Nuxeo Releases v5.2 M4 of Its Content Management Platform

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Feb 4, 2009

In December we ran through a list of things happening with enterprise open source content management provider Nuxeo, including the work they have been doing on the upcoming version 5.2 of their content management platform. Good news has come from the vendor as the make their way into the final stretch of that 5.2 release. Today you can get your hands on Nuxeo 5.2 M4 with over 30 new features and a number of tech improvements.

Nuxeo 5.2 M4

With work still actively happening on the final version of Nuxeo EP 5.2, the latest and final milestone release — M4 — has been opened up for downloading.

There are over 30 functional enhancements in this new version of Nuxeo and a number of technical improvements to go along with it.

Technical Improvements

Most of these we mentioned back in December, so here they are as a refresher:

Content Store: A new visible storage engine for the repository (but they haven't forgotten about Jackrabbit)
WebEngine: Now fully-based on JAX-RS and integrated with Eclipse IDE
Document Conversion: Improved caching and OpenOffice instances Management
Monitoring Services: Accessible through HTTP and JMX, you can now access and expose the monitoring data of components
Workflow: Better integrated with the repository and leverages jBPM properly
Event Model: Cleaner and compatible with JMS
Auditing: Easier to customize and integrate with the Monitoring services

One of the technical improvements that Nuxeo CEO Eric Barroca is particularly excited about is the new visible content store. The new content store is a native and natural SQL-based storage engine. This is good because it allows for integration of tools at the SQL level for Business Intelligence and ETL(extract, transform, load) — things that most enterprises demand.

New Features and Functionality

While the technical improvements are definitely nice to see, it's the functional enhancements that are likely to catch your attention the most. With the sheer number included, we aren't going to run through them all here. You can get a closer look yourself on Nuxeo's website.

Some of these enhancements include: Virtual Navigation, Preview Support and Picture Support, Themes, Index and Search. But here are a few worth mentioning in a little more detail:

Annotation Service

This one is likely to get the most attention. Nuxeo has included an annotation server that can be accessed via the Preview tab in the Web user interface. The Preview tab is a feature that reads the document and creates an HTML version of it for viewing (so you don't have to download the actual document). It allows you to annotate words or paragraphs of documents without modifying the document itself.

The implementation is compliant with the Annotea W3C standard (RDF based and Rest API) and includes extensions such as the ability to annotate images and associate annotations with actual documents (not just the URL) and document versions.

There's a detailed review on the Nuxeo blog that demonstrates how the annotation service works. According to the blog post "Don't worry, it's all totally down with the document model so it can understand documents that have multiple underlying files, documents that supply their own previews inside the document itself, etc.". Which is pretty cool.

Here are a couple of examples: