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The official documentation is at: http://docs.alfresco.com

ArchitectureBusiness BenefitsOverview

Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management. Industry benchmarks with leaders such as MySQL and Red Hat have shown Alfresco to be the most scalable JSR-170 repository.  Alfresco offers a low cost, easy-to-use, robust Enterprise Content Management suite built by former Documentum® and Interwoven® employees. This is suitable for true enterprise deployment with fail-over, clustering, distributed cache management, and LDAP integration built in as standard.

The Enterprise Network is fully supported with indemnity and warranty. It offers:

• Certified binaries, benchmarked for scalability
  
• Patches between releases
  
• Alfresco engineer responses within guaranteed response times
  
• Customer Portal
  

The Community Network is unsupported, has no indemnity or warranty and no benchmark certification.

Table of Contents

• 1 Traditional Content Management


• 2 Architecture


• 3 Administration


• 4 Standards Support


• 5 Repository Customization


• 6 Library Services


• 7 Data Management and Transformation Engine


• 8 Integrated Workflow


• 9 Content Categorization


• 10 Advanced Search


• 11 Benefits

Traditional Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a critical part of any corporate infrastructure. An infrastructure can only be successful when it is based on industry standards and standard components. Most of today’s legacy ECM systems were built in the early 1990’s before content management standards existed. Many of the corporate infrastructure components and standards such as application servers, web services, RSS, REST we now take for granted were developed after many ECM systems further complicating the problem.

Alfresco is a modern state-of-the-art ECM built using Spring, Hibernate, Lucene and jBPM based on standards such CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-168, Web Services and REST. This allows Alfresco to be deployed in any J2SE 5.0 (JRE 5.0) application server such as Apache Tomcat or JBoss Application Server delivering significantly better scalability and high-availability properties such as distributed cache management, automatic failover and clustering.

Architecture

• Full Service Oriented Architecture using Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, MyFaces, JSR 168, JSR 170 and JSE5
  
• High Availability – Distributed content synchronization, Failover Manager
  
• Clustering – Fully Distributed Cache
  
• Zero Footprint Client
  
• Benchmark Certification – 10 million document repository testing
  
• White Paper Available - The First Open Source JSR-170 Benchmark
  

Administration

• Simple Installation
  
• Security and User Management with Users, Groups and Roles
  
• Document Level Security
  
• Upgrade and Migration Administration - Zero-Time Upgrade for Development Extensions
  
• Single Sign-On through NTLM or LDAP
  

Standards Support

• Web Services, JSR 168, JSR 170 Level 2, MyFaces, WebDAV, DeltaV (I don't think DeltaV is supported, see http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/AR-1345), SQL, RSS, ODF, OpenSearch
  

Repository Customization

• REST architecture - URL Access to all Actions
  
• Server Customization – JavaScript Actions
  
• One Customization Model for Linux and Microsoft Windows
  

Library Services

• Check-In/Out - Minor and Major Version Control
  
• Auditing – Who Created, Who Updated, When Created, When Updated
  
• Service Oriented Auditing – Audit every service invocation
  
• Document Cross Linking – Across multiple spaces
  

Data Management and Transformation Engine

• Transformation – e.g. Word to PDF, PowerPoint to Flash
  
• Content Streaming
  
• Extensible Server-Based Transformation Engine
  

Integrated Workflow

• jBPM Integration – Complex workflow support with JavaScript integration
  
• Compliance - Secure Document Lifecycle Management
  

Content Categorization

• Automatic Meta-Data Extraction from all Interfaces
  
• Auto Categorization
  

Advanced Search

• Combined Meta-Data, Content, Location, Object Type and Multi-Category Search
  
• Saved Searches
  

Benefits

The Alfresco JSR-170 repository offers significant benefits in terms of:

• Cost – Dramatically lower Total Cost of Ownership than legacy ECM systems
  
• Performance – Dramatically better performance than legacy ECM systems
  
• Rapid Deployment – Simple to Install, Rollout and Use