I came across Alfresco a couple of years ago at the MySQL European Customer conference – at the time they were relatively new and didn’t look that relevant. I’ve kept one eye on them since and have recently had the opportunity at work to look at alternatives to Sharepoint. Alfresco is now looking very, very interesting in this respect.

Alfresco’s features cover:

• Document Management
• Web Content Management
• Collaboration
• Content Platform and Repository
• Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)
• Records Management
• Image Management

Its not that often (although admitedly it is now getting more common) you find an Open Source product that is strong on features / usability and is technically strong. The reason I say it is technical strong is due to the way it embraces and leverages Open Standards and Open Source Java components (Such as Hibernate etc – which good PHP frameworks have borrowed heavily from recently).

One of Alfresco’s people writes an interesting blog on the Business/Politics of Open Source: http://news.cnet.com/openroad/

Another Interesting Alfresco blogger is John Newton: http://newton.typepad.com/content/ He has an article on CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) which sounds fantastic.

Look forward to learning (and blogging) more about Alfresco if I get the opportunity…