Because we’re using the Titanium Appcelerator platform, a nice side effect is that we also have an Android version that you can download here. (It should also become available soon on the Android market).

A few screenshots to wet your appetite:

The source code for this app is a fork of the “Codestrong” project, and lives in GitHub, under the GPL license.

Here me answer questions about our open source business model, about open source marketing, and about the french open source ecosystem.

Here is the video on YouTube:

Let’s move on today with a video tour of the Nuxeo DM platform. It is not too long (45 minutes overall) and will give you a pretty thorough view of what you can do with Nuxeo in terms of document management, as well as some insights on how the Nuxeo platform can be managed by systems and content administrators, and extended by developers to fit your specific business needs.

We have a dedicated page on nuxeo.com where we’ve made it easy to navigate through the differents chapters of this video tour. Or you can watch the following 7 videos in order below.

Introduction

Basic concepts

Working with content

Workflow

Publishing

Administration

Extending

• Our Nuxeo DM packages have been accepted in the Ubuntu “Partner” repository, so that it’s even easier than before to install Nuxeo DM (and soon, other products from Nuxeo) on an Ubuntu Linux server.

• Nuxeo is now a part of Canonical’s “Software Partner Programme” and listed as a “software partner” on the Ubuntu site.

• Canonical is now listed as a partner in our own partner directory.

• More than 1/2 of our developers are using Ubuntu Linux on their main development machine, and 100% of our production servers are using either Debian or Ubuntu Linux (OK, that part was not it the official announcement, but it’s the truth .

The official Nuxeo press release is here, with a quote from a customer (Jeppesen) who is also a happy Ubuntu user.

Details on how to choose the best package for your Ubuntu or Debian distro are here.

FAQ

Why is Nuxeo DM only in partner and not in main, universe or multiverse?

Debian and Ubuntu have strict rules on how packages have to be done if one wants them to be part of their main distributions. These rules are unfortunately very hard to follow when packaging Java applications, specially applications made using Maven, one of the standard tools for building enterprise Java applications.

For these reasons, we agreed with Canonical that the best and fastest way to move the partnership forward was to put the Nuxeo packages in the “partner” repository.

Does this mean that Nuxeo DM is not open source?

No, it doesn’t. Nuxeo DM is open source, under the LGPL and LGPL-compatible licenses.

I want to help improve the Nuxeo packages on Debian / Ubuntu

You can help, indeed.

The source code for the packaging scripts lives here:
http://hg.nuxeo.org/tools/nuxeo-packaging/ (in the debian directory).

You can also join the nuxeo-isv PPA on Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/~nuxeo-isv

We weren’t invited to the party, but let’s take a break anyway from our Tour de Nuxeo series to look at the 7 reasons why we’re happy to be using Java (Java 6, actually, we’re in no rush to adopt Java 7) for the Nuxeo Enterprise Content Management Platform.

7. Write once, run anywhere: it’s not a myth

We develop Nuxeo applications with confidence that the application will run on Linux, Windows and Mac OS.

Of course, we run integration tests on all three platforms just to be sure.

6. It’s fast and robust

It’s not the 90′s anymore. The JVM, with the integration of the HotSpot technology ten years ago, is now on par (i.e. only 10% to 2x slower on most benchmarks) with the fastest languages, usually C and C++.

And, as a managed runtime, it also has many advantages over pure C or C++: no segmentation faults or buffer overflows, and a garbage collector that prevents most of the memory allocation mistakes that plague lower level programming languages.

5. OSGi

Java has OSGi, a module system and service platform that allows developers to create software as independent components that can be wired together at runtime, allowing for cleaner (more decoupled) architectures and real software reuse.

4. It has tools

There are many open source tools (and a few proprietary ones) that help you be more efficient when working in Java.

Dependency management is much easier with Java (thanks to Maven, Ivy, Gradle and other similar tools) than with most other programming languages.

With Eclipse, for instance, one has a modern IDE that really helps developers (from the most junior to the most experienced) be efficient in what they do, that detects many errors even before the program is run, and that has support for refactoring to make sure your code base is always as cleanly architected as possible.

3. It has, by far, the largest open source ecosystem

Java has not one, but three major open source communities (all of which we are, in one way or another, members): the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation and the OW2 Consortium.

2. It has a large set of quality open source libraries

As a consequence of the previous point, there are thousands of mature open source libraries that one can use to write modern enterprise application software, out of which we can choose those we think are best-of-breed and useful to make our software.

