“Alfresco 4 is the result of a collaboration with our 2,200+ enterprise customers and 250+ global SI partners to create the most robust and extensible platform for a new generation of cloud-scale content apps,” said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. “We have made dramatic improvements in Alfresco’s ability to scale and perform, while making it easier for developers to customize and extend the platform.”

Alfresco Community 4 can be downloaded now for development and testing here.

The announcement is being made in conjunction with Alfresco’s exhibit at JavaOne, the annual Java developer conference in San Francisco on October 2nd through 6th.

Cloud-Scale Performance

Alfresco Community 4 significantly increases overall system performance. New features that enable cloud-scale deployments include:

• High-performance Indexing - New Alfresco Index Server, based on Apache Solr, dramatically improves performance by separating indexing from content processes
• Integrated workflow – Automate content-focused business processes with Activiti, the leading open source Java-based BPMN 2.0 business process server
• Enhanced clustering – Alfresco clustering has been enhanced to increase reliability and scalability, including added support for clustered CIFS

First Open Platform For Social Channel Publishing

Alfresco 4 includes a new, extensible service to publish content and status updates to social sites, including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr and SlideShare. Integrated social processing enables:

• Simpler Process – Social content publishing is now part of an enterprise content workflow, vastly simplifying the problem of multi-channel publishing. Control publishing with existing review-and-approve workflows and built-in content security.
• Fewer Tools & Fewer Errors – By embedding social publishing into a company’s core content and collaboration tool, it reduces the need for social-specific tools and error-prone “copy-and-paste” to external tools.

Consumer-Like User Experience Drives Greater Adoption

Alfresco 4 offers a streamlined, simpler consumer-like experience for end users, leading to higher adoption. New features aimed at making users more productive include:

• Drag and Drop Simplicity – Simply drag and drop files or move files around on HTML5 enabled browsers
• Enhanced support for video, audio, Adobe Creative Suite & Apple iWork documents – Inline preview and metadata extraction now available for more file types
• Social Features – ‘Follow’ influential content creators or ‘like’ your favourite content
• Cloud Collaboration - Use Google Docs integration to collaborate in real time
• Mobile Support – New, free iOS apps available now from iTunes, along with continued support for WebDAV and CMIS standards for new mobile use cases
• Extensibility – For developers and partners, Alfresco’s web interface is now much easier to extend and customize

For developers eager to learn more about the power of Alfresco 4, Alfresco is hosting its 2nd annual Alfresco DevCon 2011 event in San Diego, CA, on October 25th through 27th, and in London on November 8th through 10th.

About Alfresco
Alfresco is the open platform for social content management. With over 2,220 customers in 55 countries, Alfresco is the world’s most trusted open platform for highly scalable, enterprise-class content management. Boasting over 250 partners, a vibrant open source community, and customers including Home Depot, Michelin and the New York Philharmonic, the Alfresco ecosystem is driving innovation across the globe.

The Ixxus Social Content Platform features out-of-the-box integration with existing social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, meaning that users can create a central repository based on Alfresco for managing both their traditional and now social content. Through being able to disseminate and access information quickly and in a consistent manner via a single platform, organisations can improve both brand awareness and customer loyalty, as well as create revenue opportunities.

“Being able to manage and share social content effectively is becoming a huge challenge for a lot of organisations as the rules have changed regarding how people consume media and interact online. Whereas previously organisations may have had control over the content they published, today’s social media channels are making this a much more difficult task,”

said Paul Samuel, Director at Ixxus.

“While recognising the importance of social media, many organisations currently manage it in a siloed fashion using a number of different tools and with very little integration with their existing content management systems. Furthermore, it can be very difficult for organisations to keep track of and record all their social media interactions with customers, which is becoming increasingly important when it comes to customer service. With our Social Content Platform we aim to provide Alfresco users with one co-ordinated point where they can publish their social content and interact with their online audiences in a more controlled and efficient fashion.”

