Alfresco News

Alfresco recently announced changes to our pricing with Alfresco One available to all existing Enterprise subscribers. That means all of our customers can try hybrid enterprise content management (ECM) for free with a limited number of users and see how this new solution can help deliver new use cases for your organization.

At Alfresco, we believe hybrid is the only way the enterprise today can address all their ECM needs. We’ve called cloud-only vendors bluff that everything can be managed in the cloud. We’ve also addressed the gaps of legacy on-premise only vendors who can’t meet the increasing needs for enterprises to securely share content outside their firewall with third parties or mobile devices.

A few weeks ago I did a webinar on how enterprise architects can use hybrid ECM to deliver new solutions that aren’t possible in either a on-premise only or cloud-only environment. Below is a summary of the four main solutions we’re seeing customers build for their enterprises on top of Alfresco One. All of these solutions can be set-up in minutes if you’re using Alfresco 4.1 or above.

1. Secure B2B Collaboration

By far the biggest driver we see from customers adopting hybrid ECM is the need to share cotent and collaborate with people outside their organization. Before hybrid ECM, enterprises would have to open up their internal systems to external users. This could take weeks to approve and provision in some organizations and potentially open up security holes.

With hybrid ECM, users can now sync content to our cloud service and use Alfresco in the cloud as a secure, compliant, Extranet, to share content and collaborate with external organizations. Because the content is synchronised automatically between both sides of the firewall, customers can now bring external parties into the collaboration process where needed, while keeping internal, confidential systems and data secure behind the firewall.

This results in faster turn-around times when collaborating on content, reducing the need to fall back to email or use unsanctioned file sharing services that the organization has no control over and may be breaking regulatory laws.

2. Enable Mobile Devices

The second driver we’re seeing is using hybrid ECM to enable mobile devices. While mobile devices can use VPN to connect securely to on-premise systems, VPN doesn’t always work and can be technically challenging for users to set-up. However, one concern we’re seeing is protection of data if a mobile device is lost or compromised. With hybrid ECM, enterprises can put the content they need to share on mobile devices on our cloud service, while keeping highly confidential and regulated content behind the firewall. That way the mobile devices can only ever access the content you want to share via cloud.

One of our manufacturing customers uses this for pushing sales presentations to their sales reps and partners in the field. Their marketing team use Alfresco behind the firewall as an Intranet with access to all the internal company research and content to help create new sales presentations for their sales teams and partners. They then push the final presentations to sales reps and partners in the field’s mobile devices via cloud using sync. Not only does this keep confidential content off mobile devices, our cloud service which is optimised for users around the world, provides faster distribution of that content to their devices all over the world.

The other great use case is using mobile devices submit new content to Alfresco in the field. A large retail customer is using Alfresco in this way to take photos of problems in their stores around the country, which are posted to a site on cloud and automatically synchronised back on-premise to the facilities management team who can then create new cases to go and fix those problems.

Both of these use cases provide a reliable infrastructure to push and pull content from mobile devices securely anywhere in the world and ensure than highly confidential, regulated content, stays secure behind the firewall where it belongs.

3. Connect Cloud Services to On-Premise

With the upcoming release of our Salesforce connector, this is a great use case that solves a real problem IT teams have with cloud solutions today. A lot of ECM repositories on-premise are used to store all the content from other solutions such as CRM, ERP, etc. the enterprise is using. Cloud has created an issue where enterprises moving to new cloud-only solutions like Salesforce cannot easily store the content from the service in their ECM repository on-premise. The reasons to do this is to make it easier to integrate with existing business processes and search behind the firewall. For example, uploading a contract on Salesforce should probably be available to SAP on-premise too.

While there are some very expensive and complex solutions available to solve this problem securely, Alfresco One provides a low cost and extremely simple architecture for integrating cloud solutions with your on-premise repositories. Our cloud service acts as a repository for all your cloud services to easily connect to via our public APIs and hybrid sync. can synchronise content from cloud to on-premise automatically and vice versa. This allows your cloud services to access content previously locked behind your firewall and your cloud services to store content in your on-premise repository where it can be accessed by your internal systems.

Once our Salesforce connector is available, you’ll be able to configure this solution in minutes and finally connect your cloud services to your on-premise systems and business processes.

4. Orchestrating your Content in the Cloud

This is my favorite use case as I believe this is where many of our customers will find the most value from hybrid ECM as they become more advanced with using the solution. The great thing about hybrid sync is that changes on both sides of the firewall are automatically synchronized and folder rules can be used on both cloud and on-premise to automate really interesting business processes.

For example, I mentioned in the mobile solution above how a large retail customer was using cloud to push photos of store issues from mobile devices to their facilities management team on-premise. With hybrid ECM, they could automatically kick off a new workflow (case) whenever new photos are submitted via cloud using folder rules. The facilities team could be using Alfresco Workdesk on-premise to manage cases and send cases to external contractors (via cloud) to quote and fix issues around their stores. Once the contract has added their quote or completed the work, the case would return on-premise to the facilities team who would then close the case,and archive it as a record.

With hybrid ECM you can start building new business processes that bring external parties and devices into your workflows without having to open up your firewall or put highly confidential or regulated content at risk.

Hybrid ECM provides a unique and powerful architecture for delivering new solutions for your enterprise. Are there some other examples of how you are using hybrid in a unique way to get stuff done? To get started watch my webinar and downloading Alfresco One today!

Is ECM a mature market?  We often hear that it is, when speaking to analysts, press and others in the industry.  Sure, Enterprise Content Management as a description for document management, capture, workflow and related technologies has been around awhile (AIIM started using it in 2000).  But does saying that ECM is mature mean organizations have all their content issues sorted?

Some new survey data from AIIM shows that is hardly the case.

The new study, ECM at a Crossroads, which Alfresco co-sponsored, surveyed 538 AIIM members about their current and planned use of ECM technologies. Key findings include:

• Only 3% of surveyed organizations have actually turned off their file-shares, although 12% have “largely replaced it” with ECM. 34% are keen to turn it off, but for 61%, file-shares still play a significant role in their content structure.
• Only 26% have the classic ECM implementation that includes capture and image workflow. 34% have separate systems, although 16% plan to bring them together.
• More enterprise content sits outside of ECM than inside: for 61% of organizations, half or more of their content is held in non-ECM/DM systems such as ERP, HR, Finance, etc. This makes it difficult to search and it is not under records management retention rules.
• Only 11% have a mobile optimized browser interface to their ECM and only 10% have specific apps. Yet 30% need their employees to interact with workflows on mobile devices.
• More than 1 in 4 organizations face a dilemma with their cloud strategy. 25% are seeing unofficial use of cloud file-sharing sites – most of which are “consumer-grade”.
• Spend on ECM software licenses is set to increase in the next 12 months.

Doesn’t really sound like a mature market, does it?   Though it does sound like one that is ‘at a crossroads,’ as the title of the new AIIM study suggests.

At Alfresco, we see customers dealing with several trends at the moment and in some cases, with really challenging enterprise content environments.

• Many deployed ECM systems are old and – as the AIIM data shows – aren’t meeting the needs of users who still rely on file shares, struggle to find content across too many repositories, and can’t participate in content-related processes when they’re mobile.
• Users are adopting “consumer-grade” services because of the limitations in their ECM systems and models.  This only creates more silos – and in some cases, data privacy or security concerns.
• Organizations don’t need more content silos, particularly ones that are disconnected from all existing on-prem systems and data.  There is real appetite in the market for rationalization, openness and integration – in the cloud, on-prem and with hybrid models.
• Business processes are more collaborative and more mobile – yet many organizations haven’t even addressed basic workflow and capture requirements.
• Yes, there is a lot of SharePoint out there, but it doesn’t seem to solve content chaos problems or lead to much rationalization – the AIIM data shows 50% of organizations surveyed use SharePoint as a content repository and those organizations are nearly twice as likely to have 4 or more ECM systems (34%) than those who don’t use SharePoint in this way (18%).
• And SharePoint likely leads to more content living outside of the sanctioned “ECM” system, since it isn’t meeting user demands for mobile access. In a recent Forrester survey about SharePoint, 91% of respondents reported not providing mobile access to SharePoint.  Hmmm…wonder what mobile workers in those organizations do when they need to access files from their phones and tablets?  Enter “consumer grade.”

The AIIM survey data backs up what Alfresco is experiencing – there is significant demand in the market for modern, open, mobile and cloud-ready ECM capabilities to ongoing and emerging content chaos and content process challenges.

Yes, spend on ECM software is going to increase in the next 12 months – the market isn’t mature.  Enterprise content problems are not solved.  It’s just that a lot of products and approaches currently on the market are old and not meeting the needs of modern organizations.  There is a difference.

Read the full AIIM study here. And then check out what customers and analysts are saying about Alfresco.

SharePoint users are at a crossroads. They have put a massive amount of content into SharePoint that isn’t always easily retrieved. They have invested time, resources and money trying to configure SharePoint to solve their content management problems.  Users are found questioning if SharePoint is efficiently managing their business-critical content processes.

AIIM has realized the challenges that SharePoint users are facing and recently addressed them at the seminar in Toronto, “SharePoint at a Crossroads.”

Attendees at the event were from a broad range of organizations with varying successes, difficulties and questions about SharePoint. Some are looking for more value from their ECM, including mobile and secure cloud solutions. Some have just deployed SharePoint and are experiencing success in their first stages of implementation. Many attendees were looking for SharePoint partners to solve their problems related to scalability, accessibility to content and flexibility of the platform to create unique business solutions.

