Alfresco Delivers Critical Foundation for Social Content Management with New Enterprise Release

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 release marries robust new platform capabilities with an enhanced user interface that makes document management and collaboration more social

LONDON and ATLANTA—January 26, 2011 — Alfresco today announced the immediate availability ofAlfresco Enterprise 3.4for download. This significant new release delivers on Alfresco’s vision of providing the open platform forsocial content managementby delivering both a more robust content platform for building any kind of content-rich application, along with a more social user-interface for collaboration and document management. This platform will be used by developers and companies to build applications where enterprise content is “social-ready” -- or shared, collaborated on and syndicated across the web – and captured for compliance, retention and control.

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Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is purpose-built for managing content in a social world. Enterprises are increasingly deploying social business systems like Jive, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Lotus Quickr, Drupal and Liferay, among others, in the hopes of making employees more effective. But these social business systems are creating volumes of unmanaged content if left un-checked. Using open standards like CMIS & JSR-168, Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is a content platform that can co-exist with social business systems to help manage and retain the content created by social business systems.

“The exponential growth of social content created in systems of engagement demands new disciplines for managing its life cycle, storage and ultimate disposition,” according to Gartner, Inc., a research and advisory firm. "Like e-mail, which was originally meant to be used once for asynchronous communication and then discarded, social software applications have the potential to create masses of unmanaged content that may become relevant in a future lawsuit or regulatory investigation. Understanding its nature (whether an intermediate work product, a draft or a "place" to share ideas) and its ultimate role (to become a document, possibly even a record subject to formal governance and retention guidelines) is crucial to adopting such systems successfully.*”

“Social Content Management is where the capabilities of social business systems and traditional enterprise content management (ECM) meet,” said John Newton, Alfresco CTO. “It is communication and collaboration with a business purpose and it requires a platform that can deliver content for discussion and engagement that then captures the results of that discussion. Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is that platform – delivered as open source with open standards like CMIS, JSR-168 and RESTful API’s -- in order for developers, customers and our partners to manage content and expose repository functionality inside of social business systems.”

Key new product capabilities for the Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 release include:

• User-interface enhancements to make document management more social– Alfresco’s refreshed Share interface for collaboration and document management now includes status updates (similar to Facebook and Twitter), content activity streams and enhanced search capabilities to make content easier to find.

• Folder-based actions for simple workflow, along with advanced workflow (using jBPM)– Business users can now set-up simple document workflow, such as approvals or content transformations, inside the Share interface. For robust workflow, Alfresco Share now exposes workflows created with standards-based enterprise business process management tools.

• Distributed Content Replication– Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to support large geographically dispersed companies, reducing access time, removing single points of failure, and removing the dependency on a single system.

• Collaborative Web Authoring– Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of best practice templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines the power of Alfresco Share for web team collaboration, with powerful content process control and publishing services like office-to-web publishing.

• Integration with Enterprise Portals and Social Software– Alfresco now includes a DocLib portlet to enhance its JSR-168 support, which exposes a document library in standards-based portals like Liferay or Red Hat’s JBoss Portal. And using CMIS, Alfresco continues to integrate with Drupal, Lotus Quickr and an expanding set of social business systems.

The Alfresco Enterprise 3.4social content management platformis available now for download. Additional resources on Alfresco’s approach, vision and strategy are also available.

Alfresco Social Content Management video

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 screen shots

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*Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management” by Toby Bell, Karen M. Shegda, Mark R. Gilbert, Kenneth Chin, November 16, 2010

About Alfresco Software

Alfresco Software (www.alfresco.com) is the leader in the open source enterprise content management (ECM) market. The company couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform at a tenth of the cost. The Alfresco content platform uses a flexible architecture to provide document management, Web content management, records management and collaboration software to customers and partners in 40 countries. Headquartered in London, with US headquarters in Atlanta, Alfresco was founded in 2005 by a team of content management veterans including the co-founder of Documentum, John Newton, and former COO of Business Objects, John Powell.

Alfresco Media Contact:
Linsey Krauss
Lois Paul & Partners
Linsey_Krauss@lpp.com
(001) 512-638-5316

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