Alfresco releases ECM software based on SharePoint

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By Robert Mullins

July 31, 2008 — Alfresco Software issued today a beta release of its SharePoint-compatible open-source enterprise content management software, in what the company called the first such release under a European Commission order requiring Microsoft to share protocol documentation for its collaboration software.

The release of the Alfresco Labs 3 enterprise content management (ECM) system makes it possible for end users of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to use an open-source collaboration platform along with open-source databases, application servers and other related software, said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco.

“Inside of Office, there are built-in hooks to SharePoint that were closed,” Newton explained. “What we’re able to do is to unlock those hooks into Office … [with Alfresco] hooking into Office as though we’re SharePoint.”

Microsoft was ordered by the European Commission in 2004 to release protocol documentation for SharePoint and other Microsoft software products, after a finding that the company was engaging in anti-competitive practices. Microsoft appealed the ruling, but the appeal was dismissed in September 2007. Microsoft began sharing documentation this past spring, allowing companies such as Alfresco to develop their own open-source alternatives to MOSS.

Alfresco worked with the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, which signed an agreement with Microsoft to be the conduit to share the protocol documentation with open-source vendors, to make Alfresco’s software interoperable with Microsoft’s, Newton said.

The ECM market has grown to close to US$4 billion, Newton said, citing research industry estimates, fueled in part by the introduction of SharePoint in 2001 as SharePoint Portal Server. But, he added, the ECM market needs an open-source alternative for ECM, much as the application server market has with Red Hat’s JBoss or the database market has with Sun MySQL.

Alfresco Labs 3 provides support for document, image, record and Web content management, Newton said. The beta release should be followed by a community release in September, and later by a commercial enterprise version with additional features and subscription-based support.

Related Search Term(s): open source, SharePoint, Alfresco, Microsoft

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