Alfresco vs Documentum

Alfresco's content management and collaboration system gained its big popularity thanks to the low pricing and availability of free open-source edition. But still it's pretty complicated solution that doesn't fit small business. But now Alfresco decided to fix this issue and released Alfresco Team which is designed for content collaboration in departments and small companies. It reminds Sharepoint Team Site or Box.net, but more functional and cheap. Users can create sites (workspaces) with different pages - document libraries, calendars, wiki, task lists, blogs, forums. Alfteso Team's functionality includes social tools (comments, ratings, Like buttons), activity streams, web-viewer (which lets you view even videos and audio files), mobile versions for iPhone and iPad, workflow-engine (implemented on Alfresco BPM), document converter (eg doc -> pdf).

Alfresco loves to make problems for IT giants by its altruistic approach to business. For several years, this company is exerting pressure on ECM market leaders (Microsoft, IBM, Open Text, EMC, Oracle) by providing high-quality free/cheap open-source system Alfresco ECM. And now, the company decided to build communism in another, related IT field - BPM (Business Process Management). The new Alfresco product - Activiti is absolutely free, open-source BPM system, distributed under Apache License 2.0. To develop this system Alfresco (traditionally) enticed executives from competing project JBoss jBPM - Tom Baeyens and Joram Barrez. They were helped by the SpringSource (VMWare) developers. In result they built light-weight, fast and free product that is intended to revolutionize the BPM market.

Document management systems (DMS) and related to them Enterprise Content Management systems (ECM) like all other IT solutions are gradually embracing Enterprise 2.0 technologies. This is a difficult move for them. Because DMS and ECM - are quite old and conservative technologies/systems and it's always difficult to change for old school. Besides the main DMS and ECM users are large companies and it's very difficult to upgrade them to the next level. Nevertheless, the progress goes on. Let's take a look on how the Enterprise 2.0 technologies are implemented in DMS and ECM nowadays:

Alfresco has released the new version of its commercial open-source ECM system Alfresco Enterprise 3.3. The main feature of the new version is integration with other content systems via the CMIS interface. Alfresco is the first ECM-vendor that added full support for CMIS to its product. Using CMIS business applications can easily access content stored in the Alfresco database. The new version includes integration with Drupal, Outlook and Google Docs. Previously, Alfresco also introduced the integration with IBM products (Lotus Notes, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections). In addition to the new integration opportunities, Alfresco 3.3 provides enhanced web interface of collaborative tool Alfresco Share. It features improved access control system, record management, custom lists (like in Sharepoint - for example, tasks, activities, companies) and Google-like search query syntax. We also note the new Alfresco Web Editor that allows non-technical staff to create and edit pages.

Alfresco, the open-source ECM system is going to compete with Microsoft Sharepoint. The new version Alfresco 3.0 features the Web interface designed for collaboration and social interaction Alfresco Share. Its capabilities are very similar to Sharepoint: Document Library with a comments and tags, people search in addition to content search, Intranet / Extranet workspaces, activity streams, profiles and customizable home pages, calendars, wiki, blogs and forums. It also provides integration with MS Office via support of Sharepoint Protocol. In addition to the new collaboration tools the new Alfresco includes lightweight development tool Surf for designing user interfaces and automate them using Alfresco Web Scripts.

Long ago Adobe invented PDF - the format designed for document collaboration. Then for this format Adobe created a set of auxiliary tools. One of these tools, Adobe LiveCycle, was designed for building web forms that save entered information directly to PDF-files. And now, on the basis of this product and in partnership with Alfresco, Adobe has released its own ECM solution Adobe LiveCycle ES that will compete with MS Sharepoint, Open Text and Oracle Content Management. Alfresco - is a very ambitious company that is  going to revolutionize the ECM market ruled by Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Open Text, SAP and Oracle. Alfresco is well-known for its open-source strategy. And now they are partnering with the "big brother" Adobe. Adobe LiveCycle ES is intended to automate all paper work - from form input to document approval and executions. And everything is accessible via a web browser. The system functionality includes:

London-based Alfresco has integrated its open-source ECM system with the popular social network Facebook. With the new Alfresco application for Facebook employees can collaborate internally and with business partners in the social network. Application adds a tab to Facebook profile where user can upload documents directly from the ECM system. Documents in the profile can be organized into libraries (folders). In Alfresco you can also access these folders and add documents to them - they will appear on Facebook and vice verse. When a document is loaded to profile, user friends are notified and can download the new documents. Of course, it's recommended to share only public documents via Facebook.

