From Alfresco to OBJECT
February 9, 2020
Dear reader.
I am happy to announce that I will switch to OBJECT on February 14th. This is a partner company of my current company Alfresco. OBJECT mainly operates in the German and Swiss ECM (Enterprise Content Management) market. Below I list my motives and at the end I explain my future visions of OBJECT and Alfresco for the year 2022.
Reasons for the Change
One of my biggest motivations is that I really like the Alfresco products. Alfresco Content System (ACS) is an genius and sophisticated content management system based on the Java VM. Even though I hardly had the opportunity to work with Alfresco Process Service (APS) so far, I recognize how great this product is and would like to work with it in the future. Last but not least, Alfresco Developer Framework (ADF). I find the new, Angular-based web interfaces very nice and glorios for the front end. Above all, the simple use of the graphical user interface and the impressive collection of ready-made components, such as the Document List affects me. In 2019 I had the opportunity to help the ADF teams with Alfresco backend know-how and was able to learn a lot about ADF, for which I am very grateful.
The switch to OBJECT should also enable me to be closer to the customer. I want to develop solutions for and with the customer. I am convinced that Alfresco offers excellent solutions in the ECM and BPM area. In cooperation with the customer I will help to find the ideal solution. I would not shy away from considering other software products for solutions or partial solutions besides Alfresco. In fact, I love getting to know new and other software technologies.
I have also discovered the possibilities of the cloud for myself in recent years and was simply overwhelmed. With such a simplicity with which infrastructure such as virtual servers or storage can be provided and operated inexpensively, it is second to none. Acting in the cloud was so much fun that I decided to take AWS certificates. In addition to other previous certificates, I obtained the "AWS Solution Architect Professional" certificate in July 2019, which I am very proud of. If you would like to know more about the certificate and the preparations for it, have a look at my blog post SAP-C01. Therefore, I would be happy if I can promote the use of the cloud in German-speaking countries.
I am also very interested in new IT technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. I think working with Docker is so nice, because you can always provide clean environments and configure them with just a few lines of code. It is also simply incomparable how much easier it is to develop with Alfresco products if they are already defined in containers. Alfresco also offers reference images e.g. acs-packaging as well as deployments e.g. acs-deployment that are easy to use and customizable. I also don't want to leave out Kubernetes at this point. Kubernetes has a steep learning curve, but when used in production it is simply unbeatable. Alfresco also has a reference deployment alfresco-dbp-deployment. I would be happy to further advance these technologies in German-speaking countries.
Last but not least. The application process with OBJECT was a wonderful experience and really stood out from all of my applications before. The employees at OBJECT make a very happy and open-minded impression. I also think OBJECT's home office culture is great and contemporary. This is the ideal environment to develop myself further.
In the next section I would like to give you an outlook on OBJECT together with Alfresco for 2022.
Outlook 2022
In the last year at Alfresco, I was able to observe the cloud trend and participate in it myself. I know that this will be expanded even more. Alfresco already offers a strong PaaS (Program as a Service) offering and will continue to expand it in the future. Realistically speaking, I believe that this offer will not be used in German-speaking countries until 2022, or will only be used to a limited extent, since countries like Germany are moving very carefully and therefore slowly in the cloud world.
Even if the German-speaking region will hardly use the Alfresco's PaaS offer by 2022, we will experience a strong move towards the cloud with regard to Alfresco products. Already today many costs can be saved by using the cloud as storage e.g. the ACS S3 or Azure Connector makes it easy to use the BLOB storages of the respective cloud provider. OBJECT can provide advice and action as a trustworthy partner.
Many Alfresco customers are already using the chic web applications created with ADF, and there will be more by 2022. I see OBJECT in the perfect position to develop customized ADF apps together with the customer.
To the wonderful readers of this article I'm saying that feedback of any kind is welcome. In the future I will try to include a discussion and comment feature here. In the meantime, please feel free to send me feedback via my social media accounts such as Twitter or FaceBook. Thank you very much :).
I love to work on Content Management Open Source projects. A lot from my stuff you can already use on www.github.com/mmuller88 . If you like my work there and my blog posts, please consider supporting me on Patreon:
