Alfresco releases Alfresco Enterprise 3

Alfresco [1] announced today that it was releasing Alfresco Enterprise 3, it's latest enterprise content management offering. The new release builds on earlier Alfresco announcements around the Sharepoint protocol support [2], draft CMIS [3] support (which John Newton, Alfresco founder and CTO, discussed in this Fierce interview [4]) and Alfresco Share, the centerpiece of this release that provides support for out-of-the-box Web 2.0 tools.

Newton says that you can use Share to build Web 2.0 applications such as blogs and Wikis inside and outside the firewall as you see fit, enabling you to create communication and knowledge sharing tools for internal and external users. What's more, because this is an open source tool, you can build tools for your organization on top of this solution or take advantage of a growing ecosystem of tools the community is developing.

You can download Alfresco Enterprise 3 for free at Alfresco.com. In addition, you can purchase a Subscription for $15,000 per CPU per year. Unlike most models, which charge by the user, Alfresco charges by the CPU which can scale to many users. The subscription services include quality assurance, support and maintenance.

As you look for ways to control costs in a tougher economic climate, you may want to take a closer look at solutions like Alfresco's. "This is a great opportunity to use a low cost, open source model, and take new types of content collaboration and document management to people trying to reduce costs and be more efficient in a tough economic environment," Newton says.