Alfresco

Overview

Alfresco was founded in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum® and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects®. Its investors include the leading investment firms Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund and SAP Ventures.
Alfresco is an open source Enterprise Content Management System (ECM) developed using java technology. It is available for multiple platforms such as Linux, Mac OSX and windows. Alfresco offers the following core features

• Document Management – Integration with Microsoft Office and Open Office, custom workflows and repository.
• Web Content Management - Integrate with and publish to your current back-end
• Collaboration – Document Library, Activity Feeds, Virtual Teams and SharePoint protocol support
• Content Platform – Library Services, Auditing Services, Search, Document conversion and transformation services and content/workflow modeling using jBPM
• Records Management – drag and drop, meta-data extraction, automatic archiving, format conversion and complete auditing and workflow integration.
• Image Management – digital asset repository, server based format conversions, secure distribution over HTTP and HTTPS, automatic classification framework and Meta-data extraction and management.

Underlying Technologies

Alfresco is built on some some of the following open source technologies.

• Spring
• Hibernate
• Lucene
• MyFaces
• Aspect-Oriented-Programming.

Applications

One of Alfresco's goals is to offer a free open source alternative to Microsoft's SharePoint line of products. It can be deployed on all major Operating Systems and is compatible with all Major DBMS. It is currently used by departments within the British Government and by big companies such as ACTIVISION

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