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Alfresco: Effective Content and Document management with a low TCO.

Alfresco makes managing documents, web content and content simple...and you can collaborate too.

By Ron Barrett on Wed, 07/22/09 - 1:03pm.

One of the many cost killers in today’s IT shops is managing documents and content. Open Source is a great way to address these needs, especially in these tight financial times. One product that fits the bill well is Alfresco Community Edition. Alfresco offers all the features of a commercial product and provides the ability to manage documents, content, web content and even offers itself up as a collaboration platform as well.

One of the first things that caught my eye in fact was the document management piece. I was incredibly impressed with the interface and ease of use. It enjoys many key features that you would find in commercial offerings like:
• Check in/ Check Out
• Version Control
• Integration with Microsoft Office
• A powerful search engine
• Social Tagging
• Integration with enterprise portals

As if that was not enough the client side needs no installation, uses a shared drive for content and you can apply rules for content. On the web content side it is very simple to create a web and author web content. Create teams to contribute and use the Alfresco surf –platform to quickly create web applications.
The content platform makes it easy to create applications from pre-built components. Build mash-ups using internal and external content and create workflows. Content services include:
• Library Services
• Auditing
• Search
• Transformation
• Thumbnailing
• Content Modeling

Finally Alfresco offers a platform for collaboration. Again I was impressed by what I saw features like: bulk upload of documents into the library, Access to content via an RSS feed, support for SharePoint, site calendar, site calendar, various authoring tools for collaboration, create personal and shared dashboards.
There are allot of great features not to mention easy administration, security and it was very simple to deploy as well. I was able to get it up and running and create a home space quickly.

Download the Alfresco Community Edition and try it today. If you need training support, high availability, support for commercial products like SQL Server, Websphere, Oracle, etc. Alfresco offers an Enterprise Edition with a much smaller cost to you than most commercial products.

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