Today, our CQ5 Digital Asset Management and CQ5 Social Collaboration become available with the launch of CQ 5.2. This is a great day for me, because my two products that I have been working on for the last one and a half years are going to market.

Both with CQ DAM 5.2 and CQ Social Collaboration 5.2 I have been standing on the shoulders of giants, which have enabled me to implement a bold vision of Digital Asset Management and Social Collaboration integrated into Web Content Management in such a short time, following our CQ5.1 release last November. These giants are our developer team and our product marketing team who have a done a marvelous job on getting this product to countless demos, POCs, beta projects, press and analyst briefings and who have implemented one cool feature after the other.

But standing on the shoulders of giants also means reusing a great platform to build upon. We did not have to think a single second about clustering, backup, scaling, permissions, LDAP integration, workflow, development environment, because all this is at some level provided out of the box by CRX (and its underlying Apache Jackrabbit and Apache Sling foundations) and the CQ5 Platform we share with CQ5 Web Content Management.

I would like to take the opportunity to shed the light on two smaller features, one in CQ5 DAM and one in Social Collaboration that we typically do not include in demos, but that offer a huge potential for everyone who sees our products as a platform to realize his own ideas.

Feature number one is the workflow launcher we are using especially for CQ5 DAM. This workflow launcher will listen for repository events at a certain part of your content repository, for example the DAM bulk upload hot zone or a Sharepoint repository we are monitoring through our connectors. Once a new file is being created here, we launch the workflow that will take care of the actual processing. For the end user this means: more flexibility in creating complex workflow-driven processing solutions for digital assets. And it means a reduction of magic, because everything that will happen to your assets is visible (in the Workflow Models tab) and the reason why it happens is visible in the workflow launcher tab. Not attempting to do magic and to appear as magician should be a goal for every software engineer.

The second feature is even less graphic (guess why we are not demoing it), but it is one of the small pieces that makes Social Collaboration so great. We call it the 'Feed Importer', but it actually does a lot more. The idea of the feed importer is to poll a remote resource at a specified interval, to parse it and to create nodes in the content repository that represent the content of the remote resource. We are using this at two places right now - for subscribing to remote iCalendar files just like you do in Apple's iCal or Google Calendar and in the blog, where you can aggregate existing blogs in one 'planet blog' that for instance contains all bloggers of the JCR community. This auto-blogging-feature has been in the blog since Advanced Collaboration 1.1, but with Social Collaboration 5.2 there is a proper and powerful API that can be used in customer projects as well. Needless to say, in order to implement a new parser & importer all you have to do is implement one OSGi component and I expect it to be not too long till we see Twitter-mashups on CQ5-powered websites that are using the Feed Importer.

So thank you very much for all the help with the 5.2 release and I am looking forward to see many CQ5-powered community websites and public asset repositories soon.