About Alfresco
A Fresh Approach to Enterprise Content Management
Alfresco brings a fresh approach to enterprise content management delivering convenience, scalability and very low cost through open source. The team at Alfresco has been working on content management for over fifteen years and has designed a new system for performance, modularity and ease of use. Using the open source model Alfresco makes enterprise content management affordable for many organizations and uses that weren't possible before. By simplifying and modularizing the way content management works, the Alfresco system is much faster than many commercial content management systems.
Alfresco was founded in June 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum, and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects, and funded by Accel Partners. Alfresco's mission is to open up content management through open source to people and uses that could not afford enterprise-level content management before and to increase innovation in the sector through community participation and free access to source code and designs. Alfresco's team has extensive experience in designing content management systems and interfaces, including Documentum's server, Java web development kit and portal integrations. Alfresco uses this experience to open enterprise content management to anyone.
This experienced team has applied the lessons of the last decade in content management to create the Alfresco system, an open-source, open-standards content repository and portal framework. The Alfresco system has a modern architecture that uses Aspect-Oriented Programming for modularity and adaptability and the latest open source tools for performance and scalability. Alfresco packages components designed to integrate into standard portals and user tools integrations that are easy for end-users to understand and are quickly productive. Alfresco makes content management much easier for users by making the content management look like a shared file system and making tasks such as versioning and classification automatic through business rules. Alfresco is available as open source through the MPL license which puts no restrictions on the use as part of applications, even commercial systems.
The Alfresco content management system is targeted at professional developers of portals, content and compliance applications and on-line services struggling to meet the needs of end-users creating and sharing content. For J2EE-based professional portal projects, the Alfresco system has enterprise content management capabilities at a much lower cost than commercial systems. For organizations that wish to replace shared drives for storage of information to improve sharing and increase compliance through content control, Alfresco provides file share interfaces to simplify content capture and portal interfaces to facilitate searching and sharing. For ISVs and developers who wish to enhance their applications, such as CRM or ERP, with content management, Alfresco provides a low-cost, royalty-free, super-fast content management system. Alfresco is also a low-cost, open source alternative to Microsoft® SharePoint™.
The Alfresco product is being developed incrementally and completely openly. A technology preview will be released at the end of June 2005. This release will include a scalable repository with meta-data and data dictionary support, fulltext indexing and retrieval, rule-based processing, collaboration capabilities, and an extensible aspect framework that includes versioning, locking and transformation. The Alfresco user interface in this release will include an adaptable portal framework based upon JSR-168 compliant portals, including portlets for repository browsing with multiple views, wizards for administration, content handling, and in-line editing of web content. The Alfresco repository will also include a Microsoft Shared File System-compatible interface that can be use with file-based tools, support offline replication and allow the repository to act as a replacement for shared file stores.
The Alfresco product will be available for production use by the end of 2005. During the months following the technology preview, Alfresco will be incrementally integrating additional functionality toward creating a complete enterprise content management system and repository. Some of the following functionality intended for future releases are: a new advanced query language, web site management, replication and federation capabilities, and a BPEL4WS integrated workflow.
