Alfresco makes collaboration simple

Open-source enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Alfresco has launched the latest version of its flagship product, designed to give customers more user-friendly document collaboration functionality.

Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.0 includes Alfresco Share, a new tool to enable collaboration across virtual teams featuring information capturing, sharing and retrieval capabilities, according to the firm's chief marketing officer, Ian Howells.

"It's really simple document management you can roll out to users without training," he argued. "Web 2.0 has blown apart the myth that it should be complicated – Facebook and YouTube are doing very smart things you cannot do in million-dollar enterprise software."

The new software enables users to view documents via a thumbnail, and a Flash document viewer removes the compatibility problems of users working with different versions of office productivity suites, Howells explained.

There are also Facebook-like activity feeds, which can keep team members updated on what is changing in a project, including content or team members.

"Traditional enterprise software is high cost, very complex and proprietary, but people want a very short return on investment at the moment, which means products that can be up and running rapidly," said Howells.