WPS Portal project

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Alfresco Share : the new MS Sharepoint (and Quickr) killer ?

Last week I attend the Alfresco European Community conference in Munich Germany. There were some really exciting news about the Alfresco solution, and especially the sharepoint protocole for the Alfresco document management product, and also the new Alfresco SHARE collaborative solution.

I'm not familiar with Microsoft Sharepoint, but my understanding is that the Alfresco Share software is clearly provided as an alternative for the microsoft product.
SHARE offers most of the features that are now included in collaboration product (Tasks list, Calendar, Document management, blog, wiki, forum, etc). The Share platform uses of course the powerful Document Management options of the Alfresco repository (Share can be installed on top of Alfresco DM, or on a separate application server and connected remotely to the repository).

The share server runs Dashlet components (which are very similar to Portlets), and it is possible to extend the Share features by adding new custom Dashlets.

Moreover, Alfresco has now implemented the MS Sharepoint protocole and the Alfresco server can now be exposed a standard Sharepoint server. That means that it is considered as a standard Sharepoint server from the MS Office client (e.g in Word, you can connect to the Alfresco solution and manage the checkin-checkout on a document, exactly as if you were speaking to a Sharepoint server).
For the moment, all the sharepoint protocole is not implemented: for instance, there is still no way to connect Alfresco with the Outlook client...but I'm sure Alfresco will provide such feature very soon.

The goal of Share is to easily create and manage Sites (which are similar to small web site dedicated to a specific Project management). With a few clicks you can set-up a new Site and invite users to work on a new project.

So with the Share software, Alfresco now offers a collaborative solution, as well as a strong document management repository. It is clearly an alternative for MS Sharepoint customers.
I'm also sure that Share is also a big challenger for IBM Lotus Quickr :-)

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