1. It also has the biggest business ecosystem

We’re not in this open source business just for the fun of it, but more importantly, to do serious projects for serious customers with serious partners.

And, surprise, all of them (customers and partners) are always happy to hear that we use Java, because they have developers who know Java and sysadmins who know how to manage Java applications.

So, no need to train developers on basic technologies, just (sometimes) on the subtleties of Enterprise Content Management and on the Nuxeo API, and they can start working on a project.

This is also the same for most other software companies we work with: most of them are using Java making it easy to integrate their applications — for those who don’t, we provide many web services APIs so that’s not an issue either .

In today’s stage, we’re going to dive deeper into the technology that powers the Nuxeo platform, and show how its architecture was carefully chosen to answer the common needs of our customers and user community.

However, since Thierry Delprat, our fearless CTO, has already written extensively about the Nuxeo EP architecture, let me focus here on the points that I think need to be highlighted and refer you to his writings and slides (see below) for more details.

Overview

Nuxeo EP is an open source Java platform that provides building blocks to create sophisticated and robust ECM applications:

• Core ECM services, such as: storage, lifecycle, security, audit, metadata, etc.

• High level ECM services, such as workflow, search, document transformation / rendering, collaboration, etc.

• Interfaces, especially web user interfaces.

To make it possible, and easy, for developers and systems integrators to create their applications, we have chosen an architecture where the building blocks are extremely decoupled, and can be easily assembled to address the specific needs of each project.

The Nuxeo runtime and component framework

How does it work in practice? Each of the independent services that comprises the platform is implemented as a set of Java classes and supporting files (e.g. config and templates), bundled together in a JAR file, which is a physical manifestation of what is generally called a “component”, and in our case, a “bundle”.

When the application server (such as JBoss) or web container (such as Tomcat or Jetty) starts, it scans the JARs that it has access to and starts up the services that are contained in these JARs. Upon activation, these components can register information in several registries, in other words, “extend” existing components. They can also define ways they can be extended by other components, using what we call “extension points”.

This way, for the application developer, an important part of his work is already covered just by choosing the services he needs from the generic “off the shelf” components that are provided by the platform, or available as add-ons on the Nuxeo Marketplace.

If you are familiar with modern Java technologies, you might have recognized here the principles of the OSGi module system and service platform, and Eclipse’s extension points.

As an example, a new OCR service (whose role would be to extract text from images) could be added to a platform and then register itself into the transformation engines registry. This way, an application that manages documents scanned from paper copies can be configured with no specific code to leverage this OCR service to index the full text content of these documents, as extracted by the OCR service.

As another example, a JAR can be comprised of only configuration files for the various services that the Nuxeo platform provides, to enable customization (or overriding) of the default parameters of a standard application built on top of Nuxeo EP (for instance, Nuxeo DM for Document Management), with customer-specific document types, life cycles, metadata, indexes, actions, or look and feel.

More info: OSGi Bundles, Components & Extension Points from the Nuxeo Tutorial.

Pre-built applications

The end-game of our development effort is to create great applications that answer the needs of real users.

Providing great building blocks and an assembly manual to create these applications is a way to achieve this goal, but it would be time consuming to build an application from scratch using a bottom-up approach.

This is the reason why we also provide ready-to-use content applications, such as Nuxeo DM (for document management) or Nuxeo DAM (for digital asset management), which cover most, if not all, the needs for basic document management and digital asset management with no customization at all.

But wait, it gets even better! Since these applications are based on the modular Nuxeo EP platform, they are easy to customize using just configuration files (no code), or by using Nuxeo Studio, our configuration “IDE” that is available as a service to our customers, that spits out the config file from high-level descriptions that can be modeled graphically by business consultants.

Why did we choose this model?

This model is great but comes with a price (mostly for us, developers of the platform): developing software as decoupled components imposes the need to be extra careful in the way software is developed, in order to isolate the different functionalities in different components and ensure that all the components can work together in every combination that makes sense.

Most of our competitors (including the big vendors in the Gartner magic quadrant) don’t make this effort, or have a technology that is too old and inflexible to move into this direction: they are happy to provide products as big monolithic pieces of software that look ok out of the box, but that are so impervious to change beyond the basic configuration that they offer that it can take 10 times longer (when it’s possible at all) to adapt their software to real-life customer needs.

Integration costs skyrocket, while the architecture of the end result looks more like a plate of spaghetti than a cleanly layered cake.

Worse, when a new version comes out, all the customization has to be thrown away and restarted from scratch.

With our model, on the other hand, you can cleanly isolate your customization and extensions into independent components, and be sure that the cost for upgrading to a new version stays very reasonable.