It's always a pleasure to watch, when a software giant's senior manager is talking from the stage that: "guys, customers do not want to tinker with the software, they need on-demand solutions ... it's time to move the software to the Cloud." In this case we are talking about EMC. On the video - Paul Maritz, president of VMWare (which is owned by EMC), talking about the benefits of cloud technologies and presenting (of course, revolutionary) platform EMC OnDemand. This platform will be used to host the wide range of applications by EMC and its partners, but for now it provides on the well-known content management systems EMC Documentum, EMC Captiva and EMC Document Sciences. Although Documentum alrady has a set of web-interfaces, the access to the cloud version is implemented via the VMWare's virtualization technologies.

Document management systems (DMS) and related to them Enterprise Content Management systems (ECM) like all other IT solutions are gradually embracing Enterprise 2.0 technologies. This is a difficult move for them. Because DMS and ECM - are quite old and conservative technologies/systems and it's always difficult to change for old school. Besides the main DMS and ECM users are large companies and it's very difficult to upgrade them to the next level. Nevertheless, the progress goes on. Let's take a look on how the Enterprise 2.0 technologies are implemented in DMS and ECM nowadays:

CenterStage - is a collaboration solution that EMC released last year with the new version of Documentum. True, last year only the light version CenterStage Essentials, that provides basic collaboration tools,  was unveiled. Today the full-functional version CenterStage Pro is already available. It provides personal workspaces, powerful search engine, wiki, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools that make it close to Microsoft Sharepoint. Moreover, unlike Sharepoint, CenterStage allows to control version history not only for documents but also for records: blog posts, wiki-pages, discussions. Disadvantage (compared to Sharepoint) is the lack of workflow automation and metadata support. Of course, CenterStage can not be regarded as a full-fledged Sharepoint rival, because it's not a self-sufficient tool and only works in conjunction with Documentum ECM. But for those companies that already use Documentum and haven't implemented Sharepoint yet - it's a quite attractive solution.

EMC calls the new Documentum 6.5 the "perfect balance: between the modern Web 2.0 technologies and compliance with enterprise security". They say "You can provide the world's best enterprise content management system, but if end users do not like to work with it, the vast amount of information just does not get into the system. Documentum was always considered the best ECM-platform, but when it comes to user interface - it wasn't so good". The new version of Documentum includes 3 new user interfaces: Centerstage Essentials (web-interface for knowledge workers that allows to create online workspaces with social tools such as microblogs, forums, tags, ratings, galleries), Media WorkSpace (Flex-based interface for managing media content, that also provides social tools) and MyDocumentum (a simple desktop client intended to access the most commonly used content, even offline).

EMC has released the new version of its enterprise content management software Documentum 5.3. One of the main features of the new system is the module Documentum Collaboration Services, which allows to organize intranet workspaces for communication and collaboration. These workspaces may contain folders with documents, notes and data sheets, calendars and discussion. Another module EMC Documentum Business Process Engine allows to organize workflow with automated task distribution, prioritization and load-balancing. Besides the new version features the plug-in Documentum Client for Outlook, that allows to access documents and tasks from MS Outlook and easily save emails and attachments to the Documentum repository. Version 5.3 also provides enhanced search engine.

The data storage giant EMC has acquired the web-platform for enterprise content management Documentum for $ 1.7 billion. The Documentum acquisition is intended to strengthen the EMC market share in its competition with IBM. Now the users of EMC storage systems will be able to get their hands on more efficient content management tools. Cooperation between EMC and Documentum began last year when the companies developed the storage and digital archive management solution for EMC Centera. Now, this cooperation will continue in a new form - Documentum will become a division of EMC.

Documentum has unveiled the new version of its document management platform Documentum 4i. The main feature of the new version - is its webification. Documentum 4i is based on the Web-architecture that utilises Java and XML to exchange information with third-party applications. Recall, last year the company released a set of extensions Documentum Web Application Environment for web-access to the system. Now, users can access documents via the web browser just like via the native desktop app. Documentum 4i supports Microsoft IIS and Netscape Enterprise Server web servers. Thanks to the XML support Documentum 4i can run as a data source for enterprise portals, public sites and other business applications. Documentum 4i includes the new data repository Docbase server and Enterprise Document Management (EDM) Server 4.0 to automate business processes and content management.