Social content management from Alfresco

Alfresco has released Version 3.4 of its enterprise content management system. The latest iteration has been designed for developers and companies to build applications where enterprise content is "social-ready" — that is, shared, collaborated on and syndicated across the Web — and captured for compliance, retention and control, reports Alfresco.

The company emphasizes the following key new product capabilities for the Alfresco Enterprise 3.4:

User interface enhancements to make document management more social. Alfresco’s refreshed Share interface for collaboration and document management now includes status updates (similar to Facebook and Twitter), content activity streams and enhanced search capabilities to make content easier to find.

Folder-based actions for simple workflow, along with advanced workflow (using jBPM). Business users can now set up simple document workflow, such as approvals or content transformations, inside the Share interface. For robust workflow, Alfresco Share now exposes workflows created with standards-based enterprise business process management tools.

Distributed content replication. Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to support large geographically dispersed companies, reducing access time, removing single points of failure and removing the dependency on a single system.

Collaborative Web authoring. Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of best-practice 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 process control and publishing services like office-to-Web publishing.

Integration with enterprise portals and social software. Alfresco now includes a DocLib portlet to enhance its JSR-168 support, which exposes a document library in standards-based portals like Liferay or Red Hat’s JBoss Portal. And using CMIS, Alfresco continues to integrate with Drupal, Lotus Quickr and an expanding set of social business systems.