An open source content management solution

Alfresco is an open source Enterprice Content Management (ECM) alternative to closed products such as Documentum, IBM DB-2 Content Management, Filenet, Opentext, Interwoven, Vignette and Microsoft's Sharepoint among others.

Alfresco was developed using exclusively Open Source components such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene. It represents a standards-based alternative to expensive, closed, commercial ECM products. Referenced standards include JSR-168, JSR-170 and JSR-283

Alfresco represents a good example of a business based on open source components and open development culture, Bazaar model, resulting in a content management solution that can be tailored to small and large organizations. Alfresco is licensed under GPL.

The list of customers using it for ECM, collaboration, workflow, document, web, records and image management is impressive for a relatively new product.

It is worth mentioning that Alfresco produced a full functioning, scalable, open ECM alternative to conventional products in less than a year of development effort using the open source components listed below. It represents a very good example of a collaborative, open and successful business developed by reusing existing components.

Alfresco's selection of open source components is a valuable reference, a list of chosen components among a large selection, as well as an excellent example of application development using existing well tested components free of proprietary licenses, royalties, patents and other demons.

Most components with the exception of Spring, OpenOffice, Hybernate and Lucene, are small cleverly crafted software, prepackaged unique functions, chosen by Alfresco to deliver the resulting functional integration in place of custom code.

• Spring. Spring is an application framework for Java.
• Open Office. OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite.
• Hibernate. Hibernate is a high performance object/relational persistence and query Java library.
  
• Lucene. Apache Lucene is a text search engine library written in Java.
  
• MyFaces. Java Server Faces is a web application framework.
  
• FreeMarker. FreeMarker is a template engine to generate text output based on templates.
  
• Rhino. Rhino is an implementation of JavaScript written in Java typically embedded into Java applications to provide scripting to end users.
  
• EHCache. Ehcache is a java-based distributed cache for general purpose caching.
  
• ACEGI. Acegi Security provides applications with authentication, authorization and access control.
  
• Log4j. Offers logging behaviour to Java applications.
  
• jBPM. Workflow and business processes library for Java applications.
  
• Axis. Apache Axis is an XML based Web service framework.
  
• POI. Apache POI project consists of APIs for manipulating various Microsoft file formats using Java.
  
• Xfire. XFire facilitates use of Web Services, via SOAP, for a Java application.
  
• Quartz. Quartz is a job scheduling system for Java applications.
  
• PDFBox. PDFBox is an open source Java PDF library for working with PDF documents.
• TinyMCE. TinyMCE is a web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor.
  
• Jaxen. Jaxen is a Java to search and extract information from XML documents - an XPath Engine.
  
• JCR RMI. Apache Jackrabbit JCR-RMI is a Remote Method Invocation (RMI) layer for the Content Repository for Java - Apache Jackrabbit implements JSR-283.

Other open source content management systems, include:

• Magnolia a project with an insightful motto: "Simple is beautiful".
• Silverstripe from New Zealand.