Alfresco Wants Enterprise Content Management in the Cloud

Written by Steven Walling / September 18, 2009 10:52 AM / 5 Comments

Alfresco, the open source enterprise content management company, has unveiled a developer program for those looking to host both the community and enterprise versions of its software on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform. Alfresco is a leading open source alternative for document and Web content management, competing strongly with ECM giants like Open Text, Documentum, and SharePoint. Enterprises might still have reservations about cloud computing. But Alfresco is attempting to capitalize on companies ready for the cloud with this new software stack and development kit.

The core of what Alfresco is offering is an AMI (Amazon Machine Image), a pre-built software package for creating a virtual machine on EC2. Only a select number of companies with enterprise content management software, such as Oracle, are officially supporting their products on EC2 or offering AMIs.

The first Alfresco AMI is only for the community edition, and doesn't include their SharePoint module or the mobile browser UI for accessing Alfresco from smartphones. Alfresco is planning future releases that will support all editions.

Alfresco follows a typical open source strategy, offering a free community edition and an enterprise edition with full support, bug fixing, and maintenance. One of the company's primary selling points has always been reduced costs, both in up front price and cost of ownership. Sticking to that strategy naturally leads to embracing the pay-as-you-go cloud, in this case EC2 from Amazon Web Services.

Comments

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This could get expensive if you have a lot of site data. Great move on Alfresco's part to offer this option. I wonder how the tech support will be?

Posted by: markbean | September 18, 2009 11:54 AM

Mark,

Since this is the free community edition we're talking about, I'm guessing the support is going to be minimal if you choose to use the AMI.

Posted by: Steven Walling | September 18, 2009 12:19 PM

We are leading with the Community version, as we do with all new technologies, but we are definitely planning to provide enterprise support options in the cloud. Plans are still being worked out.

Posted by: John Newton | September 18, 2009 2:45 PM

I'm wondering if there are some out there that use Alfresco with Jive. At Nike, we use Jive with Documentum so I was curious. thanks!

Posted by: Ken Domen | September 21, 2009 7:27 AM

I agreed that if you will go with free community edition, the support would be minimal but amazon machine image (AMI) from Alfresco is good to use.

Thanks!!!

Posted by: Data Entry India | November 19, 2009 5:08 AM