Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management

Chapter 1. Introducing Alfresco

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding Alfresco and its uses

• Looking at the origins of Alfresco and its place in the ECM industry

• Using Alfresco in different scenarios

• Considering factors when implementing an Alfresco content application

• Exploring the importance of open source and community for Alfresco

Alfresco is an open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. It was originally created in 2005 by a team from Documentum, including its co-founder, as an open source alternative to proprietary vendors in the $4 billion ECM market.

Alfresco manages all the content within your enterprise: documents, images, photos, Web pages, records, XML documents, or any other unstructured or semi-structured file. What makes Alfresco stand out are the services and controls that manage this content and features, such as metadata management, version control, lifecycle management, workflow, search, associations to other content, tagging, commenting, and much more. This allows you to find the content you are looking for in the mountain of information accumulating in enterprises and to ensure that it is accurate. It also enables you to present and publish information through the Web or any other channel appropriate to allow users to access that information.

For The End User

For The End User

For end users, Alfresco appears as a suite of applications or extensions to their existing tools that manages their content. Alfresco exposes itself as though it were a shared drive to ...