• Remoteable Client The repository and the webclient deployed as two separate applications with pluggable connectors that allow for different levels of distribution.  The webclient may even be running in a different JVM.

• RSS Aggregator and Syndicator RSS and ATOM are popular content syndication formats. It would make sense to add aggregation and re-syndication features into Alfresco. Consider NewsGator Enterprise Server and similar other enterprise products from Pluck, and other companies.

• Ruby Library - Alfresco library built in Ruby on top of Alfresco Web Service API

• Secure FTP - add support for secure FTP into Alfresco

• Simple Alfresco Blog - Unlike the blog publishing above, offer a type of space that offers simple blog functionality. It can leverage JavaScript, FTL, etc.

• Taxonomy improvements  Allow taxonomies to be owned and managed by a user,role or group.  Taxonomies be visible to one group and not to another. Delegation capabilities apply.

• Thumbnail Services - repository services for thumbnail generation and support

• Triple based metadata / categorization - add RDF like triples to content as metadata.  Could be used for basic metadata and in categorization model.  Could be used to transform RDF outputs for content

• Web Conferencing Integration with tools like DimDim

• WIKI Publishing - Use Alfresco to manage and publish content to wiki applications such as MediaWiki

• Wire Alfesco with Live clipboard  Introduce LiveClipboard as a mechanism for linking Alfresco 'applets/dashlets/widgets' (for lack of a better term) to each other. This would give the weekend tinkerer the ability to BUILD something with almost zero tech skills.  Use live clipboard and an a set of microformats to allow alfresco to better interact the desktop and other web 'systems'.

• Merit Plugin The idea here is that several components like the chat, forums, wiki, knowledge base all have a some set of aspects that allow us or other open source communities to track community activity of a user

Accepted Projects

Accepted projects enter an incubation phase from which they graduate into full-fledged projects.

Incubating Projects

<None Yet>

Graduated Projects

<None Yet>

Community Development

The goal is to provide a 'Roadmap for the Community' outlining the plans for community development.

• Federated Wiki: Details proposed in section listed above
• Alfresco Chat: areas where users can go online and discuss with other alfresco community members.  Chat areas could be staffed by an engineer for some period of the day.
• Discussions and Webinars: Alfresco supported discussions and online seminars on ECM that are not sales pitches.  Educate the world on the need for ECM and the state of the space. Visit general user groups i.e. NEJUG (New England Java Users Group). Also Alfresco engineers to visit colleges and teach students about ECM.
• Alfresco Usergroups
• Alfresco Hack/Code-fest Sessions - event where students and community memebers get together to bang out forge projects and new features. Something like Yahoo! hack-days...