Alfresco meetups for government | Follow up

Chris Conway

Firstly a huge thanks to everyone that came along that made the very first Alfresco Meetup for Government such an entertaining and informative event. 

Held at the TechUK offices, in London on 3rd February 2016, we invited members of government departments and contractors, already using, or interested in finding out more about Alfresco to the meetup. 

Designed to be a completely independent forum, we invited speakers from around local and central government like Bristol City Council and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, as well as technology providers such as Alfresco Activiti and Docusign. The focus was on how using open source tools can greatly help the way that departments function, and the options and processes to get government embracing better ways of working.

With a great attendance to the event from many areas and departments, the speakers got underway.

Introduction To Alfresco Activiti – Paul Holmes-Higgin

Paul Holmes-Higgin, the founder of Alfresco Activiti, was first to take the stand, with a succinct presentation on the use cases and benefits behind using a modern business process engine such as Activiti, and the simplicity to end users to create, use and submit work via these workflows. He ended with a demo showing how the build and management would work inside of the Activiti environment. Here are his slides below:

Seamless Integration Of Digital Signatures With Alfresco – Docusign

Here we had Iain Jones, senior solutions engineer from Docusign, as well as Justin Sheppard, solutions consultant from Zaizi presenting the Docusign case for digital signatures.

Zaizi originally designed and implemented the Cosign connector for Alfresco, allowing for internal singing of documents, and since its acquisition by Docusign we have been working away at designing and building the integration with Docusign and Alfresco, to allow for external facing, legally admissible document signing for all manner of business use cases. 

Find out more about Docusigns solutions

Records Management: Best Practices At The Department For Business, Innovation And Skills

Unfortunately our intended speaker could not attend, so a suitable stand in, Carlos Miguens, was on hand to take us through how the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) uses Alfresco as their department wide records and information management system. Carlos, as lead advisor on this project, took us through the entire process from conception through to delivery, user feedback and next steps. 

Zaizi held an event in the innovation centre at BIS in December to showcase how the department has been able to bring in and migrate to their new Alfresco instance and lessons learned, find out more about the event here.

BCC Case Study: How Technology And Forward Thinking Power Smarter Working

Robin Lewis, EDRM Domain manager at Bristol City Council came up next to take us through how the council has been using different technology to promote better ways of working within the council. They had to go through a huge property downsizing to reduce costs, and this meant getting rid of huge amounts of paper storage that councils inevitably have to deal with. 

Using Alfresco, as well as Ephesoft, Robin and his team were able to take old cumbersome manual processes and streamline them. We went through how the council managed to do this during a recent webinar below, as well as his slides from the Alfresco meetup.

Alfresco On AWS Considerations And Options For Government

Amazon recently announced they were going to bring their Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the UK by creating local data centres. This now opens up the possibility of UK government taking up the opportunity to use these flexible, powerful and scalable services for use as government data must remain in the UK. 

Carlos again takes us through considerations to take before embarking on any project using AWS, and the differences between the solutions and services they offer.

See the presentation below for a rundown of the implications for UK government. 

Correspondence & Case Management System Using Alfresco 5.X & Activiti 1.4

Last to take the stage was Giuseppe Malanga, Solution Architect at Zaizi, who created a whole run down of how Alfresco, alongside Activiti would work inside a government department, from originating documents, then following the process by passing them through the system to knowledge workers and management. 

The system is a step by step process of how content can be passed efficiently throughout an organisation, get seen by the right people, check and managed and finally a full audit report, with everyone who dealt with, worked, viewed and added to any use case. 

Find out more about Activiti, or see Giuseppes slides below

During the event we were very pleased to see a lot of questions and discussions on the implications to government, especially the Activiti workflows which many people suggesting how helpful working in this manner would be to departmental work like FOI requests and case work. 

We want to make sure that these events continue in the future, and we will be arranging the next event soon. We are on the look out for ambassadors of the open source movement that would like to help with setting the agenda and making suggestions on how we move these events forward.

We would like those interested to sign up for our Meetup group,  and more than happy to recieve suggestions and ideas that would make these events useful and informative.

See you at the next Meetup!

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