Move over paper! Alfresco has arrived

Going paperless has been one of the major thrusts behind most companies’ interest in digital transformation. Paper in all its forms is not only detrimental to the environment, it takes up physical storage space, is susceptible to damage, is hard to keep track of, and is easily stolen or replicated. The problem is, content is here to stay. So, today’s workplaces need a content management solution that is user-friendly, scalable, secure, and robust enough to manage and deliver content when necessary.

When it comes to open-source enterprise content management (ECM) systems, Alfresco, which has been around since 2005, is a market leader. The reason why the industry loves Alfresco so much can be traced to its easy customization, extension, and completely hassle-free integration capabilities.

Alfresco comes in various flavors. For example, the Alfresco One Enterprise is an enterprise-focused edition, built specifically for organizations seeking a readily scalable, vendor-backed, high-availability ECM. Alfresco in the Cloud is basically the SaaS version of Alfresco One and is ideal for small teams in multiple remote locations without on-premise servers. And then we have the Alfresco Community Edition, which is maintained and developed mainly by contributions from the worldwide Alfresco community. Stable releases are released aggregating recent developments periodically and can be used by MSMEs in production or non-essential applications since there is little official support from the Alfresco team itself. The latter is the cheapest among the three Alfresco editions.

What sets Alfresco apart?

The key features of Alfresco are as follows:

• Promotes collaboration: All Alfresco installations come with the Alfresco Share UI interface which has inbuilt wikis, blogs, calendars, etc. for efficient communication and collaboration within a team.
• Seamless workflow capabilities: The problem with finite content repositories is that outdated or unauthorized content can get in the way of adding new and necessary content. Alfresco’s integrated workflow engine ensures that all content goes through relevant approval and validation processes before it is made available for usage.
• Provides secure content access: With a large number of creators, reviewers, and end users, access to content needs to be managed hierarchically. Alfresco’s robust permission modelling system guarantees secure access to content based on a pre-defined need-to-know template.
• Powerful Search Features: It becomes quite difficult to locate individual pieces of content in extensive repositories with multiple folders and hierarchical trees. Thankfully, Alfresco provides a powerful Search feature, capable of crawling through both content metadata and the content body, providing comprehensive results for searches within moments.
• Smooth integration with external features: A front-end application looking to access and use Alfresco as a back-end repository, can do so with ease, owing to Alfresco’s REST APIs and CMIS. LDAP, active directory, or similar authentication systems similarly function well when integrated with Alfresco, making it a favourite among Solution Architects.

Along with the above, Alfresco also boasts of a robust auditing feature, easy format change options for content, the capability of maintaining versioned content as well as specifying business rules.

Alfresco for your business

For all your enterprise content requirements, Alfresco is a champion content management solution that is user-friendly, scalable, secure, and robust enough to manage and deliver content when necessary.

Taashee Linux Services is an Alfresco Gold partner with dedicated teams specializing in Alfresco development, consulting, migration, support, maintenance, training, Alfresco-SAP integration, record management, mobile implementation, and e-commerce integration.