Alfresco is an enterprise content management system for documents, web, records, images and collaborative content development.

Alfresco comes in two flavours. Alfresco Community Edition is free software, GPL licensed open source and open standards. Alfresco Enterprise Edition is commercially / proprietary licensed open source, open standards and enterprise scale. Its design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance.

Alfresco includes a content repository, an out-of-the-box web portal framework for managing and using standard portal content, a CIFS interface that provides file system compatibility on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems, a web content management system capable of virtualizing webapps and static sites via Apache Tomcat, Lucene indexing, and jBPM workflow. The Alfresco system is developed using Java technology.

History

Alfresco was founded in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects. Its investors include the investment firms SAP, Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund. The original technical staff consisted of principal engineers from Documentum, and Oracle.

While Alfresco's product was initially focused on document management, in May 2006, it announced its intention to expand into web content management by acquiring senior technical and managerial staff from Interwoven; this included its VP of Web Content Management, two principal engineers, and a member of its user interface team. In 2007, Alfresco hired the principal sales engineer from Vignette.

In addition to its main website, Alfresco's software may also be downloaded from SourceForge.

By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report reached the conclusion that Alfresco was the leading Java-based open source web content management system. That conclusion was based on an extensive analysis of rate of adoption patterns and brand strength and was backed by a survey of users.

Alfresco is capable of the following:

• Document Management
• Web Content Management (including full webapp & session virtualization)
• Repository-level versioning (similar to Subversion)
• Transparent overlays (similar to unionfs)
• Records Management, including 5015.2 certification
• Image Management
• Auto-generated XForms with AJAX support
• Integrated Publishing
• Repository access via CIFS/SMB, FTP, WebDAV and CMIS
• jBPM workflow
• Lucene search
• Federated servers
• Multi-language support
• Portable application packaging
• Multi-platform support (officially Windows, Linux and Solaris)
• Browser-based GUI (official support for Internet Explorer and Firefox)
• Desktop integration with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org
• Clustering support

eVelopers Corporation is a Gold Solution Partner of Alfresco since 2007.