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Open Source: Alfresco Content Management
Alfresco is offered as an open-source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system from Hyland Software. Alfresco is used commercially by more than 1300 organizations, like NASA JPL, Cisco, and the US Department of the Navy.
Gartner said that “Hyland’s Alfresco platform has proven itself with benchmarks and customer case studies to scale to support billions of documents. These are well-suited to large global organizations or those with long retention requirements for records.”
Forrester found that “Strengths of the Alfresco Digital Business Platform include its app design and development tools, a robust migration toolkit, and comprehensive governance capabilities… Reference customers praised a great user experience, design tools, and app integration…”
Alfresco was founded in 2005 by John Newton, who also co-founded Documentum, a successful commercial ECM business. Alfresco from the beginning was available with both community and enterprise versions. Community and enterprise versions still exist today, but the gap between the two has grown since the early days.
What distinguished Alfresco as a product from the beginning was that it was open-source software developed and managed by an elite team that came from large enterprise software businesses, like Documentum and Business Objects. Its integration of open-source components, like Tomcat, Lucene/Solr, Tika, Quartz, and its use of industry standards like REST, WebDAV, JSON, and CMIS made the product unique at the time. The use of Java Spring Framework, Web Scripts, and Rhino Javascript makes the platform highly configurable and easy to customize and interact with. Alfresco’s content modeling and metadata management are very unique and flexible, based on the concepts of types, aspects, and properties.
Formtek became an Alfresco partner in 2007. In early 2018, Alfresco was acquired by Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Alfresco was then resold in September 2020 to Hyland Software.
