Alfresco was founded by John Newton, one of the co-founders of Documentum, back in 2004. John and his band of ex-Documentum engineers set out to build an innovative ECM platform assembled from open source libraries and components. Now the company has nearly 3,000 paying customers and the software has been downloaded millions of times. Clients of all sizes and industries use the Alfresco platform for Document Management, Web Content Management, Imaging, Records Management, and Digital Asset Management.
Alfresco is dual-licensed. Alfresco Community Edition is freely-available under the LGPLv3 and is great for people who want to learn more about the platform, for lengthy evaluations, or departmental use. For production use, most companies choose to pay Alfresco for the commercially-supported version known as Alfresco One (aka Enterprise Edition). In both cases, customers benefit from access to 100% of the source code.
Metaversant founder, Jeff Potts, began working with and blogging about Alfresco back in 2005. Since then he’s worked on a number of Alfresco projects that cover the entire platform, including Document Management, Web Content Management, Liferay Portal Integration, Drupal CMIS, and Alfresco Share. Jeff wrote the Alfresco Developer Guide and is heavily involved in the Alfresco Community. The Leadership section of this site contains more background on Jeff as well as his contact information.
Metaversant likes to build solutions on top of Alfresco because of the openness of the repository. There are numerous options for getting content into and out of Alfresco through file-based protocols or through API’s. The Alfresco Web Script Framework, which provides a RESTful interface to the repository, is particularly pleasant to work with because of its flexibility, speed of development, and usefulness by any language or framework on the presentation tier.
Contact us to learn how Metaversant can help with your Alfresco project today.