Nowadays, organizations face the huge challenge to organize, control and manipulate one of the most important, and many times neglected, good: Knowledge. With the huge amount of information that is generated daily, most organizations realize that without solid content management rules and workflows, they are exposed to some risks regarding legal and compliance matters, and at a short term they will be lead to inefficient business processes.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) appears as an IT solution to help organizations to face this kind of threats, by introducing the concepts of structure, life cycle, management, access control to knowledge and content produced by their employees, partners, customers and suppliers in their daily interaction.

Business Overview

Enterprise Content Management solutions are usually introduced in organizations IT infrastructure to improve organization’s business processes mainly regarding user/employee productivity in such way that knowledge can be properly categorized and published making it more easy to find and transmit.

With an ECM solution, organizations can have a centralized and secure repository, which allows easy integration with nowadays disseminated web intranet/extranet platforms, bringing the benefit of quick and easy information spreading.

A natural, and most common, use of ECM solutions in organizations is related with legal obligations imposed by national authorities. This way, organizations can manage and control all their documental information for legal purposes with automatic retention and expiration rules. The use of ECM’s business oriented workflows, allows users to better collaborate on information & knowledge by proving the automation of the old and raw “paper-dependent” processes and also providing better visibility of the progress of the whole business process workflow, allowing them to increase organization collaborative processes’ efficiency.

Business Benefits

To face the future with lightweight processes, efficient interdepartmental communication and legal compliance systems, organizations must change their old paper time consuming way of work method. This is where ECM solutions and Alfreco comes in, bringing real benefits such as:

• Productivity increase, producing timely responses and decisions;
• Employee, partner and customer satisfaction;
• Full legal and certified compliance;
• Electronic Workflow dynamics:
• Very low ROI time;
• Tight control over enterprise knowledge through centralized security;

Technical Overview

Alfresco Community edition provides key features for a scalable, robust, and secure Enterprise Content Management System to deliver trusted and relevant content to its users and customers. Alfresco is built on industry-standard open-source platforms, such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, MyFaces, JSR 168, JSR 170, and JSE5, deploying and enabling a full Service-Oriented Architecture. Under ECM context Alfresco offers several key features:

Document Management

With Alfresco, organizations are able to implement document management solutions providing all the services necessary for creating, converting, managing, sharing, versioning, searching and visualization of electronic documents. It uses full Service-Oriented Architecture using industry standards such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, MyFaces, JSR 168, JSR 170, and JSE5. Alfresco acts like a centralized enterprise digital media assets content repository, allowing all authorized entities to search, navigate, check-in and check-out documents. Alfresco also provides an embedded version control system, allowing users to keep track of document changes. Other features provided by Alfresco in what concerns to Document Management are:

• Document Indexing
• Text search over Documents
• Document Lifecycle management
• Metadata management of Documents
• Document categorization / classification
• Digital image library

Records Management

• Automatic conversion from proprietary office formats to long-term vendor-neutral formats such as Open Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF)
• Record cutoff information management, for archive purposes;
• Record holding and retention management, for legal purposes;
• Record transfer process
• Record destruction management
• Record lifecycle management
• Archival policies
• Disposition schedules

Web Content Management

Alfresco’s web content management features provide a rich environment for creating, managing, and publishing web content. The content managed can include text, HTML, XML files, graphics and photos, video or audio. Through this solution, organizations can integrate multiple disparate sites and data formats, and give users (often sales people, partners, and customers) rapid access to information in timely manner. For web content management, Alfresco provides several features such as:

• Standards-based forms to create pages
• Email-based workflow and approval process
• Pre-built templates: Websites and website components
• Re-use existing sites: Easily reuse existing look and feel
• Virtualization server: Preview web 2.0 site updates in context, view the site in the past, present, or future
• Business process-driven web content management

Collaboration

• Team spaces;
• Discussion forums;
• Message boards;
• Ad-hoc security;
• A version controlled content repository;
• Full-text search of various content items;