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A fresh approach to Enterprise Content Management

News

Alfresco releases first Open Source Enterprise Content Management Solution

Oct 31, 2005
Standards-Based System Enables Developers to Easily Build Custom Applications; Lowers Cost and Complexity of Deploying True Enterprise Content Management

BOSTON, Open Source Business Conference—October 31, 2005—Enterprises and developers can now download the first enterprise-class content management system that utilizes the power of open source. Traditional Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems were designed a decade ago, leaving them with cumbersome interfaces and legacy technology. Alfresco is built on modern, service oriented technologies and standards from this decade, such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene and Web Services, JSR-168, JSR-170 and MyFaces. These help to dramatically bring down the cost and complexity of both implementation and use of these systems. The company is lead by a team of content management veterans including the co-founder of Documentum.

The Alfresco ECM solution is designed for small to mid-sized enterprises and departments in Global 1000 organizations that want a system that is easy for end-users to use while also being simple-to-install and flexible for developers to create new and customized content applications.

“Informa has over 7000 employees in 159 offices in 40 countries. We were looking for a flexible, cost-effective system that could meet the diverse requirements of our business”, said Bob Hecht, VP - Content Strategy for Informa. “The success of the current project will hinge on ease-of-use and configurability. We determined that the Alfresco approach is an excellent fit for our user requirements and it’s cutting edge technical architecture will provide us the flexibility and power to out-perform the traditional ECM market.

Alfresco ECM: Already in Use Worldwide

Alfresco has already logged tens of thousands of downloads since releasing a preview of the repository in June. The company has benefited from support from JBoss and MySQL. Alfresco integrates to the JBoss Portal, JBoss Application Server, JBoss Cache, JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and MySQL. Customers across all sectors in both the US and Europe have started to benefit from Alfresco. A number of hosting partners are being announced highlighting the strength of the product in this environment. The Alfresco software is true zero footprint ECM whereby no ActiveX or Java Applets are required on the client. It is easy to setup and users can be invited to groups without costly administration. As the system is not proprietary and uses standards such as JSR-170 and web services, a client can use the same system both internally and externally.

“Thanks to the increasing corporate regulation as well as the exponential growth of electronic documents, content management has emerged as a ‘must have’ application,” said Alfresco CEO John Powell. “The problem is, those companies that have installed complex content management systems in the past, today find that they are underutilized thanks to complex interfaces and large feature-sets that do not meet the needs of today’s enterprise. We built Alfresco to fix those problems.”

Easy-to-use Interface Ensures User Adoption

Alfresco uses the Microsoft CIFS interface, which enables users to treat content just as they would a Microsoft Windows shared file drive. Unlike other interfaces, CIFS enables users to take work offline and synchronize it when reconnecting. It also allows applications that will only work with mounted drives or non-networked file systems to work natively with the Alfresco repository. These can include a user’s native editing tool or a corporate application.

“In most companies today, even those with long-standing content management systems, you find a shared drive is where people place their information, eschewing central management. Since that’s a process people are comfortable using, we made Alfresco work within that structure,” said Alfresco CTO John Newton. “This ease-of-use extends beyond the product functionality making the product easy to install and rollout throughout a company with minimal training”

Additional product benefits include:

  • Developer Productivity and Portability - Developers can easily customize the system through wizards or the language of their choice. This can include customization through Aspect-Oriented Programming, Web Services, simple Templating, XML, Java and JCR-170. These customizations are portable across multiple operating systems and clients. They can also be used between a hosted and an internal environment.
  • Scalable and Fault Tolerant Architecture – The server offers high levels of scalability through a fully distributed, clustered cache. High availability is offered through replication and fail-over management.
  • Compliance/Secure Document Lifecycle Management – Alfresco’s Aspect-Oriented approach allows document lifecycle rules to be configured quickly and easily. Here, for example, “author, review, approve and distribute” workflows can be simply set-up with rules to both change the security and format of the document with a full audit trail.

Multiple Levels of Network Support

Also today, Alfresco announced the availability of both a free open source “Community Network” and a series of fee-based support networks. Alfresco has designed several levels of network support to meet the specific needs of the organization and enterprise using the product. These include:

  • Community Network: Free open source downloadable Enterprise Content Management system supported by a large and active community of open source developers;
  • Developer Network: Enables developers to gain access to the latest technology and develop against a certified, supported version of the product;
  • Professional Network: Designed for small enterprises or departments in Global 1000 organizations and layers in additional security functionality and support;
  • Enterprise Network: Designed for the Global 1000 offering support and functionality that includes advanced security features such as single sign on and mission critical features such as clustering, failover and advanced caching. This is priced to allow for unlimited seats.

Pricing and Availability

The Community Network is free and is available for download today at www.alfresco.org.

The Community Developer Network is $4.99 monthly per user and the Professional Network is $9.99 monthly per user. The Enterprise Network offers unlimited users for a monthly fee of $625. For a limited period all customers taking out a support subscription to the Alfresco Professional Network will receive the Alfresco Enterprise Network product capabilities free of charge. The Professional and Enterprise Network’s are available for download today at www.alfrescosoftware.com.

About Alfresco

Alfresco Software Inc. is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It is the first company to bring the power of open source to the enterprise content management market, enabling unprecedented scale and a much lower total cost of ownership than proprietary systems. Founded by a team of content management veterans that includes the co-founder of Documentum, John Newton, and former COO of Business Objects, John Powell, Alfresco is based in London. For more information, visit www.alfrescosoftware.com.

Media Contacts:
Ian Howells
Alfresco Software Inc.
+44 1628 860 639
press@alfresco.org

Chuck Tanowitz
Schwartz Communications
+1 781 684-0770
alfresco@schwartz-pr.com