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ECM: Alfresco Threatens SharePoint
In an interesting twist, Open Source Alfresco has announced a beta offshoot of their Alfresco Enterprise Content Management repository that is compatible with Microsoft SharePoint. It’s included with the Alfresco 3.0 Labs release.
Alfresco was helped in engineering SharePoint support because of the documentation that came out of the EU’s demand for Microsoft open up the Microsoft Office interface. With this information, Alfresco was able to develop interoperability with SharePoint.
“You can now stand up an Alfresco Labs server next to a SharePoint Server, and Office will not be able to tell the difference between the two,”
said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. “But we are offering considerably more scale than SharePoint can deliver,” he said.
Alfresco provides document scalability that SharePoint lacks. The Alfresco Labs 3 system has been tested storing up to 100 million documents. SharePoint recommends no more than five million documents.
While Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 represents a huge improvement over previous releases and their work in the area of records management is great, SharePoint is not without problems. A Burton report found shortcomings in the areas of Search, Collaboration, BI, Forms and Content Management.
Alfresco’s integration was based on a Web 2.0 technology developed by Alfresco called Surf that consists of Alfresco Web Scripts, the Yahoo Interface Library and Adobe Flash. Alfresco will be delivering a new social computing application, Alfresco Share, built using the Surf platform in September 2008. A Preview of Alfresco Share is available in Alfresco Labs 3 Beta.
