Optaros Labs

Here’s yet another great demo from my colleague Jeff Potts. This time it’s an integration of Alfresco with Kaltura, the open source video management, mashup, browser-based editing, and viewing platform. This would let you use Alfresco workflow with video assets, and then publish them to Kaltura for distribution outside the organization.

(We’re using a Kaltura CDN and player here, so the full screen icon is the four arrows pointing out toward the corners, just to the right of the volume icon).

There’s a custom view in the Alfresco web client property sheet, which embeds FlowPlayer to watch videos in Alfresco spaces, as well as “publish to Kaltura” link which pushes videos from Alfresco into Kaltura for distribution, using the Kaltura API. Once videos are published to Kaltura, the custom view is updated to use the Kaltura version rather than the FlowPlayer.

The project lives here in the Kaltura community: Alfresco – Kaltura Integration

Kaltura is an interactive, multi-user video editing platform made available as a service. They provide plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and MediaWiki, as well as a reference implementation and detailed documentation for how to leverage their service in PHP and Ruby.

In essence, Kaltura provides a mechanism whereby users can upload, transcode, and edit video used in web sites. Click “remix” button below to get a sense of the capabilities Kaltura offers.

These are videos of my dogs, Georgia and Lucy.

I’d put Kaltura’s model, in which plugins to open source web frameworks and languages are combined with services offered “from the cloud,” in the context of what I’ve been calling the Assembled Web. Businesses get the flexibility and agility of the open source stack while leveraging the economies of scale and ease of management offered by SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

Some other similar services have started to emerge, including CDN2 (a video offering for Drupal) and (Optaros Partner) Acquia‘s Mollom-based anti-spam and hosted search (also for Drupal).

Mixing the strength of open source and collaborative development models with the financial benefits of SAAS is something we expect to see much more of in 2009.