Document Mgt Roll-up: Alfresco's Enterprise 4, Knowledge Tree's DM Upgrades

By David Roe (@druadh20) Feb 7, 2012

This week, Alfresco released Enterprise 4, KnowledgeTree added new functionality to help users organize documents, Box and Smartsheet integrate, IBM’s SPSS Data Collection gets document capture and there’s talk of LibreOffice going mobile.

Alfresco Enterprise 4

The big release in the document management and enterprise content management world this week was Alfresco’s Enterprise 4 release.

Todd Barr, in an interview before the launch last week, told CMSWire that the planning on this had been extensive and was part of a concerted strategy to bring content management to where business users want it to be at the moment i.e. on the road and in the cloud.

And it does this by delivering a HTML5-enabled interface for social content collaboration, enhanced mobile access to enable it to run across tablets and integration with the most commonly used productivity tools such as Google Docs and Office.

Even if some of these are still only in the roadmap — releases to be announced between now and the summer — the real selling point of Enterprise 4 is available now: Enterprise 4, Barr said, is the base for Alfresco in the cloud.

KnowledgeTree Organizes Core Documents

KnowledgeTree has also announced two upgrades that it says will help organize core documents. They include:

Search for text within images and scanned documents: New Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology scans files as they are imported. The built-in OCR feature captures and indexes text within non-standard documents. That means users can search for and retrieve documents such as photographs or scanned contracts.
Add documents to folders via email: Users can email documents into their document vault. A unique email address for your folders can be shared with colleagues and external partners or customers. Attachments are organized in the correct folder with relevant metadata

If you want to test-drive the new functionality for free, you can set up a trial version from the KnowledgeTree website.Check it out in the video below:

LibreOffice to Go Mobile?

Meanwhile, reports suggest that the Document Foundation (TDF) is still working on bringing LibreOffice mobile. Last year it announced plans to create mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice. In 2011 an iOS porting trial run showed that it was, in fact, feasible, and that it could be brought mobile successfully.

At the FOSDEM conference last week, SUSE developer Michael Meeks indicated that the LibreOffice developers aim to maximize the amount of code that is shared between the desktop, mobile and cloud variants of the office suite.

Instead of rewriting the software or maintaining separate implementations, the existing code base will be adapted to work in new environments. It’s not there yet, he said, but work is ongoing, although when exactly it will be available is nowhere near clear.