How you can benefit from Alfresco

Alfresco offers enterprise content management (ECM) such as document management, collaboration, records management, enterprise search, and imaging. You can configure and customize Alfresco to address your business requirements. Some of them are listed here for your reference.

Using Alfresco for document management

Using Alfresco you can implement document management solutions such as enterprise document management, digital asset management, and contracts management.

Alfresco document management features provide organizations with all the services necessary for creating, converting, managing, and sharing electronic documents. Built on industry-standard open source platforms, Alfresco provides version management and search capabilities.

Built-in data management and transformation engine provides you with the ability to transform the data into required formats based on the business rules. Integrated workflow provides you with the full control over the document life cycle, management, and process flow.

Digital asset management provides a single access point for all your rich digital media and its underlying metadata information throughout the extended enterprise. Alfresco centralizes storage and provides easy, efficient, enterprise access to digital assets, and allows them to be quickly repurposed, which streamlines processes and saves money.

Whether it's an employment contract, purchase agreement, maintenance contract, or collaboration agreement with a business partner, completeness, validity, traceability, and unalterability must be guaranteed if a company is to protect its commercial interests. Alfresco's document lifecycle management features ensure that people in various company departments, divisions, and regions can work together to support all processes relating to a contract throughout its lifecycle—from creation through fulfillment and modification to termination.

Key features include:

• Flexible metadata management
• Full audit control
• Transformation of data
• Security and version control
• Indexing and full-text search
• Locking, check in/out
• Offline briefcase synchronization to access content offline
• Taxonomy and categorization of content
• Advanced search with combined metadata, location, and multi-category search
• Soft deletes and deleted documents recovery support
• Scheduled jobs and actions
• Management of web assets

Using Alfresco for records management

Using Alfresco, you can implement records management solutions such as enterprise records management, compliance, imaging, forms management, and business process management.

Alfresco records management features provide a secure, auditable environment for creating, declaring, classifying, retaining, and destroying records. Organizations can ensure compliance by defining and enforcing policies for records use, storage, and disposition, with a legally defensible audit trail.

Records management capabilities are modeled to support the US Department of Defense 5015.2 Records Management standards. Alfresco provides file plan templates for numbering, classification, disposition, and other metadata population of records. Disposition includes the transfer of records and/or the ultimate destruction of the record.

Predefined reports will provide you with information about recent records, records due for cutoff, records retention due for expiry, records due for transfer, and records due for destruction.

The lifecycle determines the disposition of the record including when the records will be cut off or grouped together, how long the records will be held, and what happens to the record after the hold period expires—whether they are transferred to a records holding area or whether they should be destroyed.

By integrating with Scanning and OCR technologies, Alfresco provides end-to-end solution by collecting paper documents and forms, transforming them into accurate, retrievable information, and delivering the content into an organization's business applications. The information then is full-text searchable and goes through various lifecycles based on the organization's defined business process management.

E-mails are considered as records in some organizations. Alfresco enables you to drag-and-drop e-mails from Microsoft Outlook into the file plan space. The system will extract the metadata from the e-mail files and populate information such as who the e-mail is from, who the recipients are, and the subject of the e-mail. E-mail content is stored in a secure and scalable repository and is full-text searchable.

Key features include:

• Record plans
• Automatic conversion from proprietary office formats to long-term vendor neutral formats such as Open Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF)
• Vital records information management
• Record cutoff information management
• Record holding and retention management
• Record transfer process
• Record destruction management
• Record lifecycle management
• Archival policies
• Disposition schedules
• Restriction of user functions
• Audit trails

Using Alfresco for collaboration management

Using Alfresco you can implement collaboration solutions such as corporate and departmental intranets, knowledge management, and client and project extranets.

Alfresco collaboration features provide the infrastructure, integration points, and tools required for accessing, sharing, and distributing content among users or systems. Built upon industry-standard, open source platforms, Alfresco helps you to quickly define and develop environments for teams (project teams, associations, research, and so on) that will streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve time to market. Users can manage and collaborate on documents, web information, and forms within a single system through a consistent user interface.

A comprehensive security model based on individuals, groups, projects, and team spaces provides you the highest level of control. The solution leverages the existing infrastructure such as LDAP or Active Directory for authentication and authorization.

A web-based rules engine enables business users to define the business and content rules appropriately without the help of programmers and IT. Alfresco supports a graphical tool to define the workflow and business process management for content flow in collaborative environments.

Users can discuss the content using the discussion forums and discussion threads tied to the content. Users can subscribe to content and receive e-mail notifications when content is added or updated. The solution supports both inbound and outbound RSS syndication to share content beyond inside and outside corporate firewalls.

Interfaces such as Common Internet File System (CIFS) and WebDAV allow each team member or departmental system to map the folder on the server as a local network drive. This enables bulk transfer of files between your local system and the central server repository. Users can use their favorite editors to edit the content that is mapped in the local network drive.

Knowledge Management (KM) refers to a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organization.

Key features include:

• Team spaces
• Full audit control
• Discussion forums
• Message boards
• RSS syndication
• Ad-hoc security
• Version controlled content repository
• Full-text search of various content items
• User controlled routing
• Integration of enterprise systems
• High availability, fault tolerance, and scalability
• Business process-driven content management

Using Alfresco for enterprise content search

Most of the ECM systems do not consider search as an important part of enterprise content management. Search helps to locate information quickly, generate business reports, and helps to make business decisions. The following features of Alfresco will provide you an enterprise search solution:

• Provides single point access to enterprise content repository
• Provides full-text search of documents
• Helps to index the documents and provide metadata search
• Helps you to build and share reports using saved searches
• Helps search for users and collaborative groups
• Searches archived content

Applications of Alfresco

Since the architecture is flexible and extensible, you can build various applications using Alfresco such as:

• Enterprise document repository
• Intranet
• Enterprise knowledge management portal
• Scalable content repository
• Corporate websites
• Marketing communications
• On demand publishing
• Compliance and records management
• Financial applications which involve security, forms handling, and approval process
• Research portals for collaboration and sharing of information

Alfresco's website (http://www.alfresco.com) has a list of customer case studies. Going through these case studies will help you understand the type of applications you could develop using Alfresco.