Document Management Roll-up: Hotmail Supports SkyDrive, Alfresco's Open Source BPM Project

With the launch of Office 2010 out of the way Microsoft has turned its attention to improving its email service Hotmail and document sharing abilities. There have also been a number of releases to improve data storage, not least of which is NetApp's new offering for SharePoint 2010.

Hotmail Upgrades To Attract Gmail Users?

Seems that with last week’s launch of Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft is again looking for other areas where it might be able to clip Google’s wings.

This time it is with an upgrade to Hotmail, which it says, will stop Gmail’s gallop in mid-track. While there are many new features coming on board, from the point of view of document management the area of principal interest is the upgraded ability to share documents through Windows Live.

Users can use a combination of Web-based editing tools and cloud file storage. The new version, which will begin being offered to most users in July or August, aims to offer a better alternative to the standard attachment.

Instead of actually attaching a document or photo to the email massage itself, users will be able to upload the file to the SkyDrive service and then send a link to the message recipient.

In doing so Microsoft (news, site) overcomes one of the biggest drawbacks of Hotmail — using SkyDrive users will no longer have to worry about file sizes and as a result be able to share and send very large documents, presentations or videos.

The new version is due for release in July or August — no exact date announced — and will have the effect of poaching users from both Yahoo Mail and Gmail who are respectively the biggest and third biggest email service providers in the US.

Alfresco Tackles BPM Space

Alfresco (news, site) looks set to give the business process management space a considerable shake up with the launch of its new Business Process Management (BPM) open source project called Activiti.

A new Apache-licensed open source BPM platform designed from a blank slate, the Activiti project implements the new BPMN 2.0 standard from the Object Management Group (OMG). Alfresco has also added Tom Baeyens, founder and architect of the JBoss jBPM project, and fellow architect Joram Barrez, to its team.

Activiti will be built from the ground up to be a light-weight, embeddable BPM engine, but also designed to operate in scalable cloud environments.

Baeyens says he expects the final version to completely disrupt the BPM space as once it is released common BPM features will be freely available to everyone.

Alfresco says it got involved in the project because it believes a more widely available and liberally licensed process engine was needed across the BPM space.

While Activiti will become Alfresco's default business process engine it will also continue to support jBPM as well as other business process engines currently integrated with its enterprise content management software.

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Tags: alfresco, apache, business intelligence, business process management, cloud computing, document management, document management roll-up, email, erp, gmail, google, hp, microsoft, netapps, office 2010, open source, sap, sharepoint 2010, yahoo!

With the launch of Office 2010 out of the way Microsoft has turned its attention to improving its email service Hotmail and document sharing abilities. There have also been a number of releases to improve data storage, not least of which is NetApp's new offering for SharePoint 2010.