Recently I’ve been working on a REST API for reporting workflow status information in Alfresco.  After getting some of the functionality nailed down, it really bothered me that I wasn’t able to use Test Driven Development (TDD) in the process.  So I went looking, and I found quite a few open source tools out there in the wild that made good prospects for acceptance testing these REST APIs that I was working on.  It was time for a SMACKDOWN! OOOOOOOH YEAAAAAAAH!

Contender #1 - Selenium

I heard of Selenium in the past and have wanted to tinker with it for a long time, so I tried this one out first.  Note that Selenium is really just the “brand name”; there are actually several inter-related offerings here.  The first is Selenium IDE, which comes as an add-on to Firefox, which is pretty awesome.  Using this tool, you can basically record your tests, and play them back.  This is very easy to try out - literally within minutes I had recorded my first tests.

That was very cool, but I needed to test result sets with dynamic data, so I had to take a look at Selenium-RC, which has APIs that enable the use of your favorite programming language: Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby.  The good news with this tool is that it actually uses the real browser to do its testing.  That’s also the bad news.  For each and every test, a new Firefox was launched, which would certainly take a while as the test suite grew larger.  The main advantage that I saw with this tool is that it would be great for testing web applications with Javascript for cross-browser compatibility.  In fact, Selenium-RC is leveraged by Selenium Grid, which allows you to test cross-browser and on different operating systems.  I dig it, but I just have some simple REST APIs to test, so the whole Selenium suite is overkill for me.

Reporting of results using Selenium-RC ultimately would have to be via JUnit reporting mechanisms, which are pretty decent as I recall, but you will have an extra step to set that up in your Ant build file.

Oh, one other note.  You can use Selenium IDE to record your tests and export them as a Selenium-RC Java class.  Pretty cool, but the implementation felt like it was quick and dirty as I recall - something about the class name I gave it and the source that was generated was ‘off’.

Contender #2 - HTMLUnit

This is basically just a Java API that makes it easy to extract information from web pages programatically.  Because I knew that several other tools were built using HTMLUnit at the core, I didn’t spend any time investigating the possibility of using it directly, which was a smart decision.

Contender #3 - JWebTest

This one is cool in concept.  It’s basically an abstraction of Selenium and HTMLUnit.  If you want to test using HTMLUnit most of the time for speed but want to switch to Selenium for a cross browser sanity check from time to time, JWebTest could be your answer.  I spent maybe an hour setting it up in my environment and writing a test with it.  It didn’t handle HTTP basic authentication right out of the box (when using a URL like “http://admin:admin@localhost:8080/alfresco/my/rest/service.json”), whereas Selenium did handle such a URL properly.  I did look (just now) to see if it handles HTTP basic authentication, and it looks like it does via the API - see WebTestCase.getTestContext() and TestContext.setAuthorization().

Regardless, the bottom line with this is that it’s a Java based API that I would have to use to program all of my tests, and the ability to switch on “Selenium mode” isn’t very compelling to me for testing REST APIs.  Therefore, this one doesn’t really add much value over using HTMLUnit directly for this use case.

Contender #4 - Canoo WebTest

Initially, my first reaction regarding Canoo was “Oh man, I don’t like that it uses Ant so heavily”.  For reasons I won’t go into here, I’m using Ant (not Maven) as my build tool for this project, so ultimately, that’s not a deal breaker.  That said, getting up and running with Canoo was pretty awesome.  The instructions say to put the WebTest bin directory in your path, which generally bothers me, but I did it anyway.  Then there’s a way to generate a project skeleton (a very maven-esque thing to do), which I did, and by running their shell script within the generated test project’s directory, I was off and running.  I then created my own test files (in Ant based XML with custom Canoo tasks), plugged them into the main build script, and BOOYAH!  I was off to the races.

