Alfresco and Acquia announced today a strategic partnership to deliver business critical content applications to their customers.With this relationship, Acquia builds on Alfresco’s open platform to extend the web experience applications that enable customers to quickly build content applications that span traditional documents, structured editorial workflows and dynamic multi-channel delivery. The combination is expected to give customers the freedom to combine content, community and commerce capabilities into unified digital experiences in order to drive business results.
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.
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:
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.
Alfresco Software today announced the availability of Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2, the latest version of its enterprise content management (ECM) product. With this release, Alfresco enables cloud-based deployments, streamlines email management and archiving and enhances team-based content collaboration. In addition, the Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 Records Management module is the only supported open source solution to have been certified to the 5015.02 standard.
This release builds on Alfresco’s ability to deliver low-cost, innovative and interoperable open source ECM solutions. New features and benefits included in Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 are listed below.
Enables efficient and easy ECM in the cloud:
The level of interest in content management systems astounds me. Each year, I continue to see at CMS Report an increase of visitors looking for information on content management. Our stories tend to focus on open source CMS more than proprietary applications and evidently that's the subject matter that our readers want to read.
Below are the top ten stories of 2009 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. As you can see, stories involving Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Alfresco, and Nuxeo took center stage. These stories might not have been the ten I would have personally picked for this list, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking.
The interest in Nuxeo took me by surprise and I'll be adding the CMS to my top 30 CMS Focus page as time allows. As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. As I've said before, I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.
One would think it should not be so difficult to find information about the upcoming SharePoint 2010 and the features it will include. I have been especially interested in SharePoint and its inclusion of CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services). CMIS is an interoperability specification that will allow for compliant clients (such as Joomla! and Drupal) and repositories (such as SharePoint and Alfresco) to interoperate and share content across information silos. For the past few months, I've been keeping my eyes and ears open for any details on the status of Microsoft Sharepoint incorporating CMIS. Sadly, there is little information to be found.
Although Microsoft announced their support for CMIS in September 2008, there has been little word from Microsoft on when we'll see CMIS available for SharePoint users and whether CMIS will be incorporated into SharePoint 2010. Arbindo Chattopadhyay on his MSDN blog recently discussed the benefits of CMIS, but he was very tight lipped whether we'll be seeing CMIS in SharePoint 2010. In fact he doesn't think we'll be hearing much about CMIS in SharePoint until CMIS is out of draft form.
There is a real fear out there. A fear involving companies commercially supporting open source software and neglecting the "free" community version of their software. Fortunately for us, when looking for proof of this fear Alfresco is in the wrong direction to look. Alfresco Community Edition 3.2 brings so many new capabilities and improvements to the table that you can almost see the enterprise content management landscape brighten up.
I finally got a chance to read CMS Wire's article, SharePoint vs Alfresco: A Platform Perspective. Nothing too surprising in the article as it shows that both SharePoint and Alfresco can stand on their own.
While we believe the comparison was fair, we also agree that there's more to SharePoint than immediately meets the eye. By the same token, there's more to Alfresco than just Share, much of which we eluded to in the article.