Alfresco Software is a collection of
information management
Information management (IM) concerns a cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposal throug ...
software products for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
and
Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...
operating systems
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...
developed by Alfresco Software Inc. using
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
technology. The software, branded as a Digital Business Platform
is principally a proprietary & a commercially licensed open source platform, supports open standards, and provides
enterprise
Enterprise (or the archaic spelling Enterprize) may refer to:
Business and economics
Brands and enterprises
* Enterprise GP Holdings, an energy holding company
* Enterprise plc, a UK civil engineering and maintenance company
* Enterpris ...
scale. There are also
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
Community Editions available licensed under
LGPLv3
The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...
.
History
John Newton (co-founder of
Documentum
Documentum is an enterprise content management platform, now owned by OpenText, as well as the name of the software company that originally developed the technology. EMC acquired Documentum for $1.7 billion in December, 2003. The Documentum pla ...
) and John Powell (a former COO of
Business Objects
A business object is an entity within a multi-tiered software application that works in conjunction with the data access and business logic layers to transport data.
For example, a "Manager" would be a ''business object'' where its attributes c ...
) founded Alfresco Software, Inc. in 2005.
In July 2005, Alfresco released the first version of their software.
Alfresco initially focused on document management, in May 2006, the company announced its intention to expand into web content management by acquiring senior technical and managerial staff from
Interwoven; this included its VP of Web Content Management, two principal engineers, and a member of its user-interface team.
In October 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report described Alfresco as a “leading Java-based open source web content management system”.
In 2010, Alfresco sponsored a new
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
BPM engine called
Activiti.
In July 2011, Alfresco and Ephesoft announced a technology collaboration to offer
document capture
Document Capture Software refers to applications that provide the ability and feature set to automate the process of scanning paper documents or importing electronic documents, often for the purposes of feeding advanced document classification an ...
and
Content Management Interoperability Services
Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is an open standard that allows different content management systems to inter-operate over the Internet. Specifically, CMIS defines an abstraction layer for controlling diverse document mana ...
brought together for intelligent
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
capture and search and
workflow
A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of ...
development.
In January 2013, Alfresco appointed Doug Dennerline, former President of
SuccessFactors, former EVP of Sales at
Salesforce.com
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, an ...
, and former CEO of
WebEx
Webex by Cisco is an American company that develops and sells web conferencing, videoconferencing and contact center as a service applications. It was founded as WebEx in 1995 and taken over by Cisco Systems in 2007. Its headquarters are in San ...
, as its new CEO.
In September 2014, Alfresco 5 was released with new reporting and analytics features and an overhaul of its document search tool, moving from
Lucene
Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a ...
to
Solr
Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features an ...
.
In November 2016, Alfresco launched an AWS Quickstart for building an Alfresco Content Services server cluster on the AWS Cloud.
In March 2017, Alfresco rebranded as the Digital Business Platform. This included the release of the Application Development Framework with reusable
Angular JS(2.0) components.
On February 8, 2018, it was announced that Alfresco was acquired by the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P.
On September 9, 2020, Alfresco was acquired again by
Hyland Software
Hyland Software is the developer of the enterprise content management (ECM) and process management software suite called OnBase. Applications of the suite are used in healthcare, financial institutions, insurance, government, higher education and ...
from Thomas H. Lee Partners for an undisclosed amount.
Products and Services
Alfresco's core platform offering consists of three primary products. It is designed for clients who require
modularity
Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a sy ...
and scalable performance. It can be deployed
on-premises
On-premises software (abbreviated to on-prem, and incorrectly referred to as on-premise) is installed and runs on computers on the premises of the person or organization using the software, rather than at a remote facility such as a server farm ...
on servers or in the
cloud
In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may co ...
using an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Quick Start. A
multi-tenant
Software multitenancy is a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. Systems designed in such manner are "shared" (rather than
"dedicated" or "isolated"). A tenant is a group of us ...
SaaS
Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
SaaS is cons ...
offering is also available.
Alfresco provides
enterprise content management
Enterprise content management (ECM) extends the concept of content management by adding a timeline for each content item and, possibly, enforcing processes for its creation, approval and distribution. Systems using ECM generally provide a secure ...
(ECM) services. This includes a content and metadata repository, a web interface named Share, the ability to define automated business rules, and text indexing. In addition, services that provide
records management
Records management, also known as records and information management, is an organizational function devoted to the information management, management of information in an organization throughout its records life-cycle, life cycle, from the time of ...
functionality to address
information governance
Information governance, or IG, is the overall strategy for information at an organization. Information governance balances the risk that information presents with the value that information provides. Information governance helps with legal compl ...
requirements are also provided by the company. Alfresco Governance Services is
DoD 5015.02 certified for records management.
A on
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
community edition of the Alfresco software known as
Activiti is available..
See also
*
List of content management systems
Content management systems (CMS) are used to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them are built on top of separate content management frameworks. The list is limited to notable services.
Open source software
:''Th ...
*
List of collaborative software
This list is divided into proprietary or free software, and open source software, with several comparison tables of different product and vendor characteristics. It also includes a section of project collaboration software, which is a standard fea ...
*
Cloud collaboration
Cloud collaboration is a method of sharing and co-authoring computer files via cloud computing, whereby documents are uploaded to a central "cloud" for storage, where they can then be accessed by other users.
Cloud collaboration technologies allow ...
*
Document collaboration
Document and file collaboration are the tools or systems set up to help multiple people work together on a single document or file to achieve a single final version. Normally, this is software that allows teams to work on a single document, such as ...
*
Document-centric collaboration
References
External links
Official websiteAlfresco Hub - Forums (Community)Alfresco Content Services on AWS (Amazon Quickstart)Activiti Software WebsiteAlfresco Software External Project Repositorieson
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
How to run Alfresco, Share, and Solr on separate tomcatson
eisenvault
{{DEFAULTSORT:Alfresco (Software)
Free content management systems
Document management systems
Free software programmed in Java (programming language)
Free business software
Digital library software
Software companies of the United States