The execution of the tests is pretty fast, certainly faster than Selenium, and result reporting is tight:

Canoo WebTest also has the advantage that adding new tests is a declarative exercise - no programming and compilation required.  HTTP Basic authentication is handled nicely via simple attributes on the <invoke> step.  Here’s an example:

        <webtest name="Check end date capability for assigned tasks">
            <invoke url="http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/admin.json?endDate=2009-05-23"
                    description="Admin with end date 2009-05-23"
                    username="admin"
                    password="admin"/>
            <verifyText text='{"description":"Review","priority":2,"due":null,"properties":null,"percent":0,"completed":null,"status":"Not Yet Started","duration":null,"created":"2009-05-23 23:59:59.0","name":"wf:reviewTask"}'/>
            <not>
                <verifyText text='{"description":"Adhoc Task","priority":2,"due":null,"properties":null,"percent":0,"completed":null,"status":"Not Yet Started","duration":null,"created":"2009-05-24 00:00:00.0","name":"wf:adhocTask"}'/>
            </not>
        </webtest>

The Winner - Canoo WebTest

Just to spell it out clearly: Canoo is my tool of choice for REST API testing, due to ease of use, speed of execution, good reporting, and easy handling of HTTP basic authentication per test.  If/when I move to using a Maven build system, it looks like that’s alright by Canoo, since they have a maven plugin.

Other Alternatives

Other possibilities for folks out there are:

• Celerity - Ruby based testing framework.  Not for me since I’m not a Ruby wonk.
• JSFUnit - Specifically geared towards testing JSF applications, which is not the case here.
• WebDriver - Similar to Selenium, and is in fact rolling into Selenium according to the FAQ.  As such I didn’t look at this for longer than 5 minutes.

As described on the wiki, you can add custom Javascript APIs that are backed by Java implementations.  In fact, it is via this mechanism that the documented Javascript API is exposed.  But for our workflow status reporting scenario, we want to replace the implementation of the exposed “workflow” object with an implementation that allows for our new authorization requirement.  Therefore we need to find where the current “workflow” object is configured.  A simple grep command revealed that this object (along with all of the others) is configured via the script-services-context.xml Spring configuration file, which has the following bean entry for workflow:

    <bean id="workflowScript" parent="baseJavaScriptExtension"
            class="org.alfresco.repo.workflow.jscript.WorkflowManager">
        <property name="extensionName">
            <value>workflow</value>
        </property>
        <property name="serviceRegistry">
            <ref bean="ServiceRegistry"/>
        </property>
    </bean>

Ideally, we would want to have all of the current capabilities that the WorkflowManager class already implements plus whatever our extension class would add to it via the ‘workflow’ object (including handling for our new authorization requirement in this case).  For some reason though, which I chose not to investigate thoroughly, extending an existing class intended for exposure via Javascript isn’t working the way I would have expected (see here for the JIRA report I filed about it).  Only the new public methods in my class were being exposed, despite the extension of the existing WorkflowManager class.

Since it’s not terribly critical though, we’ll just build a new class and expose a new object via Javascript.  We’ll call it WorkflowStatusManager and configure it via Spring as follows:

    <bean id="workflowScript" parent="baseJavaScriptExtension"
            class="org.alfresco.repo.workflow.jscript.WorkflowStatusManager">
        <property name="extensionName">
            <value>workflowstatus</value>
        </property>
        <property name="serviceRegistry">
            <ref bean="ServiceRegistry"/>
        </property>
    </bean>

Now we’re free to add parameterized accessors for assigned tasks and completed tasks (where the parameter will be the user authority for which to obtain results for).  As you can see, this class will have a reference to the ServiceRegistry from the Alfresco Java API, which can be used to gain access to a variety of services, including the WorkflowService which will be used in this case.

One addition that I’m considering adding into the Spring configuration would be a property to set the name(s) of the group(s) that should have access to other users’ workflow data.  If you have ideas for other workflow status reporting capabilities to expose to Javascript, please share!

As you can see from the image above, the workflow reporting web scripts will run on the Alfresco server, exposing information via JSON (and/or other formats) to other presentation layer technologies like Alfresco Share, JBoss Portal, etc.  Later on in this process Share dashlets or JSR-168 portlets can be written to consume and present the exposed data.

