Alfresco is open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Enterprise Content Management is different to the many open source Content Management System’s (CMS) such as Drupal or Joomla. ECM is described by Wikipedia as
“software that enables organizations to create/capture, manage/secure, store/retain/destroy, publish/distribute, search, personalize, and present/view/print digital content such as pictures/images, text, reports, video, audio,
transactional data, catalog, code”or put more simply “ECM systems primarily focus on the capture, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of digital files for enterprise use and their life-cycle management”.
While Content Management Systems (CMS) as mentioned above normally concentrate on managing web content often for community sites allowing members to collaborate.
Alfresco allows you to track documents (for example word documents) and view them. Documents can be grouped and viewed in a manner which is sensible to the users rather than just a flat file structure (as in Windows explorer). Alfresco assists collaboration on documents by multiple people and teams introducing version tracking and workflow. Remote access to documents is available though a web portal.
Alfresco includes Common Internet File System Interface (CIFS) that provides Microsoft Windows file system compatibility this means that for an end user files can be accessed through the standard Windows explorer menu allowing a completely familiar interface, even allowing
Microsoft Briefcase to synchronise files. While the user accesses the file in the usual way the Alfresco rules-engine automatically processes the document updates for version control, workflow, transformation, meta data assignment, web publishing, records management, and more which can be controlled through a web portal interface. The system includes an out of the box portal solution to simplify the development of enterprise and departmental portals.
There are three versions of Alfresco available:
- Community for Developers and Technical Enthusiasts for Non-Critical Environments
- Small Business for Small Enterprises, Departments in Global 2000 Organizations or Not-For-Profits
- Enterprise for Major Corporations, Governments and Not-For-Profits
All versions are 100% open source.
Alfresco is looking to be compliant with the latest standards and its repository is currently JSR-170 compliant.
There are many ways to have a look at Alfresco, for Windows there is a full installer that will install all of the required components including mySQL and Tomcat, if you do not want to install directly onto your machine you can download a virtual setup for Vmware and there are also
online versions to trial from the Alfresco website.Possibilities for Alfresco are endless and different projects are already appearing including Tyfresco a project to integrate to SugarCRM as well as other software, a Firefox extension and a partnership with Filemark a leading provider of document processing.
Summary
Platform
Installation – Windows, MacOS, Linux (Solaris and BSD should also work)Database – any database supported by Hibernate, including MySQL, Oracle Microsoft SQL Server.
Application Server: Tomcat, JBoss. BEA Weblogic, Sun Java System
Application Server, IBM webserver and IBM Webserver Community Edition
Browsers – Firefox (all platforms Windows, Apple Mac and Linux), Microsoft Internet ExplorerThe Alfresco system is developed using the latest Java technologies including JBoss 4.0, JBoss Portal 2.0, Spring 1.2, Hibernate 3.0, MyFaces 1.0, Lucene 1.4 and J2SE 5.0.
Well known Users/Case Studies
Boice, Informa, Reed, Case StudiesProprietary CRM Competitors
Documentum, IBM, Filenet, Interwoven, Vignette, and Microsoft Sharepoint
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