Alfresco Document Management News & Articles

Newbie to Google, Scott Johnston, the former VP of Product Development at JotSpot (which Google bought), leaked that Google will be providing Sites capabilities as part of their Google Apps suite sometime in 2008.

The Sites capability will enable a company using the Google Apps product suite to create intranets, extranets and other types of sites (like project tracking) in a collaborative environment.

The release of Alfresco 2.9 is imminent, and word on the street is that the new upgrade will feature integration capabilities with several of your favorite web applications. The news comes less than a fortnight after Alfresco announced integration capability for Facebook, news which doubtless prompted innumerable Enterprise CMS developers to choke on their morning cereal with anguish because they hadn’t thought of it first.

In a controversial keynote speech last week at cmf2007 in Denmark, B.J. Fogg, founder of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, proclaimed that “Web 2.0 was dead”, that Facebook had shifted the game and that “there might not be a more persuasive technology [than Facebook].”

Well, it was not a universally agreed upon message, nor I’m sure was it intended to be. Nevertheless, it provoked some measure of good discussion, and based on recent announcements it seems that our bustling UK-based Alfresco — commercial open source enterprise cms vendor extraordinaire — is in-tune with Mr. Fogg and has similarly swallowed the blue pill.

The arms race between the open source enterprise cms vendors continues as both Alfresco and Nuxeo announce the availability of new versions of their respective offerings.

It’s a kind of ‘Open Source 1.1’. Developers are springing up who build install stacks for open source products like the Drupal Web CMS or Alfresco’s Enterprise CMS; offering packaged versions which automate and greatly simplify the initial deployment, or offer various usability augmentations to these powerful but often occasionally less polished products.

Open source being repackaged in this fashion is something we have covered before — SpikeSource are in this line of business. Bitnami though, they’re taking things up a notch, introducing some welcome competition.

London-based Alfresco Software is reaching out to the Spanish speaking CMS aficionados of the world. They’ve just launched a new website and collaboration forum for the Spanish language market.

The company has had some success in the space already. They count Barceló Viajes, the Government of Catalonia, the City of Mijas, the Government of Andalucia, Punto Inmobiliario, TUI and the University of the Balearic Islands amongst their current customers.

Alfesco’s CEO, John Powell, points to strong CMS market expansion, both in Spain and in South America, as the driving force behind their investment in the Spanish language resources.

Other open source CMS vendors — notably eZ Publish — have also been doing well in both Spain and Latin America.

eZ Publish is more strictly a Web CMS platform which has been gaining ground in the online publishing space in Europe, Latin America and now in the good old US of A. In Latin America — where Bogotá-based Aplyca has been leading the charge — La Pensa, the largest online publisher in Honduras, is running on the platform and Spanish-owned Grupo Santillana, a member of the Groupo Prisa media group both run their Intranet on and are currently implementing an eZ solution for at least one title.

Alfresco throws the doors wide to their JLAN shared file drive interface, making it open source under a GNU license.

A potentially exciting development, this. The ever-industrious Bangalore developer SpikeSource has given the Alfresco (Enterprise Ed.) open-source CMS platform the SpikeIgnite treatment.

The results are likely to excite those that are interested in acquiring open source CMS functionality, but are worried about implementation and support issues.

Just because the researchers at Gartner chose to overlook open source offerings in their latest enterprise content management evaluation does not mean that decision makers within your organization should go the same route.

To help fill the not so minor gap left by Gartner, Infoworld recently compared five open source content management products that are worthy of any IT manager’s shortlist — though with Alfresco stacked up against the likes of Drupal, perhaps not the same shortlist.

In London last week, open source ECM provider Alfresco was awarded an InfoWorld “Bossie.”

This recognition is part of InfoWorld’s commitment to acknowledge the “best and most innovative open source software projects,” according to information from the company.

Previous winners have included Apache, MuleSource and SugarCRM.

Struts…Tapestry…Seam, these are all fully featured, open source and very active Java Web app frameworks. And all were available to the Alfresco Enterprise CMS architects when they played deciders for their recent 2.1 release.

Why then did they choose to go “back to basics” with a Servlets+JSP approach which leverages the lesser known URI Templates specification when implementing their new Web Scripts functionality?

In an effort to gauge the use of open source software on the enterprise level, Alfresco turns to its rapidly growing developer community to create a biannual report of user preferences with respect to: operating systems, application servers, databases, browsers, and portals.

This report, forever known as the Open Source Barometer, is generated by collecting opt-in survey data from Alfresco community members.

“Innovation is taking ECM out the 1990’s”

With these words and the immediate availability of Alfresco Community Edition version 2.1, CTO John Newton hopes to position Alfresco as not just an innovator in the enterprise content management space but also in the enterprise architecture community.

Joining thirteen other open source stalwarts including MySQL, JBoss, Zimbra and Sugar CRM, Alfresco is now one of the founding members of a new online marketplace for business applications called the Red Hat Exchange (RHX).

The next time you see the phrase "open source" used in association with some software, be advised that you'll need to take that claim with a grain of salt. This was a statement made last November by ZDNet blogger David Berlind.

As the concept of Professional Open Source gains momentum and more vendors jump on this boat, its becoming increasingly important to have some reliable indicators of what a real open source effort looks like.