Lost!

Alfresco CEO, John Powell, just announced that they are having DNS type issues due to their Domain Registrar, 123-reg.

Anyone attempting to visit the site needs to use the following directions sent out by Powell:

To access the web sites, please use the following URLs:

* www.alfresco.com - please use http://88.208.218.102/
* customers.alfresco.com and partners.alfresco.com - please use http://88.208.200.70/alfresco/
* forums.alfresco.com - please use http://217.174.252.22/

If you want to reach anyone in Alfresco by email, you can do so by using [email address]@alfresco.org instead of [email address]@alfresco.com.

This is hot on the heals of a news report saying, quote, “UK domain registrar 123-Reg crashes and burns, taking its customers with it”. CNet UK even mentions Alfresco in that blog posting. Basically, some are saying it’s a DOS attack while others are guessing it’s 123-reg’s screw up.

The Alfresco team ran a news report about 2 hours ago that stated that the Media and Entertainment groups like them. Specifically, certain Media and Entertainment companies have started using Alfresco Enterprise.

Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive and Film Solutions LLC are both supposed customers of Alfresco and apparently love the Web Content Management (WCM) features it packs. It’s great that Sony and Film Solutions like Alfresco, but that hardly means that they’re popular in that industry. In the press release, they state that they have over 300 customers and more than 20,000 participants with the software being downloaded more than 700,000 times.

You read that right, 300 customers out of 700,000 downloads. That means that they hope to get one customer out of roughly 2,333 downloads - ouch. More power to them, but, I’m amazed they’ve released such a low customer count. As a business owner, I would honestly be a little worried seeing such low numbers as opposed to Microsoft’s SharePoint installs (number not quickly available). What really goes through my mind when I read that is: “How can they survive off of just 300 Customers?”

In an effort to gain customers that are laboring over their network share drives attempting to find “their” file, Microsoft has release Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (I’ll call it MSSe from here on out). MSSe offers, what Microsoft calls, “Familiar search experience.” I call it a blatant rip off of the SharePoint Search Screen, but it’s their product, they can do what they want with it. In fact, the whole thing has a Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) feel to it - wait, it is WSS…

As you’ve probably guessed, Microsoft is trying to make things easier for businesses to make the hop onto WSS systems. With this, there is a huge possibility on up-selling these customers to MOSS. Add this to the fact that Microsoft is carving WSS out of Windows 2003 to make it a standard download, you have the possibility Continue reading…

While Amazon S3 is making headlines, they have an internal service called Dynamo to run their SQL farm. It’s true that S3 can be utilized as an SQL server, it’s not as reliable as it should be for most web applications. It has issues with data sets not being updated in a Write before Read situation.

For instance: If you have a form and a user updates their data, when the form is submitted and the data is queried again to show them what is listed, your data may or may not be Continue reading…

This morning, I was graciously alerted to training in Amsterdam with the Alfresco team. Apparently, because their VP of Web Dev (Kevin Cochrane) is going to be doing the training, it’s a big deal. Here’s the email I received earlier: (I left all the mistakes in sight)

Hello

Please find attached the registration form for the WCM 2 days bootcamp scheduled for the 3 & 4 December in Amsterdam This training course is delivered by Kevin Cochrane in person !

If WCM is a hot topic in your company , or If you are an Alfresco Partner, this training will allow you position this new product in your projects. There are 6 seats available left for this session so hurry up!!

Cost 1400 euros for customer/partners
1750 euros otherwise

If you want to register you only need to fill the attached form and to send it back to this number Fax +44 (0)8708 681 233

Alfresco
tel +44 (0)1628 860 500
Park House, Park Street
Maidenhead, Berks SL6 1SL
United Kingdom
Click here for map

So, they want me to pay about $2500 (Non-Customer/Partner converted into $) for a two day class. On top of this, there are a whole 6 seats left! WOOHOO!

Here’s the training schedule.

Let me tell anyone reading this, I’m extremely disappointed with Alresfco on this part. I’ve dogged them repeatedly for things I think they’re doing wrong and this is yet another one of those times. I’ve attended SharePoint 2007 training for a week for a little less than what they want for two days. To be fair, we had 22 people, so we got a discount, but if you look online, you’ll notice that there are other bootcamp/training facilities that offer a week worth of training for around the same price as Alfresco’s 2 days. If I where an Alfresco customer, I’d be rather upset.

One other thing that caught my eye while looking over their site this morning was the fact that their Employee email addresses are listed as “kevin dot cochrane at alfresco dot com”. C’mon people, you’re the VP, you’re going to get mail, you’re going to get spam no matter what. Put the damn email address up there or don’t. Don’t make me cut and paste it then fill in the blanks.