The Ixxus Social Content Platform offers users a number of features including:

• Integrated social content publishing – Out-of–the-box integration with your existing website, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, enabling users to directly publish to social media sites from their content management system. As an open platform it will also allow for easy integration of future publishing channels. Ixxus has even created an algorithm that will help reduce content to 140 characters so it can be sent out via Twitter.
• Central management of feedback – The Social Content Platform also provides users with the ability to view and respond to user comments via a common interface. This means that users no longer need to use separate tools and ensures better response consistency across all social media channels.
• Review and publish workflow – Organisations can set the necessary workflow publishing approvals for all their social content to help ensure that messages are consistent and potentially damaging tweets or Facebook updates aren’t published. Time-based workflow can also be set up to ensure that scheduled content goes out in a co-ordinated manner across all communication channels.
• Powerful reporting – Integration with reporting tools such as Google Analytics means that organisations can gauge the success of their social media activity, providing marketers with full campaign management. For example, analytics may show that Facebook activity was more successful than Twitter on a particular campaign, meaning that an organisation may choose to focus more on Facebook activity in the future.
• Full history of published content – The Social Content Platform provides organisations with access to a full history of their published content.  This means that users can easily search and retrieve content, and provide them with the ability to roll-back changes across one or more of their web or social media sites.

“Most organisations are faced with the dual pressure of driving out costs but at the same time increasing efficiency.  One way of doing this is to sort out their information infrastructures and create better repositories for all their content. Modules such as our Social Media Platform can help organisations simplify and improve the speed of their communication processes by minimising the number of tasks and people involved. Furthermore, as it is based on an open platform like Alfresco customers can have peace of mind that they will have an extensible and future-proof solution without the lock-in of propriety systems,” added Paul Samuel.

Ixxus (www.ixxus.com)

Seventy percent of clients are enterprise companies with over 10,000 employees – while 25 percent of its base draws from government, followed by finance and media. Key clients gained in 2010 include: Home Depot, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Michelin and The National Health Service. Cumulatively, Alfresco has now sold just under $100M since its founding in 2005, saving customers between $750M – $1B in software licensing costs as they migrate from costly proprietary ECM vendors. In the fourth quarter alone, Alfresco grew 40 percent over the same quarter last year with overall annual growth over one-third.

Alfresco’s key 2010 highlights include:

Corporate Growth

• Growth and 2010 profitability has been achieved on less than $20M of VC funding;
• Alfresco is now available in over 55 countries; securing its first large customers in China and India;
• Surpassed 3 million downloads of Alfresco Community Edition;
• Increased staff by 35% and appointed industry veteran, Todd Barr as new Chief Marketing Officer;
• Expanded operations in APAC and Americas, with new hires in both Sydney and Atlanta, Georgia offices;
• Named to InfoWorld’s Best of Open Source Software (Bossie) awards for third time in four years; and,
• Included in EContent Magazine’s list of 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry for fifth consecutive year.

Alfresco Technology

• Launched the industry’s first open source Social Content Management in Alfresco Enterprise 3.4;
• Launched Activiti BPM 2.0 Business Process Engine; announced hiring of leading BPM expert Tom Baeyens;
• Simplified replacement of legacy and proprietary ECM solutions with Alfresco Migration Services;
• Added collaborative web development, new tools for Spring developers, and content integration to enterprise portals to the Alfresco platform with release of Community 3.4; and,
• Delivered five new premium language packs: French, German, European Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.

Customer Support & Services Improvements

• Named Barry Duplantis VP of Customer Services to coordinate Alfresco customer support, training, consulting, and documentation projects across the globe;
• Held first annual Alfresco Developer Conferences in New York and Paris as well as first Content.Gov event in Washington, D.C.;
• Expanded training services with launch of e-Learning courses; and,
• Executed over 100 Lunch & Learn sessions in over 50 cities.

Partner Expansion

• Added 100 global system integrators (SI) and OEM partners during 2010; There has been approximately $1B in SI-related customization services revenue generated around the Alfresco platform since 2005
• Expanded Australian partner ecosystem to include SIs, named Barry Costin as Territory Manager for Australia and New Zealand; and,
• Promoted Boulder, Colorado-based Zia Consulting, Vancouver-based Appnovation, Austin-based Blue Fish Development Group, Boston-based Rothbury Software, Mexico City-based Think Hemisphere and Barcelona-based IN2 and to platinum partner status.

“Coming off our most successful fiscal year to date, we have invested heavily in expanding Alfresco’s global reach and service capability, while continuing to improve the most innovative ECM platform on the market. To achieve this we have focused on key global growth areas and extending our partner network to service these markets,” said John Powell, CEO of Alfresco. “We have used the open source model to propel our company and bring cost-effective software solutions to global enterprises. Now, with our investment in social content management, we are focused on optimizing and unlocking the power of content within organizations and from their most valued customers.”

Website: Alfresco

“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 CTO. “Through our implementation of CMIS as a core standard and 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 products can’t enable without significant time and expense.”

