Alfresco Announces New Tools to Power Collaborative Web Development

Alfresco, an open platform for social content management, announced the immediate availability of Alfresco Community 3.4 for download. With its new service, Alfresco broadens the reach of the company’s open source and open standards-based content management platform with new tools and services for Spring developers.

The new program offers Web Quick Start for easy website deployment and content integration with enterprise portals.

The increasingly networked nature of businesses is forcing individuals to collaboratively author, review and publish content, as well as to quickly build websites using that content, according to Larry Hawes of Gilbane Group.

“Alfresco's 3.4 release exposes more content management features within Share and third-party collaboration environments, empowering business people to quickly work together to create and publish content to websites, portals and social software,” Hawes added.

Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of out-of-the-box templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines Alfresco Share for Web team collaboration with its powerful content authoring and publishing services like in-context Web editing.

The Office-to-Web Framework enables users to author documents in  their native office suite, collaborate in Alfresco or Google (News - Alert) Docs, transform and re-purpose if required, and then publish straight to the Web using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Protocol and CIFS (shared file drive), along with a new API integration with Google Docs.

Alfresco now offers key content management services, the Web Content Services for Spring, built using the popular Spring and Spring Surf frameworks, which can be accessed via OpenCMIS and integrated into any Web application.

The new DocLib portlets allow seamless integration with enterprise portals like Liferay, Quickr and Confluence. Using Single Sign On or “SSO,” the portlets provide access to both content and project repositories from within any JSR168 compliant portal.

Another feature of Alfresco's 3.4 release is the Distributed Content Replication. The native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. It enables them to replicate key documents to remote offices, enabling greater sharing of information, quicker access, and reduce wide area network traffic by removing dependency on a single system.

“The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being repurposed for the public Web, external portals or even to destination sites across the Web,” John Newton, Alfresco CTO, said.

By implementing content management interoperability services or “CMIS” as a core standard and new features in Alfresco 3.4, Alfresco content services platform can now manage and deliver enterprise content to any internal or external application in a way that traditional, monolithic enterprise content management or “ECM” products can’t enable without significant time and expense, according to Netwon.

In June, TMCnet reported that Alfresco Software introduced Alfresco Migration Services to simplify content migration from costly legacy and proprietary solutions to Alfresco ECM.