Alfresco Aims for SMBs, Launches Alfresco Team for Enterprise Collaboration

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jun 20, 2011

Alfresco (news, site) offers an enterprise content management solution aimed at large enterprises (hence the word enterprise), but it decided it was missing a key segment of the market — departments and SMBs. Today, they resolve this with the addition of a new subscription offering — Alfresco Team. And it has some new functionality you won't currently find anywhere else.

Alfresco Team — For Departments & SMBs

Alfresco wants to support the content collaboration needs of the department and small business. So they designed a new subscription — and a new tool — for content collaborators called Alfresco Team.

Alfresco Team User Dashboard

It looks a little familiar at first — think Alfresco Share — but it offers more functionality out of the gate and brings Alfresco into the market range of US$ 2-15K per year.

ateamcollaborationsited#27D.png
Alfresco Team

Alfresco Team is built on a few important concepts:

Content Collaboration is at the core of our daily work lives
It is social
It happens in real-time

Now you've heard Alfresco talk Social Content Management before; here is Alfresco CMO Todd Barr explaining what it is:

Alfresco Team is basically like a SharePoint Team Site or a Box.net site, only it offers more capabilities. In addition to what you've seen out of Alfresco Share, Alfresco Team supports the ability to collaborate on content across different channels and collaboration tools, so you can work on your mobile device or the desktop and get the job done.

Some of the features you will see in Alfresco Team include:

Previews of audio/video and adobe photoshop files
Social features such as liking content, commenting, favoriting, threaded discussions
You can see changes to content in the activity stream
Take photos of a whiteboard session with your iPhone and upload it immediately to Team to share with your co-workers

There is also integration with Google Apps. Inside Team you can select to check out a document to Google Docs, collaborate on it and then check it back into Team.

Alfresco Team document actions

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can also now start a workflow. There is access to several common workflows related to managing documents, this capability utilizes the recent Alfresco Actitivi BPM solution. New folder rules and automated transformations (eg, doc to pdf) are also included in Alfresco Team.