Alfresco announced the release of Alfresco Community Edition 3.4 this week. The new version takes advantage of CMIS and other standards to provide new ways to share content among users and across web properties.

Among the new features that should appeal to users and administrators alike is the ability to publish content from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office/SharePoint and Google Docs directly to the website. The new feature takes advantage of Microsoft's SharePoint protocol and the CFIS shared file drive on the Microsoft side and the Google Docs API for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Larry Hawes, lead analyst for collaboration and enterprise social software at Gilbane Group says it's increasingly important for teams of users to be able to share and publish content across a variety of platforms. "The increasingly networked nature of business has amplified existing requirements for individuals to collaboratively author, review and publish content, as well as to quickly build web sites using that content," Hawes said.

The new release also includes support for WebCMIS to provide a layer for building web applications on top of Alfresco, integration with enterprise portal and social software and distributed content replication, which provides a way to replicate content to remote locations, and according to Alfresco, provides faster sharing, quicker access and more efficient use of wide area networking resources.

John Newton, one of the founders and CTO at Alfresco stressed the importance of standards and how that can encourage content reuse and sharing. "Through our implementation of CMIS as a core standard and new features in Alfresco 3.4, our content services platform can now manage and deliver enterprise content to any internal or external application in a way that traditional, monolithic ECM products can't enable without significant time and expense."

If the software works as billed, it should provide several significant ways to reuse and share content across a variety of platforms and properties, which is becoming increasingly important in enterprise web content management. 

Alfresco Community Edition 3.4 is available for free download now.

For more information:
- see the Alfresco website

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