Canopy Initiative

Enabling Open Source for the Enterprise

What started as an idea to create a framework to integrate a web content management platform (Drupal) with a enterprise content management application (Alfresco) quickly became much more than just getting two technologies to work together. To really foster true alignment between these software products we found that bringing together the companies behind those products, Acquia and Alfresco, was critical to its success.

The Canopy Initiative thus evolved not just by integrating two open source technologies which are leaders in their respective spaces, but by aligning the organizations behind those technologies to make open source successful for the enterprise. Appnovation is currently extending beyond the Acquia and Alfresco success to include Mulesoft, Hadoop, and leading HTML5 frameworks.  Long term, Appnovation will work to identify best of breed open source technologies, and companies that support them, to complement this stack and continue to make open source the right choice for the enterprise.

How do we choose technologies for Canopy?

• Open Source industry leaders
• Commercially available Enterprise class support
• Companies that are predictable and aligned with the open source movement
• Strong partner and development communities

The Story of the Canopy Initiative

Recognizing a need in 2009 to bring together two leading open source platforms, Appnovation set about creating a set of tools and services to easily manage the integration of Drupal and Alfresco.  

Why Drupal?

Drupal is an open source web content management system with thousands of modules available supported by a large developer community.  It leaves a lightweight webserver footprint, is highly scalable and expandable and has a user-friendly interface for non-technical users.

Why Alfresco?

Alfresco is an open source enterprise class rich document repository system with amazing out of the box features like Versioning and Document.  It affords great backend records management capabilities and a Lucene (“Google like”) search document indexer.  Alfresco supports open standards like CMIS, Web Services, Rest APIs, webdav, CIFS, JSON, JSR 168, RSS, Atom and more.

How these two technologies in Canopy work together:

• Content created within Alfresco can be pushed to Drupal and mapped to specific node types. This is done through the upload function using html files in the Alfresco repository.
• Content created in Drupal can also be pushed and replicated within the Alfresco repository. Webscripts grab the data and create the node from a preregistered model. Along with content, metadata is replicated across the two systems.
• Communication between Alfresco and Drupal are done using a custom RESTful API using JSON.
• Data is replicated across both systems and each platform functions as intended out of the box.
• Also integration using CMIS.

Why did we start with integrating Drupal & Alfresco?

• Drupal as the front-end provides Alfresco with a highly flexible presentation layer that can be used to build websites that would be more or less impossible with Alfresco alone.
• Alfresco compliments Drupal by providing a feature rich UI for managing web assets, as well as providing full document and knowledge management for entire organizations.
• There are many options in terms of scaling the application, for example you can have a low end Alfresco implementation combined with a high scale large volume Drupal front-end.
• Simple JSON REST API integrates easily into both Alfresco and Drupal.

What other capabilities have been added to Canopy

Building on the success of integrating Drupal and Alfresco, in 2011 Appnovation brought the highly popular and cutting edge technology of HTML5 into the mix. By adding HTML5, to the Canopy initiative, Appnovation was able to add new dynamic features and functionality as well as provide easy and integrated mobile access for the other technologies.

Adding HTML5

• Provides the benefits of a variety of powerful frameworks such as Sproutcore, Ember, Sencha, etc
• Cross-platform mobile and web delivery (web, tablet, smartphone)
• Whole host of new features such as: richer multimedia experience, 3D graphics, usage of offline storage, advanced client-server communication, incredible performance and much much more   

In 2012, the Canopy Initiative was recognized as “Solution of the Year” by Alfresco Software for its uniqueness and ease of implementation in helping clients combine the Alfresco suite of products with other leading open source technologies.

With 2013 well underway, a few more open source technologies have been added to the mix, bringing even more features and functionality to the Canopy initiative. The additions of leading open source technologies MuleSoft, Hadoop and MongoDB now give Canopy much more possibilities to integrate with other open source (MuleSoft Drupal integration and MuleSoft Alfresco integration) and non open source technologies alike and the power to provide Big Data solutions.

MuleSoft

• Ease of creating high-performance, multi-protocol connections involving diverse and varied systems and/or services
• Allows for integration with other open source technologies (Mule ESB Drupal integration & Mule ESB Alfresco integration) as well as non open source technologies
• Integration with the cloud

Hadoop & MongoDB

• Options for handling massive amounts of data
• Business analytics, interactive reporting, forecasting, predictive modeling, data mining and so much more

The Canopy Initiative is a proven platform but at the same time a work in progress. Appnovation maintains a strong commitment to not only integrate proven open source technologies, but to also bring the companies behind those technologies together to support the effort and create the optimal experience for clients and their users.

Get In Touch & Get Started

Appnovation's Canopy solution is proven and ready to be implemented in your environment. Take the first step getting Canopy and contact us today.