Alfresco held its exciting conference for European developers, DevCon London, last week. Taking advantage of all the talent attending, Ixxus conducted a survey to get the developer community’s thoughts on Alfresco’s current product focus and where they’d like things to go next. The results make some interesting reading:

• In terms of future direction, 52% of respondents would like to see further expansion into mobile/tablets, compared to 42% for more cloud-computing support, 30% big data scalability, 25% geographically dispersed repositories, and only 12% for more social content enhancement.
• Views on Alfresco’s WCM strategy were broadly positive; 38% think the WQS is great, although 50% think it needs better integration with WCM tools such as Drupal and Joomla. Only 6% - a clear minority – would prefer to see more support put into the old AVM.
• A massive 65% rated the Solr integration as “fantastic”, making it a definite success – and only 3% of respondents described themselves as "not keen".
• 55% think the Surf implementation has a lot of potential but needs more support; 27% love it as it is and 13% find it too difficult to use so avoid doing so.
• There was a lot of interest in the future of Alfresco Mobile - 38% of respondents want more editing functionality, 38% want support for more operating systems (this was usually Android, when explicitly stated), 28% would prefer more concentration on tablet platforms and 25% more concentration on smartphone platforms.

When asked what improvements Alfresco should make in future, respondants placed strong emphasis on the need for more thorough documentation, and problems with the layout and navigability of the wiki. It was agreed generally that Alfresco Share 4.0 was a great step forward, and that things were definitely moving in the right direction.