Alfresco vs Drupal

2020. Hyland to acquire Alfresco



Hyland, a provider of content services, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Alfresco, a leading open-source ECM platform. Founded in 2005 by John Newton (co-founder of Documentum) and John Powell (former COO of Business Objects), Alfresco has established itself as a prominent player in the open-source ECM space. Based in Boston, Alfresco specializes in developing a cloud-native digital business platform that offers content services solutions to connect, manage, and safeguard critical information for organizations. Following the completion of the transaction, the entire Alfresco business is expected to be integrated into Hyland Software, Inc. This acquisition aligns with Hyland's vision of becoming a global leader in content services, expanding its presence worldwide and welcoming additional customers, partners, and highly experienced employees. Incorporating Alfresco's solutions enriches Hyland's portfolio of content services offerings and opens up new avenues for collaboration with the open-source community, driving product innovation.


2020. Acquia launches Digital Experience Platform



Digital experience company Acquia has announced the launch of its new Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP). This powerful platform combines Acquia Marketing Cloud and Acquia Drupal Cloud, providing organizations with a unified solution to leverage data and content effectively, enabling the rapid creation of innovative digital experiences. With the Acquia Open DXP, marketers and developers now have access to a single, user-friendly platform for building, personalizing, and orchestrating multi-experience customer journeys across various customer touchpoints, including touchscreens, chat, voice, and more. The platform also offers valuable tools such as Developer Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE), and Site Factory, a robust solution for managing and scaling Drupal 9 sites and applications, making it easier for developers to build Drupal sites. Additionally, the inclusion of CMS Migrate simplifies the transition from older versions of Drupal and legacy CMS to the latest Drupal 9 release.


2016. Alfresco is available as a managed service on AWS



Alfresco, a renowned provider of enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software, has recently unveiled the early release of its platform as a managed service, now hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This development enables users to conveniently access the platform as a single-tenant managed service within an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment. Furthermore, Alfresco is taking steps to streamline cloud deployment for customers who self-manage their AWS infrastructure, making it more accessible and hassle-free.


2016. Alfresco integrates its ECM and BPM



Alfresco has unveiled a significant integration between its enterprise content management (ECM) platform, Alfresco One, and its Business Process Management (BPM) platform, Activiti. This marks the culmination of years of concerted efforts to bring the two platforms closer together, effectively enhancing the functionality of both in managing business content and processes. With this announcement, Alfresco enters the competitive Process and Collaboration Management (PCM) market, providing enterprises with a comprehensive suite of offerings encompassing content management and content-driven processes. The integration seamlessly combines BPM, ECM, records management, and includes integrations with capture and e-signature vendors, delivering a holistic solution for enterprises in need of robust process and collaboration management capabilities.


2015. Drupal 8 is released



Drupal has finally released the highly anticipated Drupal 8.0 platform, which introduces a range of exciting features and improvements. These include in-context editing and previews, allowing users to see a real-time representation of their content as they edit it. The platform also provides comprehensive content modeling capabilities, incorporating entities, fields, and views right from the start. Users can easily customize content pages, forms, and administrative pages using the intuitive administrative interface. Additionally, Drupal 8.0 offers built-in support for multilingual content and localization, ensuring that websites can be easily translated and adapted to different languages and regions. The platform includes configuration management, enabling seamless deployment of changes between different environments. It adopts a mobile-first approach, ensuring that websites are responsive and optimized for mobile devices, while also delivering HTML5 output. Drupal 8.0 supports native web services, allowing easy integration with other applications and systems through REST. The platform prioritizes accessibility and compliance with WAI-ARIA standards, ensuring an enhanced experience for users with disabilities. It follows modern PHP standards and practices, incorporating popular libraries like Composer, Symfony2, Guzzle, and Twig. Drupal 8.0 focuses on front-end performance, offering improved caching and seamless integration with CDNs and reverse proxies. Furthermore, the platform is fully compatible with PHP7 and supports both PostgreSQL and SQLite databases. Overall, Drupal 8.0 represents a significant advancement in functionality, performance, and flexibility for web developers and content creators.


2015. Alfresco enhanced integration of its ECM and BPM systems



Alfresco is enriching its ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and BPM (Business Process Management) platforms, namely Alfresco One and Activiti, through the introduction of new modules for analytics and media management, as well as enhanced BPM capabilities. These newly released components bring additional functionality to the platforms and foster closer integration between BPM and ECM. The enhancements build upon Alfresco's open-source BPM offering, which had already been adopted by many enterprises as a standalone BPM engine in their applications. Now, as an enterprise version, Activiti v1.0 offers seamless integration with Alfresco Share, Alfresco's collaborative tool. In addition, Alfresco has unveiled an Analytics Module, which can be integrated with any of the Alfresco products, providing valuable insights and reporting capabilities regarding content, processes, and events related to individuals.


2014. Alfresco raises $45M to fight with EMC and Microsoft



UK-based Alfresco, a startup specializing in open-source enterprise content management, has secured Series D funding of $45 million. This investment exceeds the cumulative amount raised in all of its previous funding rounds combined. Alfresco is in competition with established services like EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint, providing solutions for large organizations to effectively manage their diverse document storage across both cloud and on-premises environments. It offers features such as version control and compliance requirements across various devices, including mobile and PC. With the new funding, Alfresco plans to accelerate its business operations by enhancing sales and marketing efforts and expanding its range of cloud-based services. This expansion may result in direct competition with popular platforms such as Dropbox, Box, and Huddle.


2011. Alfresco created collaboration system for SMB



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). ***


2010. Alfresco launched free BPM engine



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. ***


2010. Document Management goes 2.0: Alfresco vs SharePoint



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: ***