Feature
Alfresco (news, site) released Alfresco Enterprise 3.4, continuing to make strides in the ECM platform as a Social Content Management product direction.
Alfresco Has a Dream...
...A vision, to be more precise, that their Enterprise CMS product should be an open source platform for social content management. While this release is a small step in the desired direction, there are some functionalities that allow developers to build applications where enterprise content is “social-ready.”
What’s New
A lot of functionality is identical to what we’ve seen in version 3.4 of Alfresco Community edition with some new capabilities including:
- Simple workflow based on folder actions or advanced using jBPM (Alfresco Share now exposes workflows)
- Distributed content replication from central location, where document management and web content management live in one repository
- Alfresco Web Quick Start -- a set of best practice templates for building websites on top of Alfresco Share.
- Refreshed UI with a goal of making document management more collaborative and social (e.g. status updates).
A Novel About All Things Novel
The notion of social content management is not novel: for Alfresco or others. With explosion of social media and greater acceptance of it by organizations, the move to efficiently managing social content is understandable. At the moment, it is hard to label Alfresco as a social content management product, but let’s see how the product evolves in future releases.
