Alfresco vs Joomla

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.