The rise of Alfresco: ECM that people will really use

Alfresco is an enterprise content management system that, according to some users, is beating legacy content management systems in speed, quality and ease of use. It has been around since 2005, but the open source, open standards, enterprise scale content management system offered by Alfresco is winning the trust of the marketplace.

“While other Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions are burdened with the concerns and constraints of managing the baggage of legacy code and mergers, Alfresco has seized the opportunity to start over; building a state of the art ECM platform on top of some of the most popular and powerful open source components available,” says Terry Barbounis, CTO for The Christian Science Monitor, who uses Alfresco.

Barbounis emphasizes the autonomy that Alfresco allows in letting the user shape their solution. “Technology aside, the Alfresco team has adopted a strategy of transparent content management -- let the user work the way they want to work,” Barbounis explains. “Many ECM solutions force the hand of the user when it comes to workflow, metadata and interaction with the repository.”

For the The Christian Science Monitor, Alfresco lets users work with their content through an interface that works like the same kind of Common Internet File System (CIFS) shared drive they are accustomed to using outside ECM. In the background, Alfresco is able to execute rules, workflow, enforce policies and extract metadata. According to Barbounis, ECM is only effective when users use it. Alfresco makes it easy for users to adopt and use ECM, since interacting with the system works just like saving a document.

“We had the opportunity to create this from scratch by a group of professionals who had built these systems before,” says John Newton, Alfresco co-founder and CTO. “We aren’t necessarily smarter, we just have the benefit of hindsight. We modularize out a lot of functionality that is not necessary and that helps the system move faster. We can also combine components into single Java systems that can help eliminate a lot of communication overhead. The result is definitely a faster system.”

“By making the system more modular and configurable, we can replace systems that need to be reworked or refactored,” Newton says. “This helps us build better systems without rebuilding the entire system. We have built this on top of some of the best, most robust and scalable components available in open source." Alfresco uses well-tested subsystems, including Spring and Hibernate.

The quality in Alfresco may be attributed to its many beta cycles and the human capital that performs its tuning and refactoring. “The entire open source process tends to be inherently higher quality when built by professionals,” Newton says. “The beta cycles have an order of magnitude more beta testers. The cycles of release are more frequent to provide more interactive tuning and refactoring and the code is more visible, holding the developers more accountable.”

Malcolm Teasdale, the director of content management for Eye Street Software, also feels that legacy content management systems have “baggage” that stands in the way of efficient implementation and use.