Alfresco Beecon in Zaragoza
What is BeeCon
Started back in 2016, BeeCon is the developer conference of the Alfresco community (the people not the edition). The event is organised by "Order of The Bee" which coordinates the main community contributors and actors. A big presence of Alfresco engineers and specialists acknowledges the seriousness of this endeavour. Last year the convention took place in Brussels, and this year it was located in the wonderful city of Zaragoza.
As all technical conventions, it is a wonderful place to exchange with people and share ideas. Presentations and a Hackathon were also part of the agenda. The event offered the opportunity to discuss projects using Alfresco, exchange experiences and to give feedback.
Hackathon
BeeCon started with a One-Day Hackathon and our Team came up with a lot of different ideas. We decided to propose a feature which supports user metadata extraction from a text PDF. Our main objective was to empower managers with no (or slow) access to development resources. With this solution, users can indicate in the Alfresco GUI (with the data-list) which and where metadata information can be found. Then the solution extracts the specific information and saves it. This function supports users with a need of a UI solution to help them extract metadata-fields and store them without any development.
At the end of the convention all teams presented the result of their work with a demo. Our project was awarded "Best Hackathon Project" of the year. It is an impulse to continue the project – improving it and adding even more functionalities like QR extraction or regular expressions.
Werner
BeeCon was my first developer conference organised by a software community. Usually members of a community work and collaborate remotely. This event gave me the chance to meet people in person and to collaborate, talk and have fun in a more personal way. There were many meetings presenting use cases and Alfresco employees hold speeches and answered our questions, that was awesome :-). Everything was very well organized and I am looking forward to the next BeeCon.
David
BeeCon in Zaragoza 2017 was my first conference organized by "Order of the Bee" and it was an incredible experience. I had the possibility to talk with people from all around the world and share experiences with Alfresco experts. The hackathon gave me the chance to work with professionals and I was part of a good, skilled team. With this team we will continue to share knowledge, ideas and continue to develop our idea.
The variety of technical talks and use cases presented, as well as the possibility to see how other people develop on Alfresco, helped me to learn new things. I want to thank all "Order of the Bee" members for the organization and all the speakers for their participation. A special thanks to keensoft for promoting Zaragoza, my city, making it known internationally. BeeCon 2018, I'm already waiting for you!
Simon
Before coming to BeeCon 2017 I wondered if this second edition could be as good as the first edition back in 2016. The event did not disappoint me in any manner. The presentations were more focused on devops (managing caches, synchronising two instances, merging two old instances on one new one) than last year.
Clearly the presence of multiple community contributors and Alfresco developers was very refreshing.
I found this second edition to be very well organised, people were very motivated to be there and thus interesting and interested. The fact that you can speak within a 10min. timeframe about SOLR cache issues to your favourite scene in a Tarantino film gives a good idea of that casual but productive atmosphere there was. I would deeply encourage any dev or architect dealing with the Alfresco platform should come.
In one sentence, I'm waiting for the 2018 edition impatiently.
What is Alfresco
Afresco is an Open-source ECM tightly coupled with the Activiti BPM engine (https://www.alfresco.com/)