Key product capabilities for the Alfresco Community 3.4 release include:

• Collaborative Web Authoring – Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of out-of-the-box templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines the power of Alfresco Share for web team collaboration, with powerful content authoring and publishing services like in-context web editing.
• Office-to-Web Framework* – Using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Protocol and CIFS (shared file drive), 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.
• Web Content Services for Spring – Built using the popular Spring and Spring Surf frameworks, Alfresco now offers key content management services that can be accessed via OpenCMIS and integrated into any web application. A combination of standard development tools and lightweight scripting gives Spring and Surf developers many options for building content-rich apps.
• Integration with Enterprise Portals and Social Software – The 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 JSR168 compliant portal.
• Distributed Content Replication – Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to remote offices, enabling greater sharing of information, quicker access, reduced wide area network traffic and removes the dependency on a single system.

“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 websites using that content,” said Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group. “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.”

Website: http://www.alfresco.com

The InfoWorld Bossie awards, which recognize the best business-oriented open source software products, includes products in the categories of open source applications, application development software, platforms and middleware, and networking software.

“We are extremely pleased to be named to the InfoWorld Bossie awards, this reflects the continued international success Alfresco has experienced in the last year,” said John Powell, Alfresco Software CEO. “The award recognizes our ongoing efforts to advance the Alfresco platform to address the needs of our customers while providing a low-cost alternative to proprietary content management solutions.”

The Alfresco Community Edition was singled out by InfoWorld for its recent significant developments in compliance with Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) 1.0, the addition of Alfresco’s Web Editor Framework, integration with IBM Lotus Notes and Google Docs and the development of new content automation and dynamic query capabilities – all of which contributed to the company’s selection.

“The Bossie 2010 award winners are our top picks among open source projects for many different reasons,” said Doug Dineley, InfoWorld’s Test Center Executive Editor. “Some are longtime favorites, and others are completely new. Some are fast ways to fulfill a familiar need, while others allow companies to do things that weren’t possible or affordable until they came along. The one quality they all share is extreme usefulness, and a combination of features that beats all others in their class.”

The full Bossie writeup can be found at http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/bossie-awards-2010-the-best-open-source-software-the-year-115?source=rs.

The best open source applications slideshow, which includes Alfresco, can be found at http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/bossie-awards-2010-the-best-open-source-applications-150&current=5&last=1#slideshowTop/.

Try Alfresco at http://www.alfresco.com/try

“From CMIS 1.0-compliance that will ‘future proof’ content application development, to LGPL licensing, Community 3.3 offers a range of new features and functionality that will continue to extend the free distribution and presence of Alfresco open source ECM,” said John Newton, CTO, Alfresco Software. “The enhanced content services in Alfresco Community 3.3 are designed to help organizations better manage web presence with tools designed to simplify the process of building content-rich web applications using CMIS.”

Significant enhancements to Alfresco Community Edition 3.3 include:

Content Services – Providing core content management capabilities, in a free-to-distribute CMIS runtime, which allows developers to easily embed content services in their applications:

• CMIS 1.0 Compliance – For several years, Alfresco has taken a leading role in the development of open source standards. With the imminent approval of CMIS as an industry standard, Alfresco is the first ECM vendor to launch a fully compliant implementation of CMIS 1.0.
• Inline Content Editing Services – In-context editing allows non-technical content authors to edit content directly from the web page. Alfresco Community 3.3 also provides a Web Editor Framework (WEF) – a JavaScript client side framework rendering a toolbar and associated controls designed to allow developers to extend any in-context functionality that may be required. The WEF also enables developers to easily create and package plug-ins and extensions for simple management and interoperability.
• Content Repurposing – Automated content formatting functionality allows developers to build solutions to easily repurpose content for the web. Developers can use automated rules and existing FreeMarker and XSLT templates to format content for multiple delivery channels.
• Repository Replication & Web Deployment – Alfresco 3.3 builds on current rich deployment facilities with the introduction of the Transfer Service. Developers can utilize the transfer service to build solutions that transfer content between Alfresco repositories, enabling them to maintain rich content structures and relationships between Alfresco environments. This is especially useful to WCM architectures where Alfresco provides both authoring and delivery tier components.

Integrations – Designed to meet the needs of developers looking for industry standard platforms that provide content services, Community 3.3 extends Alfresco support in the following key areas:

• IBM Lotus – Building on the ‘technology preview’ of the integration between Alfresco and IBM Lotus software products (Lotus QuickrTM, Lotus ConnectionsTM and Lotus NotesTM), this integration provides a more open platform and full-featured solution than Microsoft SharePoint(TM).
• Google Docs – Alfresco’ s integration with Google Docs provides users with full online editing capabilities, removing the need to use office applications, such as Microsoft Office(TM) to modify or update content.  The integration will be previewed at AIIM Expo and available for download in Alfresco Community in May.

