* Alfresco Network 1.3
Alfresco Software, an open source enterprise content management software company, is expected to launch the latest version of its platform for managing business documents and Web content at the JavaOne conference this week.
Alfresco Network bills itself as an open source alternative to such ECM systems as Interwoven, Vignette and Documentum – where many of Alfresco’s founders hail from. The code, which is available for free download, is licensed under the company’s own Alfresco Public License, which is similar to the GPL. Alfresco runs on Linux servers, and works with MySQL, as well as Microsoft, Unix servers and Oracle databases. (The company claims to have 120,000 downloads as of February). The company recently received $8 million in funding from venture capital firms Mayfield Fund and Accel Partners.
Alfresco Network 1.3 now supports JSR 170 – content repository API for Java – allowing the software to operate faster and interact with a wider range of content repository systems. The JSR-170 API specification outlines how a content management system interacts with a content repository (storage/database systems). Prior to the standard, content management systems could only access content from the proprietary repositories that were bundled with the application.
The new version of Alfresco, with JSR 170 support, lets Alfresco work with content stored in any repository infrastructure compliant with the API specification. In an internal benchmark, Alfresco 1.3 with JSR 170 ran three times as fast as older versions of the software without the Java API. (Alfresco says the test was conducted on two 64-bit Opteron servers with 6Gbyes of running the same versions of Windows, the Tomcat open source application server and MySQL).
Other improvements in Alfresco Network 1.3 include a new client-side Web interface, as well as new tools for creating internal corporate “wikis” – communal Web-based encyclopedia-like repositories of information.
