New Alfresco release casts a wide net

June 2, 2010 — 8:58am ET | By Ron Miller

Tools

Tags
Content Management
Alfresco
John Newton
open-source CMS
CMIS
open source
ECM

Alfresco released Alfresco Enterprise 3.3 last week, which it claims is the first commercial release to support the new CMIS content management sharing standard. (CMIS provides a single way to share content across repositories from different vendors.) In addition, it includes supports for IBM/Lotus applications, Microsoft Outlook and Drupal. That's a diverse set of capabilities by any measure.

John Newton, Alfresco's CTO, says the product comes at a time where we are seeing big changes in the industry. "Cloud computing and open source are a challenge for traditional ECM vendors, the CMIS standard will accelerate commoditization, and user demographics are changing the way people want to work," Newton said.

He adds, "CIOs are realizing old monolithic ECM suites are failing to solve today’s content management needs and are seeking alternative and flexible platforms to compliment their corporate architectures," Newton said.

This is very much in line with the trends I outlined a couple of weeks back in my Editor's Corner, "Are we witnessing the end of ECM as we've known it?" Newton is right, there are many changes going on in ECM including open source, the cloud, CMIS and of course Microsoft SharePoint. If Alfresco could truly answer all of these issues in one package, it would be something. I'm not sure if it does or doesn't, but Newton certainly has his finger on the pulse of the industry as much as anyone out there.

For more information:
- see the Alfresco press release