Open source Java

Nuxeo is an open source Java project. As such, we try to leverage as much as possible existing open source Java technologies, as long as they have licenses compatible with our project’s license, and to focus our efforts on the parts that are not already served by the open source Java ecosystem.

It takes a lot of discipline to do so: we need to carefully assess each of the external libraries we are using, for license compatibility, of course, but also for their quality and long-term viability.

As good citizens of the open source Java ecosystem, accustomed to working within our own open source project, we also work with the communities or companies that develop the open source libraries we are using, when we find they need fixes or enhancements.

Further information

Presentations

Article and white papers

• Lessons learned developing the Nuxeo EP open source, component-based, ECM platform, a research paper that was presented during the ICSSEA 2010 conference.
• Technology Audit of Nuxeo EP by Ovum Research (2010).
• Overview and Architecture on the Nuxeo Documentation site.

“Nuxeo” is both a company and an open source project that aims at creating world-class technologies (“Nuxeo EP”) and products (“Nuxeo DM”, “Nuxeo DAM”, etc.) for Enterprise Content Management.

Nuxeo, the company

Nuxeo is a company that I founded 10 years ago, in December 2000.

Our initial mission was to create open source “Web applications for better collaboration” (this was our first motto) – collaborative intranets, e-government websites – for a market that was comprised primarily of European public administrations (including several of the major French ministries).

In 2006, we did a full rewrite of our software stack using libraries and frameworks from the mature open source Java ecosystem, and started a business model migration from service company to open source software vendor.

At the same time, we chose to focus our efforts on:

• creating the best possible open source ECM technologies and products,
• working with a network of partners (systems integrators and vertical software vendors) to bring these technologies and products to the market,
• selling subscriptions to support and maintenance services, as well as a small amount of highly specialized professional services, to ensure our customers’ projects were a success.

Nuxeo now has around 50 employees, in three locations – Paris, Boston and San Francisco – and is fully dedicated to its open source software vendor business model: 80% of our annual turnover comes from subscription.

You will find more insight on our early history in this presentation I gave to students at Evry University this year:

Nuxeo, the open source project

Colloquially, Nuxeo is also the name of an open source project that we, as a company, are working on with more than 20 developers, and the help of a community of multiple contributors.

More precisely, the products we are developing as open source are:

• Nuxeo EP, the platform (a framework and a set of components) that provide all the building blocks necessary to create an ECM system, as presented in yesterday’s Tour de Nuxeo stage,

• Nuxeo DM, a horizontal, but still highly customizable, application for Document Management,

• Nuxeo DAM, an application for Digital Asset Management,

• Nuxeo CMF, a framework for Case Management.

This diagram makes it easier to understand the relations between these different subprojects:

Note that, as we show in the diagram, the endgame for us is to foster the creation of a vibrant ecosystem of vertical applications based on the Nuxeo EP platform, or on customizations of the main packaged products.

Where is the enterprise edition?

This is a FAQ that people keep asking us when contacting us for the first time: what’s the difference between the “open source” and the “enterprise” versions of your products?

The answer: there is none, because they are one and the same. In other words, we don’t have an “enterprise” version, or, if you prefer, our open source version is already enterprise-class.

Contrary to other companies, we choose to keep our development process fully transparent, with our source code and task and issue tracker publicly available. We believe this is the best way to foster trust and collaboration between us and our customers and partners.

But it’s also important to realize that Nuxeo software is also open source that can be trusted: thanks to our subscription offer, when you choose to base your next project or product on our technology, you know that you can reliably count on us to:

• make sure that rigorous development techniques are used throughout projects (more on this in a later stage),
• ensure that the released versions of our software have been thoroughly tested,
• provide support to your development and production teams, as any other software vendor would do (and probably better, because, since support is our main source of revenue, it is especially important for us to do it right, contrary to a traditional vendor which derives its revenue from selling licenses and sees support as mostly an inconvenience).

Why Open Source?

We chose to adopt an open source model from the company’s inception in 2000, because we believed (and still are convinced):

• That open source is the most efficient way to develop software, and to foster open innovation.
• That the ease of installation of our products and the transparency of our code base is the most reliable way for interested parties to evaluate our offer, instead of relying on unverifiable claims by classical software vendors,
• That, combined with our solid support and maintenance subscription offer, our professional services, and our network of partners, this is the best way to ensure the success of our customers’ projects.