Alfresco participated in the event as the only ECM alternative to SharePoint. Many participants were partners with add-on solutions to SharePoint or imaging solutions that integrate with many different ECMs. Alfresco uniquely represented one of the options that SharePoint users face—replacing it with another ECM.

A recent survey of over 500 professionals was conducted that found 80 percent of those using SharePoint thought it fell short of their expectations. Alfresco offers many valuable features in comparison to SharePoint:

• Lower cost and higher ROI
• Faster implementations
• More advanced workflow capabilities
• Scalability and stronger search features
• An open platform that more easily integrates with business-critical tools

While not everyone is looking to migrate to a new ECM, there are tools available to better manage content already in SharePoint. To learn more about managing your SharePoint data in Alfresco, watch our webinar recording.

There are many different options to choose from when considering your current ECM investment and where to invest your resources in the future. Alfresco offers a scalable, flexible and cost efficient solution for managing your content. Is SharePoint providing the same for you?

“Web content management is evolving from website publishing to digital experience support,” according to Forrester’s WCM for Digital Customer Experience Q2 2013.

What does Forrester mean?  You don’t need an explanation if…

• You’re reading this on a smartphone or tablet
• You’ve updated a website on your own, without sending files to an IT person
• You rely on user generated or suggestions from trusted communities

Websites were once about flat content with little interaction.  Today, that sort of nostalgia doesn’t play.  What we expect is…

• A digital experience that flows from browser to tablet to mobile flawlessly
• A site to be responsive to our requests with targeted information
• Communities to suggest and bubble up the best ideas, relevant to our needs

Building these abilities into a website isn’t easy. It takes more than pretty pictures and snappy text.  It takes extensive use of digital assets integrated into the web experience.  It assumes responsive design for viewing on any screen. It requires content targeting for presentation of the right content at the right time. It takes a dedicated tool purpose built for accomplishing the goal of delivering an awesome web experience. Yet many web and content experience management solutions are heavy, hard to learn and expensive.

Alfresco has a solution for WCM that it is built around the open strategy of content services. As a strategy, we decided to be committed to what we do best, manage digital content.  And although the core of WCM is managing digital content, today’s modern web requires a comprehensive solution. Welcome Crafter, you do it very well.

Who says?

• YouSendIt:  “Crafter enabled our marketing and web development teams to easily deliver dynamic and engaging content, while knowing we have preeminent Crafter experts on hand for support,” said Steve Ceplenski, Senior Director, Web Services at YouSendIt. “Using Crafter’s next generation technology, we are able to quickly develop targeted content for our brand, and easily integrate with a SaaS translation system to manage sites in multiple languages.”
• Full Sail University:  “We wanted to make use of rich web media, including flash and video in our new website and Alfresco did not limit us in any way.  Combining Crafter with Alfresco allowed us increased flexibility and to scale with relative ease” Mark Gilbert, VP Information and Media Technologies.  Read more here.
• MasterCard, National Academy of Sciences and Harvard Business Publishing to name a few – check out more references here.

Today we welcome Crafter Software to the Alfresco Partner Program as their own organization with their own team to sell and support the solution. Check out their website to learn more and read more about the great work they are doing!

Alfresco has been talking about cloud connected content management for awhile now, since we first launched a stand-alone SaaS offering last year. Cloud connected content management is all about using the cloud for applications, user groups and processes where it makes sense, but doing so in a way that doesn’t create additional, disconnected content silos or compromise content security or corporate policies.

This week at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit held in San Diego, analysts presented a vision for content management that reinforces what we’ve been seeing and speaking about at Alfresco.

In a session called The New Enterprise Content Management Scenario, Gartner ECM analyst Mark Gilbert presented his view on what he called ‘multi-verse cloud content.’  This was a spot-on analysis of the different ways in which enterprise content is moving to the cloud.  Mark distinguished between consumer-oriented file-sharing services, departmental line-of-business apps and traditional enterprise content management systems.

The reality is that most organizations have all three of these types of content systems, but the degree to which they are going to the cloud depends a lot on the type of organization.

Some organizations are way out in front of this opportunity, moving their content and apps to the cloud aggressively and encouraging users to innovate.  Others, particularly in highly regulated industries, are sticking to more traditional, IT-led approaches to content management and using the cloud only in very limited scenarios, if at all.

But most companies are somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, adopting cloud services for extranet-type apps or to enable easy access to content from mobile devices, but mostly still experimenting.  Most also know that the traditional ECM systems – which are fifteen years old or more in some cases – are in need of a refresh.  But will that refresh happen in the cloud?

Alfresco’s vision of cloud connected content is a forward looking one, but also one that can work for customers today despite being at different stages in this multi-verse world of cloud content.

To this end, we’ve created some scalable options depending on your content needs now and in the future as those needs change and evolve depending on your cloud comfort level -

Ready to put significant portions of content-centric apps in the cloud?  Check out Alfresco in the cloud, our own SaaS offering or how we’re working with AWS for private-cloud deployments.

Want to use the cloud for some apps or specific audiences without creating more content silos or worrying about loss of control?  Check out Alfresco’s hybrid model that enables content in the cloud, content on-prem and synchronization between the two environments.

Not interested in the cloud right now, but still need to think about an ECM refresh and how you’re going to meet demands for mobile access?  Alfresco Enterprise is a modern and open ECM platform for on-prem deployments with great support for mobile, business processes and collaboration.

We had some great conversations this week at PCC with customers and analysts that confirmed Alfresco’s approach truly resonates with solve real business needs.  There is no one-size-fits all solution in content management – there never really has been and the cloud, for all the benefits it offers, doesn’t change that.

Check out Gartner’s analysis of Alfresco and the ECM market in the Magic Quadrant. How are you enabling cloud connected content to do great work?

 

 

Tribloom is an Alfresco Gold Partner and has been implementing Alfresco on AWS since 2010. 

Imagine the future… I have been imagining the not too distant future a lot recently. It all started when I attended AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last November. Werner Vogels, Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos painted a picture of their services: reducing costs, leading to more users, leading to economies of scale to further reducing costs. Reduced costs, to the point where you don’t think about the cost (like you don’t think about turning on a light switch), leading to massive innovation. Democratizing infrastructure, why spend time and money on things that don’t differentiate you in the marketplace?

My vision? In the future all of our computing will be done in the cloud. There will be no more desktop or laptop computers instead we will use devices like tablets and terminals (remember the days when terminals were commonplace)? A day at work for the average knowledge worker might start off by selecting one of many EC2 instances or even entire application stacks. When infrastructure is a service and can be started and stopped with an API call, an entire new paradigm opens up. You don’t have to “fix” failing servers, you can just replace them with new healthy ones. You can version your entire server stack by keeping your provisioning code in version control. You can duplicate a production stack of hundreds of servers in minutes instead of months.

The work day could involve many of these throughout the day – developing new code on the latest product, a customer demo for the latest production release and one for crunching data about customer usage, just to name a few examples. There is a corporate policy in place, automatically enforced, to shut down servers at the end of the day so any instances left running are shut down to save money. All access to the corporate AWS account is controlled by IAM roles so each individual can only access the AWS resources that are relevant to them. For example the test group only has access to the test servers.

Leaving work doesn’t mean leaving the cloud behind. At home, the kids are watching a movie on Netflix and listening to Spotify, both streamed from AWS. Dad wants to relax with the latest shooter style computer game. He goes to the AWS Marketplace, finds the game he is looking for, starts up an instance and starts playing from his tablet. He doesn’t have to buy the game, the cost is built into the usage charges for AWS. His buddy wants to join in the game so connects his tablet to Dad’s server and both play on the cloud. Mom is uploading the photos and videos that she took of the kids’ school play earlier in the day. The photos will all be available, safe and forever secure because behind the scenes they are stored in S3.

Do you think this is a distant reality?

I don’t think so. We are already seeing corporate IT fall by the wayside. Departments are asking for AWS now as a means to circumvent the slow and tedious process of asking IT for a server for their new software installation. We see this all the time with our Alfresco clients. Like AWS management says, why spend the effort on hardware and networking when it doesn’t bring you a competitive advantage? Hardware and networking are commodities.

Spend 5 minutes provisioning an AWS EC2 instance, one with Alfresco already installed on it from the AWS Marketplace perhaps, instead of 5 weeks ordering hardware and setting it up. I personally already do this for development and customer demos. This past weekend, I needed a Drupal server. Rather than installing Apache, Drupal, and PHP, I just found an AMI and started up an instance, saving me valuable time.

The fact is that almost everything described here is already possible. The only thing that needs to change for this to be a reality is how we think about and use our computing resources. I am excited for that change to occur!

I will be attending the AWS Summit today in San Francisco. Every time I attend an AWS event, my vision becomes closer to reality. AWS is increasing their product and service offerings rapidly and usually have a few new announcements at each event.

Please stop by to say hi and if you would like to learn more about AWS and Alfresco you can check out our webinar or Alfresco’s new CloudFormation template!

Organizations can now integrate their existing user directories to our cloud service, allowing your users to login with their existing company credentials. This feature is available to all Standard and Enterprise Network subscribers and we welcome any organizations to upgrade for a free 30 day trial if they wish to test the functionality today.

For Users

If you already have a central login/password for your organization, you probably don’t want to remember a new username and password for all the different cloud services you use. With this feature enabled by your administrators, you will now be able to use a single login with your existing credientials seamlessly. In order to get started, here are some user best practices:

1. Your administrators will give you a specific URL for your organization to bookmark when you want to login to Alfresco in the cloud.
2. When you access that URL, you will automatically be redirected to your organization’s login page to login using your existing credentials.
3. On successful login, you will automatically be redirected back to Alfresco and logged into the application

Even better, if you’re a first time user to Alfresco and your organization already has Alfresco with this feature enabled, you don’t need to sign up, you can simply login straight away and you will get a new account on Alfresco automatically. This feature really makes it easy for users to access Alfresco without requiring new usernames and passwords or having to sign-up when enabled for your Network.

For Administrators

For the more technical, this new feature uses the SAML Single Sign-On (SSO) 2.0 protocol to integrate your existing Active Directory/LDAP server with our cloud service. Using some simple configuration on your Account Settings page, any of your Network Members will be able to go to a unique URL for your Network, which will redirect them to your own login page where they can sign in. On a successful login, they will be automatically redirected back to Alfresco and logged into use the service.

This means a couple of things:

• Your users only need to manage one password for your organization and no longer need to create a separate login to use the Alfresco in the cloud service.
• Since you control the login process and policies, you have complete authority over how users are provisioned and managed using your existing security infrastructure.
• You can onboard users easily by just letting them login to the cloud service, automatically creating a new account for them if its their first time accessing the service

You can find our full documentation on how to get setup using SAML SSO with Alfresco in the cloud here.

Supported Identity Providers (IDPs)

We have built this to conform with the SAML standard so this feature should work out of the box with any SAML SSO enabled IDPs. However; in practice many IDPs have their own quirks, which means we have to certify each provider to ensure they work and are fully supported by our service on every release. At this time our official support is limited to PingFederate, but we will be looking to expand this list to other IDPs such as Centrify over time based on customer demand.

Get started today and let me know if you have any feedback or questions by leaving a comment here!

Last year was my first time to Alfresco DevCon. I was six months in to working here and had heard of DevCon before having been one of Alfresco’s partners in a previous life. But for some reason I was always under the assumption it was this strange geek thing lead by the mysterious Jeff Potts. I was only half right. With no expectations, I showed up in Berlin for Day 0 with Trainings and the Hackaton.

The one thing that immediately stood out was passion. I mean, what else explains 17 grown men sitting around a table working in teams to build the best applications that will actually help make every day work easier and more productive?

The trainings were packed with a smart audience asking great questions around how they can get the most out of our powerful platform. Having eight hours to focus on understanding how to put content to work and get the most from employees really sets you on a good path to a more calm content existence. If I would have gotten one of these crash courses when I first started in PR, it would have saved me literally years of version control press release nightmares.

The next couple of days were a complete whirlwind, each one building on the other and opening my eyes to the heart of Alfresco. I have never had the chance to be in a room with a smarter, more passionate and innovative group of people looking to solve real work problems and enhance the flow of global content.

At the same time, I also sort of felt that DevCon was the best secret conference I had ever been to, which is saying a lot considering I’ve worked SXSW Interactive for the past eight years in some capacity. More people would come if they were aware and we opened it up to industry heavy weights and customers who can share unique perspectives that others can learn from to empower great teamwork.

This year we are doing just that with Alfresco Summit!

I’m so excited that Jeff along with an internal team of event ninjas is taking the best of what makes Alfresco’s entrepreneurial community unique and letting more businesses take advantage of learning how to put our critical content to work.

We also put out the Call for Presenters due June 15,2013 so get submissions in early! We will stop accepting ideas once all the speaking slots are filled. We couldn’t be more excited for what 2013 will bring and can’t wait for our November reunion in two really vibrant cities – Boston and Barcelona…won’t you join us?

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and use #SummitNow to let us know you are coming!

 

 

United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) of Greater Chicago was looking for a way to deliver digital content to their students and schools, but had growing challenges managing their large repository of books. So they talked with our Platinum partner TSG about their content needs. TSG introduced Alfresco as the content platform to convert over 11,000 books in 500 schools with over 2000 downloads per month. The solution that TSG built provided a flexible platform on Amazon Web Services so that their users could control the flow of information rather than IT.

If you’re interested in hearing more about how Alfresco is helping organizations manage their content securely in a flexible cloud environment, meet us at one of the AWS Summit events this month either in New York this week (April 18) or San Francisco (April 30).

We’d love to show you how easy it is to launch Alfresco on AWS and talk more with you about how Alfresco on AWS can deliver power and agility your organization can use today!

 

There is a notably recurring theme in much of the feedback that we receive from our customers . . . when it comes to mobilizing the enterprise, security is paramount.

So as we prepared our first Alfresco Mobile app update of 2013 we wanted to make sure it improved upon our existing enterprise grade security features to add extra layers of content protection and increase peace of mind for the ever-expanding mobile workforce.

Alfresco Mobile for iOS version 1.5 answers further mobile security questions with optional features such as file-based security, certificate authentication, limited sharing with other apps and the ability to apply a “shelf-life” to content that has been downloaded or synced to an iPad or iPhone.

This last feature for Alfresco Mobile 1.5 eradicates the worry caused by employees downloading, saving or syncing content to their devices beyond the boundaries of the enterprise server or cloud account. IT and regulatory personnel amongst our enterprise customers can now rest easy, secure in the knowledge that their confidential content can be time-stamped to become inaccessible on a device that has not been connected to the repository for a pre-configured period of time. If you don’t want your content going walkabouts, keep it on a leash by restricting sharing rights on your documents and make it entirely inaccessible on that mobile device if the device is not connected to your enterprise account for a certain amount of time – 24 hours or 8 hours or even one hour.

Set an offline expiry time for individual documents within your Alfresco repository.

In addition to these ground-breaking security features we have also included some further improvements, including:

- Compatibility with the Google apps version of Quickoffice

- Version numbering consistency with the Alfresco web client

- Previews for iWorks documents

The mobility and flexibility trends are doing great things for the efficiency of enterprises, but we are also well aware that the security of your content is perhaps even more important than mobile access. Now you don’t need to compromise between security and mobility, nor do you need to run the risks associated with using an insecure personal file sharing service to get your content to your mobile workforce.

Download Alfresco Mobile for iOS 1.5 free from the App Store today to securely access your business critical content on your iPads and iPhones!

This week we held our annual Americas Partner Kickoff with our growing community of system integrators, software vendors, infrastructure providers and resellers who build their solutions with Alfresco. As part of the great work our partner community does to deliver strategic and flexible innovative solutions to meet today’s demanding customer needs, below are the winners of our Americas Partner Awards!

Partner of the Year 

We are excited to announce that Zia Consulting (pictured) is Alfresco’s Partner of the Year with the highest overall performance on new accounts, customer service and innovative content solution development. This is the second consecutive year that Zia has been recognized as Partner of the Year and adds to their awards for other open source recognitions including the Ephesoft Partner of the Year. Zia continues to create and implement valuable business solutions to their customers around the world and we look forward to seeing what 2013 brings as they continue to grow their solutions and new business.

Partner Solution of the Year

For their achievements with Alfresco’s WorkDesk solution, Zia Consulting also takes home the Alfresco Business Solution of the Year.  This award recognizes their excellence in not only delivering the solution but also contributing to the overall development of the platform.

New Partner of the Year

Since becoming an Alfresco partner in Fall of 2012, Sigmatrix helped lead the sales and integration efforts at Baldwin & Lyons leading to their first enterprise sale. Coming in full force as a new partner, their diligent work to close deals and promote the Alfresco platform have been a great addition to the partner program.

Top Growth Partner

Technology Services Group’s has grown year-over-year new Alfresco bookings exceeding all other Americas Partners and also achieved Platinum partner status making them the winner in the Top Growth Partner award category. Their commitment to providing exceptional services and solutions to their clients has helped them grow and continues to reinforce their leadership in the market.

Federal Partner of the Year

Armedia has not only created opportunities within the government sector, they have also stepped up as a valuable asset to helping some complex projects that implement and strengthen the Alfresco platform making them the Federal Partner of the Year award winner.  Armedia has been key in expanding Alfresco’s presence within the Federal government and submitted back code that further solidified our positioning within the public sector.

Implementation of the Year

With the help of Reva Solutions, PhenoPath implemented Alfresco as the central document repository for all its SOPs including customized workflows for document approval at different steps in the process. Reva built a custom mobile application to integrate competency assessments within Alfresco that replaced the paper assessments performed by PhenoPath supervisors. This provided a faster, easier and more secure way for doctors to access the information they need, all while staying within the strict HIPPA compliancy guidelines. Assessments developed as templates are now stored in the Alfresco repository where they can be accessed at any time via an iPad application. With future development already being discussed at PhenoPath, we are excited to see the true scale of this implementation.

Please join us in a BIG Alfresco congratulations to the winners of this year’s Americas Partner Awards! Interested in joining the Alfresco partner community? Check out how you can here.

New opportunities for enterprise content management (ECM) are continuing to pop-up as organizations look for ways to leverage the cloud to better enable mobility without being bound by the firewall or the limits of an out-of-date IT infrastructure.

Trends in mobility and the rise of cloud-based content services have increased user expectations (and options), but businesses still need to manage custom processes, integrate with existing data and systems as well as ensure content security meets compliance regulations.  These requirements are leading enterprises to hybrid ECM strategies that combine the agility of the cloud with the requirements of the enterprise.

