An open source ECM from people who know the market
Alfresco is born from the conviction that enterprise document management should not require million-dollar licences. Founders John Newton and John Powell — respectively co-founder of Documentum and a former executive at Business Objects — know the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market from the inside and identify its core problem: licence costs disproportionate to perceived value, which exclude from structured document management every organisation that cannot afford solutions such as Documentum or Microsoft SharePoint.
The project is released in 2005 with a dual-licence model: a community version under a GPL licence and an enterprise version with commercial support and additional features.
Repository and standards
At the heart of Alfresco lies a content repository compliant with the JSR-170 (Java Content Repository) specification, the Java standard for accessing document repositories. The repository manages documents, folders, metadata and relationships uniformly, regardless of file format.
Every document can carry custom metadata defined through a configurable content model. Versioning tracks every change: it is possible to consult a document’s complete history, compare versions and restore previous states. Automatic rules apply actions to documents based on predefined conditions — for example, automatically converting every document uploaded to a specific folder into PDF, or classifying content based on metadata.
Workflow and collaboration
Alfresco integrates a workflow engine based on jBPM that allows modelling complex document processes: multi-level approval, cyclical review, conditional publication. Workflows define who must do what, in which order, with what deadlines, and track the progress of every case.
Document access is available through the web interface, through standard protocols such as WebDAV and CIFS — which allow mounting the repository as a network folder — and through APIs for integration with other systems. Full-text search indexes the content of documents in all common formats.
A concrete alternative
For organisations managing significant volumes of documents — contracts, procedures, forms, technical documentation — Alfresco offers a complete platform at accessible costs. The open source model allows evaluating the software in depth before adoption, without licence constraints. The Java platform ensures integration with existing enterprise infrastructure.
Link: alfresco.com