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Alfresco, which provides an open platform for social content management, has announced the availability of its latest version, Alfresco Community 3.4, for download.
Alfresco 3.4 expands the company’s open source and open standards-based content management platform with new tools and services for Spring Framework developers. Alfresco 3.4 also features Web Quick Start for easy Website deployment and content integration with enterprise portals. This builds on Alfresco’s strategy of offering a content platform that delivers the flexibility and affordability required across the enterprise, the company said in a press release on the announcement.
“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,” said John Newton, Alfresco’s chief technology officer (CTO), in a statement. “Through our implementation of CMIS [Content Management Interoperability Services] as a core standard and the new features in Alfresco 3.4, our content services platform can now manage and deliver enterprise content to any internal or external application in a way that traditional, monolithic ECM [Enterprise Content Management] products can’t enable without significant time and expense.”
In addition to collaborative Web authoring, Alfresco Community 3.4 features an office-to web framework. Using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Protocol and Common Internet File System (CIFS), along with a new API integration with Google Docs, users can now author documents in their native office suite, collaborate in Alfresco or Google Docs, transform and re-purpose if required, and then publish straight to the Web – even with sophisticated approval workflows, the company said.
Alfresco Community 3.4 also features distributed content replication as well as integration with enterprise portals and social software. The ECM’s new DocLib portlets allow seamless integration with enterprise portals like Liferay, Quickr and Confluence. Using Single Sign On (SSO), the portlets provide access to both content and project repositories from within any Java Specification Request (JSR) 168-compliant portal.
“The increasingly networked nature of business has amplified existing requirements for individuals to collaboratively author, review and publish content, as well as to quickly build web sites using that content,” said Larry Hawes, lead analyst for collaboration and enterprise social software for the Gilbane Group, in a statement. “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.”