Earlier this month, Alfresco founder and CTO, John Newton and Research Director at 451 Research, Alan Pelz-Sharpe conducted a compelling webinar around the future of ECM.

During the conversation, John and Alan discussed the loss of content control and the unique opportunity enterprises have to tackle the silos around shared drives and email addiction that continues to be the main gateway to access content. While business processes remain essential to everything we do, transactional processes tend to be more difficult to automate. As users continue to become more tech savvy we will see a greater need for these difficult process to be automated easily and effectively.

The future of ECM is moving towards hybrid and customers, such as UCA, which is using Alfresco as a mobile document management platform and Estrella Galicia, using Alfresco to streamline processes and workflows on mobile devices are just a few examples of how organizations are starting to embrace technology that empowers the future of ECM.

Interested in hearing more from John and Alan on how hybrid is enabling today’s enterprise users? Check out the link above that goes to the webinar recording.

What is the first thing you think of when you hear New Orleans? I know I don’t think about enterprise content management (ECM).

But two weeks ago, AIIM held their annual conference in New Orleans and Alfresco was proud to be a platinum sponsor of the event. The event brought together ECM, records management and web content management idea seekers from across the globe.

Walking through the exhibit floor you could hear attendees conversing on a variety of topics about why information governance is still essential in today’s business to why the future of enterprise content is gaining secure access inside and outside the firewall.

What I loved about this conference is that AIIM set-up interactive sessions where attendees heard from thought-leaders on a variety of subjects. Our very own John Newton, who is also AIIM’s Chairman of the Board, talked about how cloud connected content is changing the way organizations create, share and manage files– in short, how your business works. He discussed how keeping files synced inside and outside the firewall, is changing the way business work and manage/access their content.

While it was great to hear John talk about ECM and the future of ECM, I think the best part of the conference was listening to LexisNexis talk about their Alfresco implementation. I always love listening to how our customers react to our software and the cool things they do with it. LexisNexis connects the dots between millions of public records and transactions, resulting in actionable information their customer can then use to advance their goals. LexisNexis considered using Alfresco because of our open source, reliable, mobile functionality as well as our easy adaptation for the end user. So far, in just a short two years, they have eight million documents stored using 4 TB of data and migrated four millions documents from their legacy document management system into Alfresco.

All in all, AIIM gave us a great platform to be able to showcase our platform including hybrid, business process automation with Workdesk and records ranagement components. The attendees responded to the great strides we are making to make our software the premier ECM solution as well as learned how to manage their information better, faster and more accurately so they become more effective and efficient.

To get more information on the Alfresco presentations shared at AIIM this year, please leave me a comment below and I’d be more than happy to share them with you. Now I just can’t wait to be in Orlando for next year’s event!

Armedia is an Alfresco Platinum Partner and a Platinum Sponsor of the recent Alfresco Content.gov event held in Washington, DC on March 5, 2013. This support marked Armedia’s third consecutive sponsorship of the event and demonstrates Armedia’s commitment to flexible, open source content management solutions for federal agencies.

We had a blast at Content.gov this year in partnership with Alfresco as it reinforced our commitment to solution deployments within government entities at the federal, state and local level including HUD Records Conversion and the FederalConference.com solution for the Army Strong Bonds program.

At Content.gov, we introduced a case study showcasing our recent work at the US Food and Drug Administration.  The FDA Center for Diseases and Radiological Health (CDRH) needed an improved method of interacting with submitters of devices through the review and approval process. With the existing process, medical device companies would submit a device for approval and then be forced to wait for an indefinite period of time before learning whether their medical device had been approved or denied by the FDA. Leveraging the Alfresco platform, Armedia worked with CDRH to develop DocMan that enables and tracks communication between FDA and applicants and provides an external view to FDA’s review process

This case study was just one of several presentations at Content.gov that highlighted the success of Alfresco within the federal government. The federal government is at a point where it is being forced to do more with less. Doing more with less is a very important change for the government, particularly in the context of the recent sequester. This presentation provides an innovative and cost effective way to help government organizations support open government initiatives leveraging open source technologies.

The FDA Safety and Innovation Act (Public Law 112-144) includes the Medical Device User Fee Amendment of 2012 or MDUFA III. Under this provision medical device companies agreed to pay a fee when they register with the system to list their devices with the organization. These fees, which can total up to $595 Million over the next five years, help the FDA to pay for innovative tools, such as the DocMan system, that better enable their organization to adhere to increased expectations.

We are looking forward to figuring out new ways to help organizations do more with less with the strength of the Alfresco platform. If you have an example, please share it here!