Because a lot of workflow information is already exposed via the Workflow JavaScript API, I’ll use JavaScript backed web scripts to expose the data as appropriate for the reports I want to generate.  I suspect that as I progress further, I may need to extend the workflow service at the Java level to expose additional workflow information.  If/when that happens, I’ll have a couple of choices for exposing that new information:

• Use Java-backed web scripts in conjunction with my existing JavaScript backed web scripts by extending DeclarativeWebScript
• Expose the newly implemented Java methods as Javascript properties or operations

For now though, I need to flesh out what the API will look like.  At this point I’m assuming that most custom workflows will extend the out of the box models, and will thus have certain metadata available for extraction and reporting.  Note that only JSON will be exposed for now.  Exposing XML, RSS, ATOM, or even an HTML representation of the data is easily possible though by using the Alfresco web scripts templating capabilities.

User

Returns current and historical workflow information for the authenticating user.  It’s also possible to request another user’s workflow information via the id parameter.

URL

http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user.format

Formats

JSON

HTTP Method(s)

GET

Requires Authentication

Yes, as the user for which workflow information is being requested or as an administrative role otherwise


Parameters

• id.  Optional.  Specifies the id of the user whose workflow information is being requested.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json
• startDate.  Optional.  Specifies the start date after which to retrieve workflow information.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?startDate=01-01-2008
• endDate.  Optional.  Specifies the end date before which to retrieve workflow information.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?endDate=12-31-2008 or http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?startDate=01-01-2008&endDate=12-31-2008
• timePeriod.  Optional.  Specifies the time period to use to delimit data, for example in a table or graph.  The value must be one of {daily, weekly, biweekly, bimonthly, monthly, quarterly, biannually, annually}. When specified, this parameter must be accompanied by either startDate, endDate, or both
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?startDate=01-01-2008&endDate=12-31-2008&timePeriod=monthly
• taskName. Optional. Specifies a taskName to filter by. Workflow information related to any other task will NOT be included if this parameter is specified.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?taskName=wf:reviewTask
• sortBy.  Optional.  Specifies the parameter to sort by.  Must be one of {taskName, priority, duration, status, percent, dueDate, created, description}.
• showProperties.  Optional.  Specifies whether task properties should be included in the output for every task.

Response

{
      user: "brobinson",
      assignedTasks: [
            {
            	name: "wf:reviewTask",
                description: "Take a look",
                priority: 3,
                due: null,
                percent: 0,
                completed: null,
                status: "Not Yet Started",
                duration: null,
                created: "2009-05-12 10:25:52.51",
                properties: [
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}startDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}packageItemActionGroup",
                            value: "edit_package_item_actions"
                        },
						{
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}completionDate",
                            value: null
                        },
						{
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}percentComplete",
                            value: 0
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}context",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/707f218a-0967-4ebc-9bb4-872e9cb67597"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}priority",
                            value: 3
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}pooledActors",
                            value: "[]"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}package",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/f602c326-ea5f-40f0-91b4-21f27249aff7"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}packageActionGroup",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}owner",
                            value: "admin"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}dueDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}hiddenTransitions",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}description",
                            value: "Take a look"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}outcome",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}created",
                            value: "2009-05-12 10:25:52.51"
                        },
                        {
                        	key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}status",
                            value: "Not Yet Started"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}taskId",
                            value: 6586373
                        }
                  ]
            }, ...(truncated)...
      ],
      completedTasks: [
            {
            	name: "wf:submitReviewTask",
                description: "Hey, take a look at this, will you?",
                priority: 3,
                due: null,
                percent: 0,
                completed: "2009-04-15 16:22:49.808",
                status: "Completed",
                duration: 17.468,
                created: "2009-04-15 16:22:49.128",
                properties: [
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}startDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}packageItemActionGroup",
                            value: "start_package_item_actions"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}completionDate",
                            value: "2009-04-15 16:22:49.808"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}percentComplete",
                            value: 0
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}context",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/6c5bf7d2-806c-4f04-99bc-3a4b84ed7073"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}workflowDueDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}priority",
                            value: 3
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}pooledActors",
                            value: "[]"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}package",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/6c5bf7d2-806c-4f04-99bc-3a4b84ed7073"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}packageActionGroup",
                            value: "add_package_item_actions"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}assignee",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/9a4684c8-18ef-4f3e-a119-e5bb08c9da52"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}owner",
                            value: "admin"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}workflowPriority",
                            value: 2
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}dueDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}hiddenTransitions",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}description",
                            value: "Hey, take a look at this, will you?"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}outcome",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}created",
                            value: "2009-04-15 16:22:49.128"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}status",
                            value: "Completed"
                        },
                        {
                        	key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}taskId",
                            value: 2785280
                        },
                        {
                        	key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}workflowDescription",
                            value: "Hey, take a look at this, will you?"
                        }
                  ]
            }, ...(truncated)...
      ]