More info:

Related information

• Wikipedia entry for Nuxeo EP
• About Us (from the Nuxeo corporate website)
• Our subscription offer, Nuxeo Connect
• The Nuxeo Way: leveraging open source to build a world-class ECM platform (Older presentation, from 2008, on SlideShare)

Enterprises and organizations face tremendous pressure to deal with an increasing amount of content, in terms of sheer volume (petabytes and beyond), number of content items (millions to billions of documents), and number of interaction points with either human personnel (inside or outside the organization) or automated systems.

In today’s Tour de Nuxeo stage, we will have a look at the main challenges that face organizations that need to manage their content. But first, let’s start by answering a simple question: What is content?

What is content?

Content is information transmitted through a medium, which conveys a meaning to its receiver.

Web pages are content. Word documents are content. Images, movies, business forms, complex XML business documents, tweets (140 characters long text messages) are other examples of content.

According to Forrester, content falls into three categories:

• transactional: content that supports business transactions between an organization and its customers or suppliers,

• persuasive: content that aims at communicating a message that supports the organization’s mission – for instance, marketing material that helps the organization sell its products or services,

• and collaborative: everything else, including all the office automation documents (e.g. MS Word / Excel / Powerpoint, but also emails) that are used and shared everyday by the organization’s personnel to support their activities.

What is Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?

According to AIIM, ECM is: “the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”

This means that ECM is not just a technical concept (“tools”), it’s also an organizational challenge (“strategies”). Only by articulating technical innovation with change management to foster adoption by their employees can organizations really make their ECM projects a success.

An ECM system typically needs to address the following concerns:

• Storage: the system need to store content in a way that makes it available for the entire duration it is needed, as a “live” (i.e. editable) document, as well as a “dead” document (a non-editable record that needs to be preserved for compliance purposes). As with any business application, content storage needs to be transactional For documents that need to be preserved over a period of time significantly longer than the obsolescence half-life of hardware and software technologies, provision must be taken to ensure that content can still be extracted from the system after a long period of time in a format that will be still meaningful by that time.

• Lifecycle: as we’ve hinted above, content can change state during its life, for instance from “draft” to “live” to “archived” to “destroyed”. One of the fundamental functions of the system is to manage the state transitions of the content, which can be triggered either by human interaction (e.g. validation by one or several editors) or automatically (e.g. automatic expiration on a given date).

• Security: the system must enforce access rules so that only people authorized to access a given piece of content are allowed to do so. In the most sophisticated systems, it’s even possible to specify rules that give visibility to parts of the content.

• Audit: with great power comes great responsibility, and it’s important in an ECM system to be able to track users action (lifecycle changes, writes, sometimes even reads) so that everyone is held accountable for their actions.

• Metadata: raw content, represented by a raw file, is mostly useless. Only with additional metadata is it possible to do anything meaningful with it. A common set of metadata includes: its title, its author(s), several dates attached to its lifecycle (creation, validation, expiration). Also of importance is all the information necessary to classify the document (see below): categories, tags, references to or from other documents and real life concepts (project code, account number, etc.). This metadata needs to be stored and managed by the system, with the same (or specific) rules as applied to the raw content itself.

• Efficient collaboration: the system must enable people to efficiently collaborate (i.e. work together) on content, with functionalities such as versioning, check-in / check-out, locking, workflow or commenting systems.

• Delivery: content is usually useless if it sits in a repository without producing business value. This is the reason why an organization wants to be able to deliver the content needed by its personnel, customers or partners at the time they really need it, and in a form that is most convenient to them. These days, this includes delivery on the web (on a public website for persuasive content, on a intranet or a portal for transactional or business documents), on mobile devices, but also, more traditionally, in a form suitable for printing.

• Classification: from the 19th century onwards, organizations have stored their business documents in file cabinets according to hierarchical, tree-like, taxonomies. This habit has lingered with the advent of electronic storage systems, with file plans with a rigid tree-like structure. Unconstrained from the physical worlds, it has appeared that it was possible to assign a document to not just one, but several categories. Eventually, fundamental new techniques have emerged less than 10 years ago, from Web 2.0 (tagging, folksonomies) and Web 3.0 (ontologies) applications, and are now gaining steam in enterprise applications.

• Search: full-text search is now the most popular way for people to find information on the public Web. It’s not surprising that they expect the same approach to work also on their private document libraries. The problem may seem simpler, as a private content repository usually has several less orders of magnitude in terms of documents than the public web, but the structure of these repositories is also very different, and algorithms that are known to work well on the public Web (e.g. Google’s PageRank) don’t apply that well on a company’s intranet.

