Alfresco, WoodWing Push ECM for Publishers

By Angela Natividad | Published Apr 23, 2007

Alfresco and WoodWing Software have decided to combine strengths in support of a joint program for WoodWing's Smart Connection Enterprise editorial workflow system in conjunction with the Alfresco 2.0 open source enterprise content management system. The integrated solution caters to the members of the sacrosanct publishing industry. (We confess we're a bit biased.)

The pairing was consummated shortly after WoodWing released its most current update to Smart Connection Enterprise v4.2, their triple-tiered open architecture editorial workflow system.

“The Alfresco-WoodWing partnership brings together some of the best innovation in publishing, web content management and content delivery systems built on top of an open source and standards compliant, enterprise class technology,” says CTO Terry Barbounis of the Christian Science Monitor, an international daily boasting a multimedia website along with e-mail, PDA and downloadable PDF editions alongside standard print.

Intended for just such dynamic publications, the fruit of the Alfresco/WoodWing collabo gives book publishers, newspapers, magazines, corporate and agency clients a scalable system that is easy to maintain, implement and customize on the front and back ends. The publishing process thus becomes more efficient, rendering production cycles shorter.

The dual-part ECM offering arrives as a welcome rebuke to statements Google recently made about the stagnant state of the ECM industry.

David Bercovich, a product marketing manager with Google's enterprise application unit, contends, “Unlike the content management industry where you might be two years, five years, 10 years away from switching vendors, switching technology, in the search world it's a click away at any given point in time,” Bercovich said. “We have to win a user's loyalty with every click.” He also totes Google, iPod, TiVo and even MySpace as more innovative than the latest enterprise technologies.

Bercovich made these comments at a recent AIIM-hosted conference and expo, adding that Google is the world's largest content management system. It gathers information, categorizes it and makes it accessible via search. He encourages users to think of Google as a business application because so many people use it to find information when they are working.

An ECM solution may not be a one-click implementation, but certainly there are merits to organizing one's own information in-house. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how one assesses the situation, intra-office correspondence can't all be indexed on “the world's largest content management system.”

Promoting their dual offering as an alternative to expensive and rigid systems of yore, CEO Brian Kruger of WoodWing USA happily notes, “We are now able to offer the best in editorial workflow and ECM at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems.”

Alfresco CEO John Powell agrees, toting the partnership as “a result of the clear demand in the global publishing industry for faster, lower-priced solutions and leverages the adoption Alfresco is seeing with leading publishing organizations and publishing software companies.”

Learn more about the solution at Alfresco and Woodwing's websites, respectively.