}

Group

Returns current and historical workflow information for the identified group

URL

http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.format

Formats

JSON

HTTP Method(s)

GET

Requires Authentication

Yes, as an administrative role


Parameters

• id.  Required.  Specifies the id of the user whose workflow information is being requested.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering
• startDate.  Optional.  Specifies the start date after which to retrieve workflow information.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&startDate=01-01-2008
• endDate.  Optional.  Specifies the end date before which to retrieve workflow information.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&endDate=12-31-2008 or http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&startDate=01-01-2008&endDate=12-31-2008
• timePeriod.  Optional.  Specifies the time period to use to delimit data, for example in a table or graph.  The value must be one of {daily, weekly, biweekly, bimonthly, monthly, quarterly, biannually, annually}. When specified, this parameter must be accompanied by either startDate, endDate, or both
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&startDate=01-01-2008&endDate=12-31-2008&timePeriod=monthly
• taskName. Optional. Specifies a taskName to filter by. Workflow information related to any other task will NOT be included if this parameter is specified.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&taskName=wf:reviewTask
• sortBy.  Optional.  Specifies the parameter to sort by.  Must be one of {taskName, priority, duration, status, percent, dueDate, created, description}.
• showProperties.  Optional.  Specifies whether task properties should be included in the output for every task.

Response

To be implemented, but is intended to contain tasks assigned to group members, group pooled tasks (which are by definition unassigned), and completed tasks, all of which will have the following fields associated with each task: taskName, priority, duration, status, percent, dueDate, created, description.

Task

Returns current and historical workflow information for the identified task.  Further details TBD.

Workflow

Returns current and historical workflow information for the identified workflow.  Further details TBD.

If you have any feedback on what I’ve presented so far, as always, please speak up.

Now there are a lot of ways in which we could build this out.  First, we need to consider the reporting context.  Do we want to report based on:

• the system as a whole (”show me all workflow status in the entire system”)
• web content management use (”show me all workflow status for web project X”)
• user (”show me how user ‘bobsmith’ is involved in workflow”)
• group (”show me how group ‘marketing’ is involved in workflow”)
• asset type (”show me all workflow status pertaining to ‘.jpg’ files”)
• asset (”show me all workflow status related to this particular document”)
• path (”show me all workflow status related to assets in/under this path”)
• workflow (”show me all status related to all instances of this named workflow”)
• workflow task (”show me all status related to all instances of this named workflow task”)
• something else I haven’t thought of yet (please comment here if you have other suggestions)

Since I want to get something going that will be of the most use to the most people, I’m going to start with reporting by user, then by group.  My next consideration will be exactly what to report.  I have not used any other workflow software besides Alfresco, so if you’ve got input on this, I would love to hear it (please comment below).  That said, so far I’m thinking that given a user id, the report will show:

• the number of currently active workflows the user is/may be involved it (i.e. this would be inclusive of pooled tasks assigned to a group that the user is a part of)
• the number of currently active workflow tasks the user has assigned to them

Given a user id and a date range, the report will show:

• the number of completed tasks
• the number of completed workflows
• the average duration of each completed task

Better still, given a user id, date range (Jan 1, 2008 - December 31, 2008), and recurring time period (monthly), the report could show a bar chart or line graph of the aforementioned metrics.  Perhaps you can even add the ability to compare one user to another on those metrics.

