Alfresco 2.0 Released

Alfresco has released the 2.0 version of their successful ECM platform. The release has been issued to the community (free) and via the Alfresco Enterprise Network (24/7 support) which includes top notch support from Alfresco’s development engineers. This will be the beginning of a series of posts that I will be writing on the Alfresco 2.0 product.

First, I will do a short introduction on the management team at Alfresco as I think this is an important component of their success so far. Alfresco was founded as an open source alternative for enterprise content management. The founding members of Alfresco consist John Newton (Co-Founder of Documentum), John Powell (Former COO, Business Objects), Dr. Ian Howells (Former VP Marketing, SeeBeyond), Kevin Cochrane (Former VP Web Content Management, Interwoven), Matt Asay (Founder and Organizer of the Open Source Business Conference). The development team consists of the former Documentum Java Web Development and Portal Team and former Interwoven TeamSite and OpenDeploy Engineers. They are funded by leading investment firms Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund. Having the right people on board with funding is a good start to any successful company.

Now for the fun stuff….the 2.0 release packs in several new features as well as extensions to features included in the 1.4 release. Here is a short list summarized from Alfresco’s site:

1. Document Management (enchancements) - more multi-language support capabilities
   
2. Web Content Management (new) - first release of WCM leveraging same repository as document and records management features with rapid import of existing web applications of all types (J2EE, Static HTML, etc.). This first release offers many other features as well including virtualization (i.e. show me what my site displayed to users on 1/3/2007 @ 1:30 PM, etc.).
   
3. OpenSearch (new) - Parallel, Federated and Secure Search capabilities (huge!!)
   
4. Alfresco Application Exchange (new) - Alfresco Module Package (AMP) capabilities to provide simple methods of packaging functionality that may be shared within an organization or Alfresco partner.
5. Records Management (new) - advanced customization capabilities for FilePlan execution, advanced scheduling management for record cutoff, hold and disposition
   
6. Web Client (enhancements) - additional rich client features leveraging AJAX

In upcoming blogs I plan to go over each of the features listed above in more detail. I also will be talking about Alfresco’s implementation architecture which I believe presents a major competitive advantage over the existing [legacy] ECMs in the marketplace today.