Alfresco Document Management News & Articles

Last October, open source Enterprise CMS provider Alfresco (news, site) and content software provider Caringo (news, site) announced that they had developed an interface that would support the use of Caringo’s CAStor as an Alfresco content archive and repository.

At the time, it was inevitable that tighter integration between the two was on the way, and yesterday they formally announced the launch of the Alfresco2CAStor connector between the two platforms.

With a public review of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS) (news, site) expected to be announced sometime soon, it's definitely time to check in and see what the various player have been up to.

Reminder: CMIS is an OASIS specification. It may well end up as a standard (and we hope that this happens), but it's not there yet. Here's where things stand today.

Alfresco (news, site) has been talking about their ability to support to the complete CMIS specification in the next version of their ECM for a little while now, but that's not all that has arrived with Alfresco 3.2. The latest version of the community edition of their open source enterprise content management software also includes some updated records management capabilities, improved Forms, IMAP support and a nice solution for the iPhone.

Open source enterprise content management vendor Alfresco (news, site) really doesn't strike you as a vendor that likes to stay in the shadows. Quite the contrary actually. And the work they have been doing on CMIS -- the Content Management Interoperability Specification -- proves it. Their goal -- and they aren't being subtle about it -- is to the first Enterprise CMS that is fully CMIS compliant.

Welcome to July 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

At the end of March this year Alfresco (news, site) released version 3.1 of its enterprise content management system. Discussing the new release, VP of Business Development Matt Asay indicated that they had improved support for Kofax Capture. So the announcement that a new extension for Alfresco 3.1 is undergoing beta testing and will soon be ready for general release is no real surprise.

However, it was neither Kofax, nor Alfresco itself that developed the extension, but Alfresco’s partner Micro Strategies did the honors this time.

The buzz this morning at the dungeon-esque eZ Conference Developer's Track (it took a while to find the smoky back room) was on implementation of CMIS to integrate Alfresco's document management interface with eZ Publish.

Christian Lundvang from NXC presented on the topic with some help in the question period from Sergey Puschin.

Lundvang demo-ed how documents can be created using Alfresco's MS Word interface or Alfresco administration and then accessed in the eZ Publish Back or Front office. He then presented a case of creating and publishing a document from eZ Publish into the Alfresco space.

While Lundvang did not show a counter case of requesting the eZ Publish content repository using the CMIS interface, it is reportedly in the planning and under development.

The demo and discussions showed the strengths of the standard but also highlighted some potential limitations as pointed by some attendees. For instance, eZ Publish could store more structure contents than simply document oriented content: a folder in eZ Publish might have its own set of meta information when it is a very simple container in both Alfresco and the CMIS standard.

The CMIS standard, which has been advanced as a work-in-progress under the Oasis umbrella, has been provisionally adopted by a number of systems including Alfresco, Nuxeo and Day software. The current version of the standard, 0.61, has been implemented by NXC first to enable integration with Alfresco but it could then be used for any integration with a CMIS compliant solution.

eZ undoubtedly looks to this project as an example of how an eZ partner, like NXC, can contribute to the eZ Publish model: The extension, a collaboration between NXC and eZ Systems, will be integrated into the eZ Publish 4.2 release slated for September.

Alfresco (news, site) is one of the most well known open source enterprise content management providers. With over 1.4 million downloads of their solution already and a number of marque clients for the Alfresco Enterprise, they should be happy to continue business as usual.

But, as usual, they aren't. This week they have announced a partnership with ParaScale, a cloud storage software provider, to offer Alfresco "Content as a Service".

Open Source solutions seem to be in high demand in this down economy. So what do open source enterprise content management providers do to meet this demand? They add new features and functionality of course. At least that is what KnowledgeTree (news, site) has done.

The latest release of this commercial open source ECM is out today and offers a number of new features including integration with the entire Microsoft Office Suite.

Enterprise Content Management specialist, Alfresco Software (news, site) and EnterpriseDB Corporation, are partnering to offer Alfresco Enterprise for use with EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus and EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

In our February article entitled Under the Covers: Alfresco's SharePoint Services (WSS) Killer we looked at Alfresco's (news, site) take on providing basic document and collaboration services for free. Alfresco's project is called Alfresco Share. 

When we posited that Alfresco Share was after SharePoint Services' marketshare, it sparked a bit of chatter -- some positive, some not so much.

Voices in the SharePoint camp said that the two solutions should not be compared, that SharePoint  was a platform -- much more than a simple collaborative document management solution, whereas Alfresco was only providing some services.

While we believe the comparison was fair, we also agree that there's more to SharePoint than immediately meets the eye. By the same token, there's more to Alfresco than just Share, much of which we alluded to in the article.

Is it worth it to look at a side-by-side view of SharePoint and Alfresco from a platform perspective? Is it possible that one is significantly better than the other? Maybe, but the answer you get may not be the one you expected.

As the community manager for Alfresco (news, site), I interact in a variety of ways with our members but most of the time our conversations take place over the great expanse of the “Interweb”.  It is, therefore, a great pleasure to see faces, shake hands, and listen to what our community has to say at our meetup events.

Matt Asay, VP of Business Development for Alfresco (news, site) opened the CMSExpo with the message that open source is now mainstream and being embraced by the enterprise.

It is the right message at the right time. Open source companies like Alfresco are thriving in an otherwise difficult time.

Proprietary vendors are trying to survive through acquisition resulting in less choice. They use closed standards making it difficult to get your content out of their systems. Set your content free by using open source software.

Here are just a few other tidbits that Asay had to say about open source:

• Alfresco is considered enterprise but Drupal and Joomla! are also being embraced by the enterprise
• Cost gets you in the door but surveys show that 87% of companies actually show cost savings after implementing open source
• Open source de-risks software acquisition -- you can try it for free before buying it
• Most software projects fail: If you buy open source and it fails, you have spent much less money in the process -- it is a subscription vs a large up-front charge
• Forrester survey: 100% will be using or plan to use open source by 2010, 56% will be using or plan to use a content management system
• Why use open source:  65% said it sparked innovation, 81% for better quality software, 67% lower cost

And what are the 2009 trends for Enterprise Content Management?

1. Governance, retention, compliance
2. Freedom of choice
3. Easier to use, customize and deploy (Drupal and Joomla! are leaders here)
4. More and better software for the price

Welcome to the first installment of our new end-of-the-month look at what you can expect from open source CMS projects in the next 30 days. We're just getting started and are counting on you, our community members to help us gather the key facts.

Here's what you can expect in May 2009. To avoid playing favorites, the projects are presented in alphabetical order.

Companies struggling to control vast amounts of documents for compliance, or even litigation purposes, may be interested in the latest partnership designed to deal specifically with these issues.

This time the partnership is between open source Enterprise Content Management vendor Alfresco (news, site) and document management software provider Rational Retention (RR).

The result is a system that will automate the management of both structured and unstructured data from across an entire ECM that may be needed for drawn-out compliance and litigation proceedings.