A few things are notably missing so far.  Nowhere have I mentioned the ability to key off of custom workflow metadata, or report on custom workflow metadata. Perhaps the former could be addressed via the inclusion of a name/value pair that serves as a filter.  For example, providing {http://www.mycompany.com/model/my-workflow/1.0}/customId=42 could serve to filter out any workflow that does not have that custom metadata set on the workflow’s start task.  Reporting custom workflow metadata probably doesn’t make sense as part of a “by user” oriented report, but probably does make sense as part of a named workflow report.  What do you think?

Hopefully this post will drum up some food for thought, and ideally some feedback on what Alfresco users might want from a workflow reporting perspective.  Please feel free to share your thoughts on the subject by commenting here or participating in the workflow forum at http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewforum.php?f=34.

Here’s a simple example of how such an action could be used:

<action class="org.alfresco.repo.workflow.jbpm.Mailer" config-type="bean">
   <to>alfresco@localhost</to>
   <from>info@alfresco.com</from>
   <subject>Content awaiting review!</subject>
   <text>New changes have been submitted and are awaiting your review!</text>
</action>

This is a bit easier to work with as a workflow author than having to code an E-Mail action being sent via Javascript. It does have some limitations though in this simple form, so let’s enhance it a little further. A few things that might be desirable include:

• Comma and/or semicolon separated E-Mail addresses
• Variable resolution of E-Mail addresses
• Variable resolution of task assignee E-Mail addresses (bpm:assignee)
• Variable resolution of multiple task assignee E-Mail addresses (bpm:assignees)
• Variable resolution of task group assignee E-Mail addresses (bpm:groupAssignee)
• Variable resolution of multiple task group assignee E-Mail addresses (bpm:groupAssignees)
• Variable resolution within the subject and body text

By implementing an Alfresco jBPM action to handle these various requirements, one could ultimately specify a quite dynamic E-Mail action, such as the following:

<action class="org.alfresco.repo.workflow.jbpm.Mailer" config-type="bean">
   <to>bob@example.com, ${bpm_groupAssignees}, ${somewf_somePersonsEmail}, jane@example.com</to>
   <from>info@alfresco.com</from>
   <subject>Content awaiting review!</subject>
   <text>New changes have been submitted and are awaiting your review!</text>
</action>

Further enhancements could include leveraging E-Mail templates already registered with the repository.  To get your hands on an implementation of the E-Mail action described here, see improvement ALFCOM-2555 in Alfresco’s JIRA.  If you have suggestions for how to further improve this simple extension, please comment here!

1. Home entertainment enthusiasts - those people who have a computer of some kind stationed in or near their home entertainment center, dedicated solely for use by the home entertainment center
2. Digital media content producers - those people who capture audio, video, and/or digital images and work with them in order to deliver the appropriate format and size for their intended destination (such as TV, mobile devices, the web, etc.)

I’ve thought about this quite a bit, but I wonder, what do you think?  Here are the issues I am wrestling with:

1. Are these target audiences different enough to warrant two separate blogs, or can one blog serve both audiences with excellence?
2. I really like the “blog family” concept, which I think is essential to establish a brand.  Think about TechCrunch, MobileCrunch, and TalkCrunch as an example of a “blog family”.  With that in mind, what should the blog/blogs/podcast be called?

I’m usually really good at brainstorming, but for some reason, the name question is killing me.  Therefore, as a thank you for relieving my mental block, whoever comes up with the naming scheme I end up using will receive a free copy of Tribes by Seth Godin.  Please comment here with your suggestions, and thanks in advance for your help!

