A few days ago, the Liferay product and engineering teams announced the release of Liferay Portal 6.1 CE. Last fall, during the Liferay West Coast Symposium, CMS Report was able to get a sneak peak of the features that Liferay Portal 6.1 had to offer. We were impressed then and we're even more impressed now with the changes that have been made since then.

Liferay Portal ships with broad product capabilities and provides more function than you would expect from a traditional portal. Besides having the capability as a web platform, Liferay Portal is also capable of supporting content and document management (including Microsoft office integration). Additional capabilities include:

• Web Publishing and Shared Workspaces
• Enterprise Collaboration
• Social Networking and Mashups
• Identity Management

Liferay issues their portal software under two licenses, an open source community edition and an enterprise edition. The Liferay community edition we're talking about in this article is specifically designated as Liferay 6.1 CE GA1.  In addition to the numerous bugs that have been fixed since 6.0 GA4, many new features and improvements have gone into this release.

Alfresco announced the release of Alfresco Community 3.4. Alfresco 3.4 broadens the reach of the company’s open source and open standards-based content management platform with new tools and services for Spring developers, Web Quick Start for easy web site deployment and content integration with enterprise portals.

“The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being re-purposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web,” said John Newton, Alfresco CTO. “Through our implementation of CMIS as a core standard and new features in Alfresco 3.4, our content services platform can now manage and deliver enterprise content to any internal or external application in a way that traditional, monolithic ECM products can’t enable without significant time and expense.”

Key product capabilities for the Alfresco Community 3.4 release include:

• Collaborative Web Authoring – Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of out-of-the-box templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines the power of Alfresco Share for web team collaboration, with powerful content authoring and publishing services like in-context web editing.
• Office-to-Web Framework – Using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Protocol and CIFS (shared folders), along with a new API integration with Google Docs, users can now author documents in their native office suite, collaborate in Alfresco or Google Docs, transform and re-purpose if required, and then publish straight to the web – even with sophisticated approval workflows. This feature will be available in a follow-on release Alfresco Community 3.4.b in approximately four weeks.
• Web Content Services for Spring – Built using the popular Spring and Spring Surf frameworks, Alfresco now offers key content management services that can be accessed via OpenCMIS and integrated into any web application. A combination of standard development tools and lightweight scripting gives Spring and Surf developers many options for building content-rich apps.
• Integration with Enterprise Portals and Social Software – The new DocLib portlets allow seamless integration with enterprise portals like Liferay, Quickr and Confluence. Using Single Sign On (SSO), the portlets provide access to both content and project repositories from within any JSR168 compliant portal.
• Distributed Content Replication – Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to remote offices, enabling greater sharing of information, quicker access, reduced wide area network traffic and removes the dependency on a single system.

Alfresco has seen major adoption of its open source and open standards content management platform with more than two million downloads of Alfresco Community. Alfresco Community is a free-to-download, free-to-use version developed on an open source stack that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac. Alfresco Enterprise is certified against a larger range of technology stacks (both open source and proprietary), goes through a more extensive QA process and is provided with full commercial technical support.

So the iPad has arrived, creating with its arrival a new market for devices that are small and easy-to-use enough to avoid carting your laptop around, but more usable than existing mobile devices.  Of course, you can argue that the disadvantages are precisely that you cannot put it in your pocket, and that it isn't as easy to use as a laptop with a proper keyboard and mouse.

That being said, the iPad has a growing set of business applications for it - the Apple App Store is being updated constantly with them.  And some of those are tools to allow business folk on the move to work on their content; the iPad will allow users to edit and view documents and work on them efficiently, given the screen size.

So what about its place in the CMS world?  The iPad of course has a browser, and using that you can access any of the web-based CMS repositories that support it; or (doing a thinly veiled plug here for our product) you can use a purpose-built UI that provides multiple repository access, such as our CARA product which leverages CMIS in order to provide functionality on any repository that supports CMIS - and that list is growing.

Release extends the solution’s enterprise capabilities
and improves integration with other enterprise systems

RALEIGH, NC — KnowledgeTree^®, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provider focusing on affordable document management software that is easily installed and used by business professionals, today announced the release of version 3.7 of its commercial edition, version 1.1 of its Microsoft^® Office Add-in, and an alpha release of KnowledgeTree Explorer CP (cross platform).

KnowledgeTree 3.7, deployed on Zend Server, features improved performance – tests indicate KnowledgeTree runs up to 40 percent faster through the inclusion of Zend Optimizer. It also introduces the first iteration of KnowledgeTree’s new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) interface, which is compliant with the 0.61 draft of the specification. By using Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable rich information to be shared across Internet protocols, CMIS enables greater interoperability among ECM systems.

“KnowledgeTree continues to offer a simple, easy to use document management system that does not strain IT resources and is up and running in no time. By embracing open standards and other strategies that enable seamless integration with widely accepted platforms, such as Microsoft IIS and Kofax Capture, KnowledgeTree is answering the needs of the enterprise user,” said Daniel Chalef, CEO of KnowledgeTree.

Significant features and enhancements of the 3.7 release include:

• Thumbnail and Instant View Functionality:  New thumbnail and Instant View document preview functionality allows users to see, search and scroll through documents before downloading them from the KnowledgeTree repository. 
• Support for Microsoft IIS 6 & 7 on Windows 2003 & 2008 Server:  The KnowledgeTree installer now enables administrators to install to an existing Microsoft IIS Web Server.  This native support benefits organizations that have chosen to standardize on IIS.
• Server-based, MSI, RPM and DEB installer packages:  These allow easy installation and maintenance of the stack using standard package management technologies on Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.
• Setup Wizard:  The wizard automates installation, configuration and upgrades, making it easy for both non-technical and experienced administrators, and completely removing the need for command line interaction.

LONDON – Alfresco Software today announced that it has included the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0 in Alfresco Community 3.2 to enable developers and organizations to participate in the public review process.  The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC) has recently approved CMIS Version 1.0 as a Committee Draft and announced the start of a two month public review period.  

In order to support education and training on CMIS, Alfresco will also host the first CMIS virtual training session designed to explore the specification and share CMIS expertise on November 24.

The objective of the CMIS specification is to deliver a common REST or Web Services API that can be used to develop write-once, run-anywhere, next generation content and social applications. The CMIS specification is backed by vendors including Alfresco, Adobe Systems, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP.

“Anyone who doubted that CMIS would become a real standard should think again. CMIS will have a profound impact on the Content Management industry. Now everyone can try CMIS for themselves on Alfresco and contribute to the public review process,” said John Newton, CTO, Alfresco Software.

This week, eZ Systems announce the immediate release of eZ Publish 4.2, the new version of its Open Source Content Management System. The new release brings important improvements to the heart of eZ solutions, the eZ Publish engine, as well as major advances and new features for eZ Flow and eZ Find. A new extension, eZSI, makes its debut in the 4.2 package providing full support for the Edge Side Include standard to eZ Publish.

Bård Farstad, CTO and Founder of eZ Publish, described the motivation underlying the new release: "Our team focused on Usability for both end-users and editors, as well as Scalability and Performance for customers using eZ Publish in extremely high-traffic installations ". Farstad emphasized that "in those two focus areas, eZ Find (the enterprise-grade search plugin for eZ Publish) has become a key element for achieving the best results".

The 4.2 release was developed by eZ Systems with contributions from eZ Publish partners and trusted community members, and is immediately available as certified software, which benefits from eZ System's Premium support and maintenance services, including the unlimited bugfix guarantee.