Alfresco is a free/libre enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems. Alfresco comes in three flavors:
- Alfresco Community Edition is free software, LGPL[2] licensed open source and open standards.
- Alfresco Enterprise Edition is commercially & proprietary licensed open source, open standards and enterprise scale. Its design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance.
- Alfresco Cloud Edition (Alfresco in the cloud) is the SaaS version of Alfresco.
Alfresco includes a content repository, an out-of-the-box web portal framework for managing and using standard portal content, a CIFS interface that provides file system compatibility on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems, a web content management system capable of virtualizing webapps and static sites via Apache Tomcat, Lucene indexing, and Activiti workflow. The Alfresco system is developed using Java technology.
History
John Newton (co-founder of Documentum) and John Powell (a former COO of Business Objects) founded Alfresco Software, Inc. in 2005. Its investors include the investment firms SAP Ventures, Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund. The original technical staff consisted of principal engineers from Documentum and from Oracle.
While Alfresco's product initially focused on document management, in May 2006 the company announced[3] its intention to expand into web content management by acquiring senior technical and managerial staff from Interwoven; this included its VP of Web Content Management, two principal engineers, and a member of its user-interface team. In 2007 Alfresco hired the principal sales engineer from Vignette.
In October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report described Alfresco as a leading Java-based open source web content management system.[4]
In 2010, Alfresco sponsored a new open-source BPM engine called Activiti.
In July 2011, Alfresco and Ephesoft announced a technology partnership to offer their users document capture and Content Management Interoperability Services brought together for intelligent PDF capture and search and workflow development.[5]
In January 2012, Alfresco 4.0 was released with significant improvements over the user interface. The new Alfresco aims to move further features from Alfresco Explorer to Alfresco Share, as Alfresco Explorer is intended to be deprecated over time.
Usage
Enterprise content management for documents, web, records, images, and collaborative content development.
Features
Alfresco is capable of the following:
- Document management
- Web content management (including full webapp & session virtualization)
- Repository-level versioning (similar to Subversion)
- Transparent overlays (similar to unionfs)
- Records management, including 5015.2 certification
- Image management
- Learning content management support for learning management systems (e.g. Moodle)
- LOR Learning Object Repository (edu-sharing)
- Auto-generated XForms with AJAX support
- Integrated publishing
- Repository access via CIFS/SMB, FTP, WebDAV, NFS and CMIS
- Activities workflow
- Lucene search[6]
- Federated servers
- Multi-language support
- Portable application packaging
- Multi-platform support (officially Windows, GNU/Linux and Solaris)
- Browser-based GUI (official support for Internet Explorer and Firefox)
- Desktop integration with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice.[7]
- Clustering support
- Pluggable authentication: NTLM, LDAP, Kerberos, CAS
- Multiple database support: MySQL, PostgreSQL (Community Edition), Oracle Database, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server (Enterprise Edition).
Notes and references
See also
External links