“Thanks 4 following. Here is a short video introduction: http://www.cruzinthegalaxie.com/sfw/thanks-for-the-follow/”

So I checked out his video, liked the guy and the idea, and asked him how he did it. He told me, so I did it too a few days later. See my welcome video here.

As you can see, I simply introduce myself and tell people what I do, what my interests are, and what I tweet about.  The feedback I received in the week since has been overwhelmingly positive.  In fact, I went back and counted.  I got 50 positive responses via direct message or reply from Twittter, 4 neutral responses, and 2 negative responses out of the 344 people who clicked on the link.  In addition to that, I’ve been invited to lunch by a social media company, invited to write for a recently launched online magazine with several authors, and invited to record 30-60 second videos on various topics for a well known musical artist’s web site.  Here is some of the praise I received (only public responses included here):

steaner: Pretty cool. When @Hobnox started following @br524 we got a DM with a link to a short introduction video http://bit.ly/13yEw

MikeLizun: Nice touch from @br524 thanks followers with a video http://tinyurl.com/6nemcq tells you a little about him, what he does, what he tweets

cwalcott: @br524 I like your twitter welcome video, I think that’s a really good idea

aneel: well now.. @br524 has a nice “welcome” vid for twitter followers. kinda like that.

botchagalupe: Digging the video intro thingy when I follow someone. I need to get one of those… thx @br524

dcw: @br524 just inadvertently gave me a wonderful idea as far as v/blogging goes. Brilliant; utterly brilliant….

MikeyPod: @br524 wow! great idea to do the twitter intro video! nice to meet ya!

ellieeille: Nice idea: @br524 introduces himself to new twitter followers in a 30-second video clip (link in a DM) http://poprl.com/6xg

martin001: @ellieeille i just followed @br524 because i watched his video you linked up.. i think thats a brilliant idea - might just have to imitate

jstorerj: the other day i asked what you thought of auto-DM’s after a follow. most ppl thought it was a bad practice. @br524’s is ok http://is.gd/aip0

DarinRMcClure: @br524 Nice welcome vid.

HeatherLeson: Wow that is a first! Follow someone and get a video introduction. Masterful usage @br524

Today I got a negative response from @lizstrauss, a highly followed and successful blogger, who asked me to ‘please turn off your auto-responder’.  After a private back and forth, Liz directed me to this post about Twitter Spam, which basically says auto responses demonstrate that you don’t “get it”, and that you’re sending unwanted spam to people in this fashion.  I really have to disagree with this view, particularly in light of all the positive feedback I’ve been receiving about this.  Generally, yes, the auto-response is impersonal, and I rarely click on the links to a person’s blog in those messages.  I really do think the approach I’ve taken is distinctly different, significantly more personal, and a hell of a lot more engaging.

So I’m curious now…those who did not respond after having clicked the link in my auto-response message but did not comment one way or another…did they dislike the introduction?  After all, there are 289 people who saw the video who have not weighed in.  Maybe all this positive feedback is really the minority!

Somehow I doubt it though.  The guy who had the idea originally (as far as I can tell) reports success on several levels, and got similarly positive responses.

For those of you seeing it here for the first time, what do you think?  If you followed me on twitter and got a direct message that said, “Thanks for following! I made you a 30 second Twitter Welcome Video - http://poprl.com/6xg .  Thanks again…Brian”, would that make you mad?  What about after you watched the video?

Please comment here, I’d really love to get to the bottom of this.

• Increase user engagement with your content
• Extend the reach of your content
• Enable API access to your content

As a prerequisite though, companies should be converting their content into assets that can be managed centrally.  In so doing, content can be easily related to other content and then be syndicated, retrieved by third parties, or composed and presented to users.

