This week, Alfresco announced the availability of Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 for download. This new release delivers on Alfresco’s vision of providing the open platform for social content management by delivering both a more robust content platform for building any kind of content-rich application, along with a more social user-interface for collaboration and document management. This platform is expected to be used by developers and companies to build applications where enterprise content is “social-ready” -- or shared, collaborated on and syndicated across the web – and captured for compliance, retention and control.
Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is purpose-built for managing content in a social world. Enterprises are increasingly deploying social business systems like Jive, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Lotus Quickr, Drupal and Liferay, among others, in the hopes of making employees more effective. According to Alfresco, these social business systems are creating volumes of unmanaged content if left un-checked. Using open standards like CMIS & JSR-168, Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is a content platform with a goal to co-exist with social business systems to help manage and retain the content created by social business systems.
“The exponential growth of social content created in systems of engagement demands new disciplines for managing its life cycle, storage and ultimate disposition,” according to Gartner, Inc., a research and advisory firm. "Like e-mail, which was originally meant to be used once for asynchronous communication and then discarded, social software applications have the potential to create masses of unmanaged content that may become relevant in a future lawsuit or regulatory investigation. Understanding its nature (whether an intermediate work product, a draft or a "place" to share ideas) and its ultimate role (to become a document, possibly even a record subject to formal governance and retention guidelines) is crucial to adopting such systems successfully.*”
“Social Content Management is where the capabilities of social business systems and traditional enterprise content management (ECM) meet,” said John Newton, Alfresco CTO. “It is communication and collaboration with a business purpose and it requires a platform that can deliver content for discussion and engagement that then captures the results of that discussion. Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is that platform – delivered as open source with open standards like CMIS, JSR-168 and RESTful API’s -- in order for developers, customers and our partners to manage content and expose repository functionality inside of social business systems.”
The Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 social content management platform is available now for download. Additional resources on Alfresco’s approach, vision and strategy are also available via Alfresco.com.
[Source: Press Release - Alfresco Delivers Critical Foundation for Social Content Management with New Enterprise Release]