Alfresco upgrades flagship ECM offering

Alfresco Labs promises easier social computing and collaboration

Enterprise content management (ECM) firm Alfresco has released a major new version of its Alfresco Labs open source application, designed to offer greater social computing and collaborative functionality, and a viable alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.

Alfresco Labs 3 Stable features the stability fixes of the firm's non-open source enterprise-grade product, as well as support for SharePoint protocols and the new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) ECM standard.

CMIS ECM has been used to enable integration with other open source tools, such as Joomla, MediaWiki, OpenOffice and WordPress, according to Alfresco chief marketing officer Ian Howells.

"In the current climate, we've seen people wanting to manage more content for compliance and productivity reasons, and for less cost," he said. "If people have money to burn they don't care about open source, but now is a good environment for it."

The company has also made significant enhancements to the product's web content management capabilities with the release of Alfresco Web Studio, a drag-and-drop visual editor for end-user site development built on Surf, an Ajax-enabled web user interface component framework.

Alfresco Labs 3 Stable can be downloaded from Alfresco's Download Labs page.