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The official documentation is at: http://docs.alfresco.com
OverviewBusiness Benefits
Document management is critical to any organization, whether it is used for compliance, customer service, business continuity, or effective collaboration. Today, users want the simplicity of a departmental solution, with simple to configure applications; whereas corporations want the consistent control and compliance of a scalable, robust content management system. Alfresco offers the industry leading, open source document management system to capture, search, and collaborate on documents with full library services and lifecycle management on a unified, robust repository.
Traditional Document Management
Traditional document management has its roots in complex document vaults accessed by document librarians. These have historically been developed as large, complex, enterprise software applications.
This has caused document management systems to be:
- Complex and difficult to use
- Very costly
- Very low adoption rate - typically 5% of users
The choice of a complex, robust document system or a simple to use system that lacks essential features has resulted in a very low adoption rate. The systems that users are familiar with and use are:
- Shared drive for storage
- Email for Collaboration
- Google for search
- Yahoo for categorization
- Folder structures and content for project plans
Alfresco Document Management
Alfresco offers document management using familiar interfaces to get rapid user adoption built on a repository that offers transparent, out-of-sight services for full ECM:
- Virtual File System - Replace shared drives and offer the same interface
- Email-like rules - Configure plug-in rules to automate manual processing and offer out-of-sight compliance
- Google–like search - Search directly from Firefox or IE7
- Yahoo-like browsing - Automatic meta-data extraction and categorization
- SmartSpaces - Best practice collaboration spaces
- Transparent lifecycle support
Content Contribution
- Virtual File System making ECM as simple as a shared drive
- CIFS Briefcase Synchronization
- Portal Access - JSR-168
Content Categorization
- Automatic MetaData Extraction and categorization from all Interfaces
Advanced Search
- Native OpenSearch from Firefox or IE7 across multiple Alfresco repositories and also other Open Search repositories
Data Management and Transformation Engine
- Transformation Services - Office to ODF/PDF, PowerPoint to Flash.
Library Services
- Check-In/Out - minor and major version control
- Auditing - who created, who updated, when created, when updated
- Document cross linking - across multiple spaces
Team Collaboration
- Space Wizard - Best practice of folder structure, content, templates, rules and processes
- Forum Support - threaded discussions
- Simple Email Based Workflow - embedded URL, approve/reject
- Email and RSS change notification
- Portal Deployment (incl. Liferay)
Integrated Workflow
- jBPM and Activiti Integration - complex workflow support
- Dashboard Task Management
- Compliance - Secure Document Lifecycle Management
Security
- Security and user management with users, groups and roles
- Document Level Security
- Single Sign-On through NTLM or LDAP
Benefits
Alfresco delivers:
- Dramatically increased user adoption - for all users across systems
- Dramatically reduced cost and TCO
- Reduced risk
- Rapid deployment
