Chapter 1. Introduction to Alfresco

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the fastest growing category of enterprise software. Customers who are implementing or upgrading ECM systems are facing issues such as vendor lock-in, high maintenance costs, and a lack of standardization. Open source technologies and open standards are becoming powerful alternatives to commercia closed-source ECM software. Alfresco—a relatively new player in this market—has already gained a lot of momentum by providing content management solutions to enterprises, by using open standards and open source based technologies.

The latest release of Alfresco has an Enterprise Edition as well as a Labs Edition. The Alfresco Community Labs product, formerly known as the Community version of Alfresco, is an unsupported product, and is designed for use by developers and technical enthusiasts in noncritical environments. It serves as the research vehicle for new features, and as the platform for the Alfresco Community. Constant innovation of Alfresco Community Labs renders a daily build that offers the latest functionality.

The Alfresco Enterprise Edition is a production-ready, stress-tested certified build that is supported by Alfresco Software Inc. It is a fully-supported Alfresco Product that can be used by corporations and governments that require commercial Service Level Agreements (SLAs). With the release of Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.0, Alfresco adds Alfresco Share, which is a new collaborative content solution, a draft implementation of the CMIS specification, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Protocol support to Alfresco's innovative ECM platform.

This chapter provides an introduction to Alfresco and outlines the benefits of using it for your enterprise's content management requirements. It also introduces the features of Alfresco Enterprise 3.0.

In this chapter, you will see:

• The overview and features of Alfresco Enterprise 3.0

• Key features of Alfresco software

• How to use Alfresco for your document management, records management, web content management, and collaboration requirements

• The future roadmap