Infoworld recently reviewed the Alfresco open source ECM platform:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/15/79206_25TCalfresco_1.html
The author, Mike Heck, favorably compares Alfresco to the much more expensive Documentum platform — confirming my view that open source ECM has arrived as a serious contender in the ECM marketplace.
Alfresco weighs in at a "Very Good" rating of 8.3, even after getting dinged by the reviewer for lacking the "capability to publish web sites". This is absolutely true. Alfresco today is not a web content management (WCM) system, but it's not positioned as one either. Instead, Alfresco provides a strong content repository for managing the lifecycle of all types of enterprise content, including documents, records, images, digital assets, etc.
Incidentally, complete WCM capability is under development and is slated for release later this year.
Overall, I think the review is well done — providing a concise overview of many of Alfresco's primary features. I think the review could benefit from a treatment of a few key capabilities that are not addressed, including:
- CIFS emulation support (Microsoft's file share protocol), which allows the Alfresco repository (or any space within it) to look as if it were simply a file share — a major ease-of-use feature that complements the WebDAV support
- Extensible content modeling type system, allowing users/adminstrators to easily define custom metadata to accurately characterize their content and/or define links and associations among content items
- Dashboard views, provided by a built-in templating engine that allows users/administrators to create custom views of the repository contents
By helping our clients deploy Alfresco, we've found these features to be quite useful toward creating/managing/collaborating on documents (CIFS makes it real easy), finding information faster (content models allows faster search), and getting work done faster (dashboard views). So any review of an ECM system should include these types of capabilities.
