The thing about blogging is that whenever some really big thing happens in your life, you get so caught up in dealing with that really big thing that you never get round to actually writing anything about it.

So we moved into the new flat (it’s shiny!) last Monday and since then things have been slowly coming together. The compulsory trip to IKEA was undertaken on Saturday (the car park experience being one which I hope I won’t have to repeat anytime soon), the new sofas arrived yesterday and today the most wonderful thing has happenned – our broadband has been turned on.

Maybe I’ll get home and it won’t work at all, but for now I’m happy. And I’m certainly not staying late in the office today. I have things to play with!

Update: It works!

Apparently the fantasticness of Gmail is soon to be available for business use, with Google now piloting the service within San Jose City College in San Jose, California. They’re also accepting registrations from other organisations interested in taking part, via the original blog post. (How scary does the “Google Blog” sound?)

This kind of service that offers a real compelling alternative to the hosted Outlook type of service that we use for email at Alfresco at the moment. With 2GB of storage per user and the power of Google’s search technology, this is going to turn the market on it’s head.

Today we followed up our recent aquisition of alfresco.com with the quiet deployment of our two newly re-designed web sites.

We’ve made a big effort to cater to two distinct audiences (call them markets, if you like) with the new sites. Our company site at www.alfresco.com (although the www.alfrescosoftware.com also still works for backwards compatibility) has been overhauled to make it much easier to get at information about the Alfresco platform and the services we offer around it.

Some of the bigger changes we’ve made here are as follows:

• The creation of a five-step introduction to Alfresco, designed to help people get to know the product and featured prominently on the front page of the site
• An overhaul of the news feeds featured on the front page – we’ve added separate feeds for news stories, events and product updates so you can just get the news you want
• A complete re-design of the registration form for our basic online demo, and the addition of two new forms that allow you to register for our extended 30 day demo or our enterprise download trial
• Our training information (a key part of our strategy to introduce more people to Alfresco) has been brought up to date
• We’ve improved the general usability of the site by increasing font sizes and making links clearer
• Many other bug fixes and cosmetic changes…

Our community site at www.alfresco.org will become the focus for community activity around Alfresco. This has been through some even more radical changes, having been re-implemented from the ground up to give it a better fit with the look and feel of the company site.

• We’ve added a brand new downloads page that we hope will make it easier to get at the open source download you want faster
• We’ve started linking through to content that we already had in our wiki and other developer resources but hadn’t really publicised before – this marks the start of our pulling together of the developer/community content that we have scattered across various systems
• We’ve added a new community page where we’ll be providing a bit more information about how to get involved with Alfresco

The key thing is that this only marks the start of our efforts to improve our web infrastructure and we’ll be debuting a number of other changes in this area over the next few months. Stay tuned! 🙂