Collaboration – New enhancements to Alfresco’s collaborative content management platform, Alfresco Share, include:

• Repository-wide content access – Alfresco Share users can now browse the document management (DM) repository as well as project or collaboration sites. New features provide users with full permission control and DM capabilities.
• Automated Content Rules – Alfresco Share now includes a new rules and actions interface, allowing administrators to automate actions on content such as transform, move, copy, notify and many more. In addition, Alfresco 3.3 enables users to define a library of rules and link these to any space for automatic execution.
• Collaboration Lists – Provides users with a mechanism for tracking lists of items within the context of a project. Lists can be used for multiple purposes such as tasks, issues, to-dos, and contacts and can be easily extended.
• Google Like Search – Offers users a familiar Google-like advanced search, which allows fields to be queried alongside text searches, such as finding documents by a given author created since a given date and containing a given text.

Business Friendly Open Source License – With Alfresco Community 3.3, the Alfresco repository has been moved to the LGPL license, allowing developers to embed Alfresco into their solutions without affecting their existing business model or license.

To learn more:

• Download Alfresco Community Edition 3.3 from http://bit.ly/alf33
• Preview Alfresco Community Edition 3.3 in an on-demand webinar at http://www2.alfresco.com/l/1234/2010-04-16/GV6CZ

With this release, Alfresco enables cloud-based deployments, streamlines email management and archiving and enhances team-based content collaboration. In addition, the Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 Records Management module is the only supported open source solution to have been certified to the 5015.02 standard.

“Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 brings low cost content management and collaboration tools to both commercial and government organizations, and dramatically reduces the barrier to regulatory compliance,” said John Newton, CTO and Co-founder, Alfresco Software. “Supporting the cloud and IMAP standards allows Alfresco customers to address all of their content management requirements – records management, document management, Web content management, collaboration, email archiving or digital asset management – through one value-based solution.”

This release builds on Alfresco’s ability to deliver low-cost, innovative and interoperable open source ECM solutions. New features and benefits in Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 include:

Enables efficient and easy ECM in the cloud:

• Multi-Tenancy – Alfresco is the only ECM system that natively supports multi-tenancy, a critical component of multi-company cloud implementations as it maximizes use of hardware and simplifies administration of multiple instances of Alfresco.
• Cloud-deployable – Alfresco now supports multiple deployment options from traditional on-premise to full cloud deployment ranging from a simple AMI to a fully-configured, fault-tolerant and load-balanced Alfresco cluster.

Delivers enterprise-class compliance at a dramatically lower cost:

• Records Management (RM) module– 5015.2 certified, Alfresco RM enables both commercial organizations and government agencies to address the strict legal requirements associated with managing key business records. The Alfresco open source RM module (available in February 2010 via the Alfresco Enterprise Subscription as a separate module) will enable companies to manage all document content with retention ranging from lightweight to 5015.2-compliant in a single repository, at a fraction of the cost of traditional RM solutions.
• IMAP support for email client access & email archiving – Simple ‘drag and drop’ support allows users to share key email messages with colleagues and team members. Unique transparent IMAP standard protocol support provides full access to repository services without a client install and can be accessed from mobile devices.

Scalable collaborative community management:

• Collaborative content creation – Enhancements to Alfresco Share make it easier for teams to collaborate and work together, extending team collaboration from the extranet environment into the cloud through scalable moderated sites, group based site membership.
• Rich user profiles – Alfresco enables users to employ social media techniques to navigate and find important information.
• Portlet updates – New dashboard features, such as image galleries, a new forms engine, and activities filters make it easier for end users to configure project portals to suit their needs.

Simplified, high-availability administration:

• Storage policies – Alfresco enables organizations to manage the physical storage location for content based on business polices as part of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy.
  This allows content to be automatically stored and moved between storage subsystems based on its business value, governance and compliance requirements and relative storage costs.
• Monitoring and configuration tools – Based on the industry JMX standard, these tools, combined with the new Alfresco subsystems, allow the administration and reconfiguration of Alfresco without the need to stop and restart the server.

Web content management performance enhancement:

• WCM authoring and deployment – Significant performance increases to improve deployment of Web site content to external web sites through highly-parallel Web site deployment and publishing. New open and flexible deployment architecture makes it simpler to deploy content to multiple delivery environments and allows easy integration into the web delivery tier.

Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2 is immediately available for all existing Enterprise Subscription Customers.