Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that a set of Drupal modules are available for integrating Drupal with Alfresco.
Alfresco and Optaros, in conjunction with Acquia, have made available a set of Drupal modules that integrate Drupal with Alfresco using the CMIS APIs. See the CMIS module and the CMIS Alfresco module on drupal.org.
As mentioned by Dries and Jeff Potts, this is a big deal for enterprise users who need access to a document/asset management system outside of Drupal. The CMIS API is "vendor neutral" allowing for a path to integrate not only Drupal with Alfresco but other CMIS-compliant repositories. As a Drupal fan who has been making efforts to introducing Drupal in the workplace, I find this news very exciting!
A lot of organizations like what they see in Drupal and do consider it as an option for use on their Intranet. But these same organizations also have operational and administrative requirements for utilizing document management systems outside a Web CMS. Even at my own workplace I have ran into roadblocks implementing Drupal on bigger projects due to our document and file management needs.
Allowing for better integration of Drupal with a CMIS-compliant repository such as Sharepoint or Alfresco can potentially give the enterprise the best of both worlds. My understanding is that Alfresco is fully CMIS compliant today, while we're still waiting for Microsoft to keeping its promise to make SharePoint compliant and functional via CMIS. If anyone out there able to brief me and our readers on the current status of SharePoint and CMIS, please leave the information in the comment section below.