Alfresco improves support for the cloud, becomes more collaborative

January 13, 2010 — 1:29pm ET | By Sharon Fisher

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Enterprise Content Management
Documentum
Alfresco
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Alfresco Software announced a new version of its Enterprise Edition enterprise content management product. New features in version 3.2 include support for cloud-based deployments, improved email management and archiving, and enhanced team-based content collaboration.

The London-based company was founded by several former employees from Documentum, which was acquired by EMC Corp., said Ian Howells, chief marketing officer, who was there between 1993 and 2000. It also includes refugees from several other acquisitions, including JBoss, Novell and Vignette, he said. The company currently boasts 2 million downloads, 1,000 enterprise customers, up to 150,000 people registered in the community and more than 60,000 live sites, he said.

Alfresco is currently offering 24-hour demonstrations of its open-source software in the cloud. The software uses the industry standard Content Management Interoperability Services specification, which Howells said will be as important as SQL.

In addition, the company demonstrated a technical preview of its Alfresco Content Services for Lotus social collaboration products, which integrates the Alfresco system with IBM Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal. The software is scheduled to be available next month.

Compared to SharePoint, Alfresco offers support for a wider range of languages, APIs, protocols and services, as well as records management capabilities that are certified to work with the DOD 5015.2 specification. However, it includes an implementation of the SharePoint protocol, which allows users to migrate with less disruption and gives users access from Microsoft Office, the company said.

For more:
- see the press release