I am about to catch a flight to India and wanted to blog one thing before I left. Last week, one of the Asite technical architects, David, pointed me towards what looks to be quite an exciting project - Alfresco. This is a project started by a bunch of guys from Documentum and it looks to be based here in the UK in Maidenhead.

"Alfresco is an open source, open-standards content repository..."

To me, this is immediately interesting on two levels. First, on a technical level. This project is being built upon the same technical foundations as the Asite technology, an open J2EE framework based on JBoss and JBoss Portal technology, and incorporating open standards such as WebDav and Lucene for federated search. This is close-to-home in both the technology as well as the geography senses and I look forward to exploring ways that our work might be complementary.

On the commercial level, those of you who know me well will have heard me talking for years about the impending commoditisation of the certain subset of our construction IT industry known as "project extranets" or "project collaboration". This is one of the several business lines which are required to build a holistic solution for capturing data all the way through the lifecycle of a built asset. This concept of data throughout the built asset lifecyelc goes to the core of my view of the "correct" solution model in the AEC industry. Much more about this in subsequent posts...

The core technologies targeted by the Alfresco system (document/content management and workflow in a portal-based system) are the functional specification of all of the systems in this over-populated industry sub-space. Opening this up will increase the pace of innovation and will enable those of us who are building the holistic solution to focus more talent and more time on the higher-value pieces of the solution-set.

I love this stuff because it keeps us pushing forward and because it will make irrelevant those who grow complacent.

Keywords: Alfresco, Open+Source, AEC, Innovation

Posted by ndoughty at 1:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

I am starting a blog again. I have had a history since 1994 of bursts of blog effort in between much longer bursts of blog inactivity. In the last two years I laboured under the creeping suspicion that perhaps an officer of a public company was not meant to have a blog. But, I have been inspired by high-profile presences on the blog scene such as Jonathan Schwartz, the COO at Sun. Even Bill Gates is supposedly considering making an appearance. There is always the outside possibility that this is actually him. Voila. A clear precedent. I am missing out on the conversation while I am holding back and not contributing so here goes nothing. No-one ever won a game on the sideline.

I plan to write about what I do and what I know (first tip they say) - and that is software development. The software I have spent most time building is collaboration software and software for integrating systems between companies in a supply-chain - all internet-based. Expect to hear a lot about the AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) industry in particular as this is where I have spent a lot of time and focus in my career.

What this blog will not contain is any forward looking statements about Asite Plc - for all insight into our business performance, please refer to our regularly scheduled filings at the LSE.

Keywords: free, collaboration, AEC

Posted by ndoughty at 12:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

testing again. let's see if this shows up

Posted by ndoughty at 8:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)