Overview of Alfresco

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. The proven track record of its leaders, the features in the technology, the open source business model, and good venture capital backing of the team, as a combination makes Alfresco different.

Leveraging the benefits of open source

Enterprise customers can reduce costs, minimize business risks, and get competitive advantage by adopting the right open source based business software solutions. Based on publicly available pricing from a range of vendors, a white paper from Alfresco shows how it is possible to save, in the first year of implementation (based on a 1000 user configuration), up to 89 percent of the cost of SharePoint purchases and up to 96 percent of the cost of other ECM solutions by using Alfresco's open source ECM. You can reduce the cost of software solution acquisition, deployment, and maintenance by bringing the community into the development, support, and service process.

Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. The open source model allows Alfresco to use the best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly and at a much lower cost.

State-of-the-art content repository

The following diagram explains the overview of Alfresco content repository and its integration with external systems such as virtual filesystems, web applications, knowledge portals, and web services.

A content repository is a server or a set of services used to store, search, access, and control content. The content repository provides these services to specialist content applications such as document management, records management, image storage and retrieval systems, or other applications that require the storage and retrieval of large amounts of content. The repository provides content services such as content storage or import, content classification, security on content objects, control through content check-in and check-out, and content query services to these applications.

What distinguishes content management from other typical database applications is the level of control exercised over individual content objects and the ability to search content. Access to these services requires wrapping the calls in security to prevent unauthorized access or changes to content or its metadata. The finer granularity of this security and its complex relationship with other objects such as people and folders requires a more sophisticated mechanism than provided by a traditional database security.

The complex requirements of these services imply that much of the business logic of the content repository can be as large as or larger than the database itself. Almost all the content repository vendors provide proprietary service interfaces to encapsulate the breadth of functionality required. Despite having tried over the last 10 years to standardize these interfaces, it is only over the last two years that any progress has been made. In 2005, the Java community adopted the JSR-170 standard interface and Alfresco's content repository is based on these standards.

Scalable architecture

The single most important aspect of any ECM system is the underlying architecture. Alfresco supports pluggable, aspect-oriented architecture out of the box by leveraging the open source standards and components such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, CMIS, JSR-168, JSR-170, and JSE6.

The architecture is based on open standards and hence the applications built using Alfresco can be deployed on any environment such as Windows, Linux, and Mac, using any relational database such as MySQL, and Oracle. Applications can run on various application servers such as JBoss Application Server and Apache Tomcat, can work with any browser such as Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Internet Explorer. More over the applications built using Alfresco can be integrated with any portal such as JBoss Portal, and Liferay Portal.

In any enterprise, the amount of content you will manage will keep on increasing. In some organizations such as media, pharmaceutical, and healthcare, the content increases exponentially every year. Hence scalability is a critical issue when evaluating the ECM solution.

Due to modular and light-weight architecture, Alfresco is highly scalable. Alfresco provides horizontal scalability by having each tier in the architecture deployed on multiple servers. Similarly Alfresco can scale vertically by partitioning and load balancing in a multi-server environment.

Open standards-based underlying components

Open standards protect enterprise investment, promote innovation, and make it easier for IT departments to support the software. By adopting open standards for their ECM requirements, enterprises can lower the risk of incompatibilities with existing technologies. The enterprise application integration becomes easier with open standards.

Alfresco is completely built on the following open standards:

• Java 1.7
• WebDAV – IETF web-based distributed authoring and versioning
• 5015.02 – US Department of Defense (DoD) certified for records management
• JSR-170 – Java Content Repository (JCR) API
• JSR-283 – Next generation of JCR
• JSR-168 – Portal integration standard
• CMIS – specification supported by all major ECM vendors including IBM, and Microsoft
• Spring 2.0 Aspect-Oriented framework
• Apache iBatis (replacing Hibernate from Alfresco 3.4 version onwards)
• AIFS (Alfresco Intelligent File System) supporting Windows files sharing (SMB/CIFS), NFS, and FTP
• Open Office 3.3

Globalization support

If your enterprise has a global business model, it is very important for you to provide content in multiple languages. Most of the enterprises look beyond their geographic borders for new markets. The majority of the web users speak little or no English. Hence ECM systems should be designed with globalization in mind.

Alfresco out of the box supports major languages including Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish.

Security and access control

Protecting unauthorized access to the content is the key requirement for enterprises. This is true for corporate websites, intranets, extranets, front office, and back office applications.

A nice thing about Alfresco is that the permissions can be applied at a space (folder) level or can be set for each individual content item. Out of the box, Alfresco supports relational database-based membership systems and also supports external identity management systems such as LDAP, NTLM, Kerberos, and Active Directory.

Essential library services

Library services are required if you want to manage, leverage, modify, and control the content in an ECM system. Alfresco provides library services such as Check-In/ Check-Out, version control, auditing information, and content streaming.

Using Alfresco, you can define the library services to be executed automatically based on the business rules. For example, every edit to the content can version the content automatically. Or every check out can move the content to a specific location based on the business rules.

Alfresco provides additional intelligence to the content by adding metadata (data about data), business rules, security rules, and collaboration rules dynamically, using aspect-oriented programming. Alfresco also provides features such as content metadata extractors, content transformers, translations, and auto categorization to make the content intelligent.

Business process automation

Business process automation increases productivity, reduces costs, streamlines processes, and shortens operation cycles. Alfresco includes Activiti (http://www.activiti.org/) as a business process management and automation solution. This would help manage document life cycle with security and audit trails capabilities. Alfresco extends the support for JBoss JBPM workflow engine which was the default workflow engine for the earlier versions.

Enterprise integrations

Alfresco provides open-standards based protocols to integrate with external applications. Some of the application integration examples are mentioned in this book in Chapter 9, Integrating External Applications with Alfresco. Alfresco could be used as an embedded repository or as an external content repository. Because it is open source, you can reuse the integration components for your business applications saving time and money.

Alfresco now integrates with applications such as Facebook, ViewOne Pro, and iGoogle, and gadgets such as iPhone. Alfresco integration with Drupal (PHP-based web content management system) is a perfect example of how cooperation between open source projects can yield innovative solutions more rapidly than a proprietary model.

Alfresco integrates with Ephesoft, offers the customers access to a comprehensive production capture solution, including automatic document classification, data extraction, and validation for both Internet-based distributed capture or centralized environments.

Alfresco integrates with an open source J2EE-based leading portal framework called Liferay. Alfresco Liferay bundle is an out of the box solution, which provides an excellent portal-based ECM solution.

Alfresco integrates with external identity management systems such as LDAP and Active Directory and supports centralized security and single sign-on.