Alfresco launches open-source BPM project

Suddenly everywhere you turn, content management has become all about business process management (BPM). Companies are suddenly falling over themselves to be associated with a real business need and to make intelligent use of content.

Open-source content management vendor Alfresco has a bit of a different take on it, however. They announced this week, they are launching an open-source BPM project, one that will be run by Alfresco employees, but still be an independent open-source project, which has no direct ties to the Alfresco ECM tool.

The project is called Activiti Business Process Management open source project, and Alfresco has hired leading BPM expert Tom Baeyens as Chief Architect to run the project. Even though, Alfresco appears to be leading the development of the new open source BPM tool, it will be an Apache-licensed, open-source project. The goal is to build a light-weight, open-source BPM engine based on the emerging BPMN 2.0 standard.

Activiti will become the default business process management engine for Alfresco ECM, and will provide a broad set of BPM capabilities. It's unclear if it will be sophisticated enough to meet the needs of complex organizations, but it does provide standards-based, open-source underpinnings for BPM and that should be very helpful for organizations looking to add BPM capabilities.

For more information:
- see the Alfresco announcement

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