Optaros Labs

Back in July of 2007, Andy Peatling posted on his blog about creating a social network called ChickSpeak on top of WordPressMU, the multi-user version of the popular open source blog platform . It was a compelling possibility – compelling enough that Automattic (the company behind WordPress) hired him to work on it full time.

BuddyPress 1.0, the result of that effort, was released on April 30th of this year, and is an option that should be seriously considered anywhere a new content-centered community is being built.

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In this screencast (see Part One here) Jeff Potts walks through some additional functionality in Alfresco Share, including:

• How new share “sites” (collaboration spaces or communities) get created
• How sites can be customized, including adding and removing dashlets from sites

As promised, Jeff also shows us some custom components which demonstrate the types of custom development capabilities possible in Share:

• Status Update, which allows for rolling status updates across the team using the site, á la Facebook status or microblogging, including the ability to aggregate across collaboration groups in an enterprise
• Shared Bookmarks, which enables the easy posting and sharing of bookmarks across a collaboration site.

Hopefully these two screencasts give you a good sense of what Alfresco Share offers and how teams can use it to collaborate across an enterprise.

We hope to do many more screencasts on a variety of topics – thanks Jeff for setting the bar high with these first two!

One of the joys of working at Optaros is the opportunity to work with colleagues like Jeff Potts, who you may know from his blog (ECM Architect) or as the author of Packt Publishing’s Alfresco Developer Guide.

I asked Jeff to add his expertise to the Labs blog by way of a demonstration of Alfresco Share, which is a social collaboration platform built on top of the Alfresco stack.

In the below screencast, Jeff walks through a quick (~12 minute) demo of the core features of Share, including:

• Site Dashboards
• Joining Sites
• Wiki
• Blog
• Document Library
• CIFS
• Calendar
• Discussions

Since the screencast is mostly live demo of a working Share site, you’ll likely need to “full screen” the video for best viewing (click the icon to the left of the volume icon which looks like a small TV).

In part two of the screencast, which I’ll post early next week, Jeff walks through the customization options Share enables, as well as some custom components Optaros has written:

• Status Update, which allows for rolling status updates across the team using the site, á la Facebook status or microblogging, including the ability to aggregate across collaboration groups in an enterprise
• Shared Bookmarks, which enables the easy posting and sharing of bookmarks across a collaboration site.