In addition to the aforementioned strategic goals, companies should strive to deliver on them in an efficient manner.  According to Bryan Spaulding, this means building a system with a Media Service Architecture that scales and enables exposure to PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.  And don’t forget to instrument your system such that feedback can be obtained to enable reporting and thus tweaking of the platform.  Jeff Potts reminds us that Alfresco and Optaros can be levaraged to get you there faster via their awesome capabilities.

What is interesting to me about all this is the different approach to the problem.  At Ringside Networks, we focused on the “beefy middle”, as Shaun Connolly so eloquently put it.  In a nutshell, this meant enabling social interactions in the context of existing web sites with existing users and content.  Restated in terms of a Ringside customer’s objectives, those three goals might look like this:

• Increase user engagement with your web site
• Increase the reach of your company/brand
• Enable API access to your site’s social capabilities and/or users

In the Alfresco/Optaros case, the underlying premise is that content is of the utmost importance, and that people will pay to enable their users to interact with your content, or better yet to advertise around your content.  In the case of Ringside, it was all about identity and interaction on your site amongst your users, with new eyes sourced from various social networks.  SocialPass is taking yet another approach, which brings people to your site, regardless of where they came from.  Either way, people would pay to bring users to their web sites.

I think the best of both worlds can be achieved.  There will be some shops that won’t be positioned to re-architect their content management systems, and will pay to bring new users to them.  Hopefully their advertising revenue will more than offset the costs of customer acquisition.  Other shops will be well positioned to capitalize on their content via a solid Media Service architecture.  Finally, there will be shops that do both.  I can imagine the NY Times online syndicating images, videos, and stories, providing API access, and serving photo galleries and videos along side related stories with personalized SocialPass conversations involving Facebook users, MySpace users, E-Mail invitees, and Twitter invitees all on the same page with integrated ratings and persistent comments.  This is nirvana!!!

I’m thinking back to my week of Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training, and I recall the general concept that you can’t improve a process that hasn’t been measured.  That said, it would be fairly easy to simply time someone performing a task or set of tasks before DM implementation to estimate cost savings, and then again after DM implementation to monitor progress.  You could go deep and set up a control chart if you really wanted to, which actually may yield information about special cases that cause delays, and provide further opportunities for automation.

I’m wondering if any Six Sigma experts or system integrators out there have actually done any projects that leveraged DM software to increase knowledge worker efficiency and automate their work.  If so, please comment here and share what you’ve found!

Our process for defining processes was basically this:

1. Draft the process
2. Pilot it (and make revisions based on what was learned)
3. Approve it
4. Deploy it

Of course, there were several sub-steps within those processes, and they required version control, auditing, and moving documents to different folders at certain times (a document workflow).  At the time, we used Sharepoint as best we could to manage all this.  It handled version control and auditing, but it had two shortcomings as I recall.  First, there was no automated way to baseline a set of documents as being part of a release candidate (such as you can do with CVS or Subversion tagging).  Second, the moving of documents was all manual, every step of the way.  This doesn’t sound like much, but as I recall, we had six or seven folders in the workflow, and we could have used some automation when doing round robin peer reviews within our team.  And the deployment of these assets was no trivial matter; I remember it took me almost a whole day to learn how to deploy a set of process assets, and then deploy a set of them for the first time.

So as I went through “Getting Started With Document Management“, I was shaking my head the whole time.  It is so easy to create content rules and workflow rules.  Instead of manually moving documents from folder to folder, a workflow could have been set up to do that automatically.  Instead of manually notifying a teammate that it’s their turn in the round robin peer review chain, the workflow could have done that for us.  And best of all, we could have easily set up a templatized space that could have been used for all of the processes and associated documents that we delivered over the course of over two years.  Finally, because Alfresco is open source and standards based, we could have extended the platform to automate our specific processes for deploying process assets.

Considering the number of documents we handled, the amount of reviews, the number of gates in the process, and the number of people involved, I have no doubt that if we used Alfresco we would have saved a lot of time and therefore money as we defined, piloted, approved, and deployed new Agile processes across the company.

So yeah, document management software is a great thing.  I only wish I knew about it years ago.