Alfresco Document Management News & Articles

Ever thought Vignette was way too expensive for your content management heart's desires? Now, there may be a way to rethink this.

Today, Vignette Corporation (news, site) announced new licensing models for its web content management solutions, including a subscription-based model.

You aren't interested in SharePoint, so our piece on 7 Must Read Articles for SharePoint didn't tickle your fancy. Instead, you spend your time in the world of open source.

Fortunately for you, so do we. At a time of tight budgets and whispers of interoperability are everywhere, open source is something you can't ignore. Whether your interest is Joomla!, Drupal, XOOPs, Alfresco or one of the many other open source content management systems available, we have the information to guide you on your path.

Here are five must read articles on Open Source Content Management Systems.

If you are hanging out at the AIIM Conference the next few days, you are going to hear some interesting news and announcements from EMC (news, site). Along with some revealing research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by EMC, on the impact and importance of organizational agility, EMC is also announcing some new solutions designed to help customers work smarter.

Alfresco (news,site) has released version 3.1 of its enterprise content management system. Exclusively available to enterprise customers, this version has a number of stability improvements designed to support the most complex enterprises.

Open source offerings and associated services are getting better and starting to seem less risky, while IT budgets are shrinking. Result? What's bad for economy is clearly good for open source.

A recent survey shows that web content management is one of the prime "targets" for disruption by open source.

Open source vendors rejoice, closed source companies nod in agreement and utter the magic word "interoperability."

Alfresco is hosting a series of Alfresco Meetups from April 21 through May 14, 2009. These meetups are a chance to spend an informal day absorbing the latest developments at Alfresco, get some face-to-face time with Alfresco staff, network with the Alfresco community and learn through technical workshops.

Meetup topics include the latest developments in the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification, Alfresco Share and Alfresco Web Content Management (WCM) implementation experiences, and a presentation of the Alfresco roadmap for your input.

Meetup locations span the globe, from Europe to North America and Australia. For dates, locations, the agenda and registration, see Alfresco Meetups for Community & Customers.

CMS Watch studies the content management industry very closely. It's their job. They write a number of good research reports on technologies like web content management, enterprise content management, social software and SharePoint. Every so often they take all that knowledge and wrap it up into a neat little subway map, giving us a bird's eye view of who's who and where they fit in the industry. 

An updated version of that Subway map has been released and it is certainly worth taking a look at -- if not using some of that color printer ink you hold so dear.

Alfresco Software, Inc., announced that Bill Robinson was named their new Vice President for the Americas. His addition should help this open source Enterprise Content Management firm continue to grow even in this difficult economy.

SharePoint, dear SharePoint. We talk about this business collaboration tool -- sometimes called an enterprise content management system -- on almost a daily basis. You either love it, hate it, integrate with it or try to replace it.

Alfresco has chosen the last option.

The Alfresco Share solution can integrate with SharePoint, but more importantly, it can replace it. The software from Alfresco can provide organizations with an open source SharePoint alternative that does all the things Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) does, and a little more. What is under the covers of Alfresco Share? Come, let's have a look.

Still in the works, but getting close now, enterprise content management provider Nuxeo has some breaking news on the upcoming release of their version 5.2. In December and then again earlier this month we covered Nuxeo and the changes going on with their enterprise content management system. Now, according to Stefane Fermigier, Nuxeo’s founder and now chairman, Nuxeo 5.2 final will be ready within a month.

Ingres Corporation, a provider of open source database management, released the Ingres Icebreaker Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Appliance.

The new appliance (we'll get to what it is exactly in just a moment) is powered by Alfresco and aims to lower the total cost of ECM ownership. Will the customers respond to this new offering in the saturated ECM market and with tight IT budgets?

One of the first official demonstrations of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS) came from Alfresco last December. Their Alfresco:Joomla! Integration Module enabled organizations who use Joomla for web content management to access content stored in Alfresco's content management repository. In fact Alfresco version 3 has built in CMIS capabilities, so it was only a matter of time before another open source vendor would come along and set-up their own integration module. Optaros, in association with Acquia and Alfresco has now also created a set of CMIS integration modules connecting Drupal web content management with Alfresco.

We are thinking that the competition between open source enterprise content management vendors is really going to pick up this year. With a bad economy and extremely tight budgets, open source solutions are making their way to even more enterprise boardroom tables, especially in the US. Expect to see Nuxeo right there, selling their enterprise platform.

Mind you they won't have to go far to do it, with their latest office now open in Boston, Nuexo should find themselves right in the thick of things.

Stirring up the vibrant web publishing game is WoodWing, a company we haven’t mentioned in a while. The last time we spoke of them they were playing around with Alfresco and partnering for Smart Newspapers.

This time they’ve brought to the table the latest version of their flagship product, the somewhat awkward to pronounce Enterprise 6 Content Publishing Platform and they are building new and interesting bridges with their pluggable repository architecture. Let's take a quick look at how they're evolving the web publishing side of our landscape.

No one will argue that we need technologies and solutions that help us pull together and share content and information from the various content repositories we have in our organizations today. Gone are the days of single repositories for everything. That's why companies are diving deep into the content connector market to provide solutions to integrate content between repositories.

That's also why CMIS is such a desired specification for the enterprise content management market. But will this new spec, expected to be out late spring for a public review, be the demise of the content connector market?