• Integration: ECM it not just about managing documents anymore, it’s about managing the content that supports all the business activities of an organization, in relation to the other systems that comprise its information system: the authentication and identity management system to compute access permissions on content, CRM and ERP applications that generate, and use, documents such as proposals, purchase orders or invoices, etc. Ease of integration with external systems is hence a critical capability of an ECM system, that only highly customizable and modular systems can provide.

What is a content application?

Content applications, also called CEVAs (Content Enabled Vertical Applications) or CCAs (Composite Content Applications), are business applications that primarily manipulate content.

Examples include:

• An HR management application that focuses on keeping, and updating when needed, all the documents related to a person’s employment in a given organization: resumés, diplomas, certificates, annual evaluation reports, disciplinary documents, termination documents, etc.

• A news management system, where a news organization (press agency, press conglomerate) provides its writers and editors with the tools needed to efficiently produce and validate news-related content (text, pictures, videos, infographics..), to publish it in the appropriate form (HTML, PDF, etc.) on the appropriate channels, and to efficiently repurpose existing content when needed.

How is ECM different from traditional data management?

ECM shares some commonalities with two technologies that everyone in IT knows about: relational databases (RDBMS) and file systems (FS).

• Filesystems provide a hierarchical view of documents, stored as files in a hierarchy of folders (also called directories in Unix and Unix-like systems). They provide access control, usually via user-level and group-level permissions, though usually not with the same granularity level as mandated by ECM applications. They also usually don’t provide indexing and search (this can be done by external applications) or metadata management. Transactionality, lifecycle management, auditing, collaboration, etc. need to be added on top of the filesystem by the applications.

• On the other hand, RDBMSes store information in tables, i.e. in a very flat manner. This is good for metadata management (you can add columns to your table to add pretty much any kind of metadata you need), and most modern RDMSes provide full search functionalities on textual content. Another nice thing is that they also have transactionality built-in. But, with their flat spaces, RDBMSes don’t allow for hierarchical access control, and they also are more suited at managing structured data than semi-structured or unstructured data as is the most common way to look at content.

In the end, our view at Nuxeo is that both FSes and RDBMSes lack many functionalities that are crucial for ECM, but they provide several of the building blocks needed for it. This is the reason we chose to build our ECM platform using both these robust and proven technologies, and add the missing functionalities as part of the value added by our software.

Why use Nuxeo to manage your content?

There are many reasons why you would want to use Nuxeo EP as the basis of your next ECM project. We will come back to this subject later in much greater detail, but let me now list a few of them:

• Nuxeo EP provides all the functionalities expected from a modern ECM platform.
• Nuxeo EP is professionally developed and supported by a mature company.
• Nuxeo EP is based on very standard enterprise Java technologies, so that it’s easy to find personnel able to work with it.
• Projects developed with Nuxeo EP are usually 2 to 10 times less expensive that projects developed with a proprietary ECM platform.

Additional resources

• Getting started with Nuxeo – a beginner’s page (Nuxeo Documentation).

• What is ECM? (Atle Skjekkeland – AIIM).

• 8 reasons you need a strategy for managing information…before it’s too late (John Mancini – AIIM).

• Enterprise Content Management (Wikipedia).

Next stage

Join us again tomorrow for another Tour de Nuxeo stage: “What is Nuxeo?”.

Comments? Questions?

Did I forget something? Did I write something outrageously wrong? Use the comments below to make your voice heard.

The first “stages” have been published:

• Why manage content?
• What is Nuxeo?
• The Nuxeo architecture
• A video tour of the Nuxeo DM Document Management Platform

Keep coming back for the next stages!

You can download the packages (zip, windows installer, generic installer) here:
http://community.nuxeo.com/static/rc/nuxeo-5.4.2-RC2/

If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, you can also test it by adding:

deb http://apt.nuxeo.org/ natty releases datebased

and running apt-get install nuxeo-dm.

(You may substitute natty with maverick,squeeze`, etc. i.e. the nickname of your current Debian or Ubuntu release but it won’t change anything for now).

77 issues have been resolved between RC1 and RC2:

Now we are focussed on delivering Nuxeo 5.4.2 final next week. We have a bug day today where we will try to crush as many bugs and outstanding issues (there are currently 159 of them):

If you’d like to help, please test the RC2 today if possible and submit new bugs to the Jira.

If you are into IRC, you can join to the #nuxeo channel on irc.freenode.net to participate in this endeavor.

NOTE: this is a release candidate, so don’t deploy it to your production servers!