The Alfresco Enterprise Content Management System has now made its enterprise features of security, directory integration, scalability, clustering and hot standby available as 100% open source. Government agencies, non-profit organizations and major corporations have made clear that want the flexibility to change to the open source offering if necessary. In addition, enterprises are willing to purchase support contracts without withholding enterprise features. Other leading open source companies are using this model to offer the same functionality across all product lines, giving the customer the option of purchasing, not extra functionality, but support, consulting, integration and training.

As a result, Alfresco is making enterprise features such as security, directory integration, scalability, clustering and recoverability open source in version 1.2.1 of the open source Alfresco Community edition. This approach allows the customer to get the benefit of open source in the short-term – low-risk trial with easy access to source code, product details and roadmap – and in the long-term – the flexibility to stay with enterprise support or move to community model with no loss of functionality.

The Alfresco Enterprise Network offers the following support services:

• Certified Stacks; Maintenance, Updates and Patch support
• Problem Resolution,
  Compatibility and Migration Advice
• Customer Portal – Information, Bug Tracking
  and Case Tracking
• Performance Tuning Advice
• Indemnity and Warranty

The Alfresco Community edition is available for download from http://alfresco.org/downloads

Alfresco seems to be very document-focussed, it is possible to add custom content types and have them versioned by the respository? I had a quick look around the wiki and the documentation, but it didn't seem immediately obvious.

Great news in opening the whole stack, hopefully this will kick off more interest within the community for Alfresco.

You can read on http://www.alfresco.com/products/

Alfresco now offers the same functionality across the Enterprise, Small Business and Community product lines. The customer has the option to purchase additional support, consulting, integration and training services.

Does it mean that I will download identical arcive after folowing "try alfresco", "by alfresco" and "open source downloar" links?
If not, what are diferences?
Alfresco uses JLAN and it is not free. Is there JLAN in open source download?

My second question is:

Java EE 5 has just passed Final Approval Ballot. There are many JSRs under it like JSF 1.2, EJB 3.0 etc. What Alfresco plans related to those technologies?

Nebojsa

Does it mean that I will download identical arcive after folowing "try alfresco", "by alfresco" and "open source downloar" links?

On "Try Alfresco", there is a free, hosted version of Alfresco for people who don't want to download the system to try it out. In "Buy Alfresco", the model is very similar to JBoss or MySQL where you can buy the support and certified stacks of Alfresco. For those who purchase Alfresco enterprise support, we provide quick maintenance fixes; prioritize answering configuration, deployment and development questions; certify against non-open source systems such as Oracle or commercial portals. The enteprise version also comes with a warranty and indemnity.

Alfresco uses JLAN and it is not free. Is there JLAN in open source download?

The source code for the Alfresco version of JLAN is free and completely open source, but is specific only to Alfresco. As a result, Alfresco supports the Microsoft CIFS protocol, similar to Samba, which provides more metadata than WebDAV, allows for offline synchronization, and works with Microsoft Briefcase. It also supports NFS and FTP.

Java EE 5 has just passed Final Approval Ballot. There are many JSRs under it like JSF 1.2, EJB 3.0 etc. What Alfresco plans related to those technologies?

On JSF, we use the MyFaces 1.1.1 implementation of JSF 1.1, which has not yet addressed JSF 1.2. The recently approved JSF 1.2 implementation helps rationalize the expression languages of JSF and JSP, but will require substantial changes on our part. As soon as MyFaces reaches 1.2, we will start moving to the new spec.

On EJB 3.0, our plan is to provide compatibility as soon as possible, but it is a longer term project to migrate to some of the interfaces specified. We are quite happy with Spring for AOP and Hibernate for O-R mapping.

is it possible to add custom content types and have them versioned by the respository?

Documentation on defining new content types is in the Developer Guide section and can be found at: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Data_Dictionary_Guide. In the Developer Guide section there is also information on how to use the model definition to define integrity constraints and to add new behavior through Aspects.

Alfresco is more than just document-focused. You can manage web content and apply records-management type controls on records informaton. There is also a forum capability and one of the members of our community is developing a wiki. In February, we hired the core team from Interwoven, including Interwoven's VP of Web Content Management, who are busy building an enteprise scale web content management system.

There is already an active Alfresco community, which you can find participating in the forums at http://www.alfresco.org/forums.

So are the interwoven guys working on the OSS version of the CMS, or developing something more specific using alfresco as a base? It may be too sensitive to say, but it would be amazing if you had full-time developers working on an OSS project!

So are the interwoven guys working on the OSS version of the CMS, or developing something more specific using alfresco as a base? It may be too sensitive to say, but it would be amazing if you had full-time developers working on an OSS project!

It is not too sensitive to say because we want to keep the process of developing the product as transparent as possible. You can see the plan for the WCM including specs and uses cases on the wiki: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/New_Web_Content_Management_Plan

We have four developers from Interwoven working full time on the OSS project including the guys who designed and built Open Deploy, Forms integration, Workflow, Middleware and advanced user interface. A preview release will be coming up in the summer and will also include an advanced workflow capability that we are building on top of jBPM, that will also be compatible with BPEL.

thats truely impressive, it seems that you guys have come a long way since the first previews were released (last year?).

One small point, when the guys from spring and hibernate chose to use products like phpbb or vbulletin, people often suggest that they don't appear to have enough faith in what they are doing to actually use it themselves. Whilst I appreciate it is very narrow minded in respect to their projects, wouldn't be a good idea to use alfresco to manage alfresco?

Alfresco had its first release in late June 2005. We started the company in January 2005 and started coding in March.

We purposely chose PHP products for our Wiki and Forums so that we could replace them at a later date.

The web content management plan is a bit light on for details about how inter-content-item links are handled. Is this information available anywhere?

The web content management plan is a bit light on for details about how inter-content-item links are handled.

We have already incorporated the Freemarker templating engine (http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/) for marking up the HTML content. Freemarker has the ability to attach to a Java data model and we have bound Freemarker to the Alfresco data model. This allows us to create relative links, absolute links, query-based links or relationship based links.

We will be adding more documentation about the WCM solution over the coming weeks.

Sorry, I should have been a bit more specific. What will Alfresco's publishing policy be in the cases where an item that is being deployed has a link whose target is not currently deployed (either because it hasn't been deployed yet, or because it has recently been undeployed)?

Where can I found more information over the mentioned "forum capability" ?

...Alfresco is more than just document-focused. You can manage web content and apply records-management type controls on records informaton. There is also a forum capability and one of the members of our community is developing a wiki.

Where can I find more information over the mentioned "forum capability"?

Here is some information on the forums and its design: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Forums_Design.

The mechanism for including a forum is opening up in our 1.3 release in two weeks time to make it easier to add new capabilities like this. The new designs for WCM and Wiki will take advantage of this.

Thx, for the provided information. We haved played with the current version and it makes for me, by the handling and the currently available features, a very good impression.

Maybe the solution is in a later - more stable state - destinated to one of our projects ;-)

For this reason I hope, that the mentioned version 1.3 can be a little bit more stable - in some of the things, which are sometimes causing in a crash on our Installation (Tomcat/Oracle) here.

A crash is in the current state excusable - but after this, sometimes the login as admin or all other users was impossible and that´s really not so good ...

regards
-roland

Here is some information on the forums and its design: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Forums_Design.The mechanism for including a forum is opening up in our 1.3 release in two weeks time to make it easier to add new capabilities like this. The new designs for WCM and Wiki will take advantage of this.