A few weeks ago I got to attend Alfresco’s Content.gov in one of my favorite US cities, Washington DC. Having lived near the city for six months a few years ago, it really felt like a different place when talking to old friends and customers about what was happening to the government sector right now. We talked about sequestration, the furlough and budget squeezes that were having an impact across all the government agencies. This situation is not too dissimilar from the challenges faced by the UK government everyday too.

So the key question several people I met posed was this – with all the cuts going on in government, how can agencies and departments deliver more with less?

My inevitable answer was cloud. Cloud enables IT departments to shift their resources from spending 80% of the budget (the average today) from simply running and maintaing existing systems and infrastructure, towards spending smaller budgets on delivering new solutions and innovations instead. And it seems the current administration agrees with a directive to push agencies towards open-source and cloud solutions to benefit from these cost savings.

While the cloud provides many benefits, in addition to the cost savings, there are several challenges government agencies need to address before adopting a scalable cloud solutions:

1. First and foremost is compliance. While there is a push towards cloud, cloud solutions must be FISMA compliant and depending on the data being stored, potentially HIPPA along with a whole other range of compliance certifications too
2. Closely tied to compliance is security. While a lot of Government data is publicly accessible, there are huge amounts of data which aren’t and need to be kept top secret and out of the hands of hackers. With the recent Wikileaks postings and increased foreign activity in cyber espionage, this concern is very real.
3. And finally, like many large organizations, integration. Being able to customize cloud solutions to their individual requirements, are still important, to get the most benefit out of the solution.

So how can government agencies adopt cloud while addressing these challenges?

Enter Open-Source Hybrid ECM

With the current state of security, compliance and integration challenges within the public sector, cloud-only solutions cannot meet all the needs of agencies and their constituents while on-premise cannot open up content to new use cases such as easy external collaboration, mobile devices and sharing data with other cloud services. It iss clear a new solution is needed that delivers the control and compliance of on-premise with the agility and cost savings of cloud. We call it Hybrid enterprise content management (ECM).

Using our powerful open source on premise Enterprise solution for ECM, you can easily synchronise content to Alfresco in the cloud, to enable new use cases and architectures for managing your content both inside and outside the firewall all while benefiting from the cost savings of open source and cloud compared to the more traditional ECM solutions out there.

The Key is Content Classification

By understanding the classification of your content, you can decide what needs to stay under your control on-premise and what can go into the cloud. Many agencies generally categorize their content into three broad categories:

• Public - This is content that is publicly available and does not need to be secured. For example this could be articles, web content or policies that have been published to the public. This should be able to go into the cloud without any issues.
• Confidential – This is internal content like day-to-day office documents that agency workers create and share to do their jobs. The content is confidential, but if the content was leaked, it would not have a harmful impact on the agency. Most of this content should be okay to go into a secured cloud, but certain pieces of content may need to be kept on premise if it relates to more confidential information.
• Top Secret/Restricted – This is the highly restricted and top secret information that should never be out of the control of the agency and would be harmful if ever leaked. Think security briefings and intelligence dossiers. These still need to be managed and accessible, but cannot be put into a third party cloud service.

Using these broad definitions, agencies can start to decide which content needs to stay on-premise and what can go into the cloud. Alfresco provides the same user experience on both sides of the firewall. Your employees, third party partners and constituents will not get stuck behind a firewall. They can also access mobile, desktop sync and Web access to create and share content freely. They get a seamless experience while giving your IT organization new agility and architectures to enable new use cases. For example, you may decide a project to archive defence documents needs to be delivered on-premise, but for the facilities project to capture pictures of all your facilities from mobile workers raising issues that need to be fixed can be delivered via cloud with the pictures automatically syncing back to on-premise for archive at a later date that you set and control. On-Premise is the New Private Cloud When I refer to on-premise it’s important to highlight that this doesn’t necessarily mean the traditional server/data center setup that many organizations have today. With our recent Amazon Web Services partnership, you could also provision your own Private Cloud using Amazon’s Federal Data Center and we have Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that enable you to get started in minutes using Alfresco on AWS. With Private Cloud the infrastructure and solution is under your complete control while still enabling you to benefit from the agility and cost savings cloud provides. Your Strategic Stepping Stone to Cloud It’s clear that cloud is here to stay and many agencies are looking at how cloud can help them deliver more with less. But there are still many issues that need to be addressed by cloud-only solutions before all enterprise content can be moved into the cloud. Hence a Hybrid ECM solution like Alfresco provides your organization a strategic stepping stone to delivering new solutions for your users quickly, while still keeping control of where the content resides for security and compliance requirements. Alfresco is the sole vendor in the ECM and cloud-only markets today that can deliver the Hybrid ECM solution. If you’re interested in finding out more, please contact our sales team who will be happy to answer any of your questions. Also check back later this week for the last blog post in the Conversation’s from Alfresco’s Content.gov series!

Earlier this month, we held our third annual Content.gov event in Washington, DC. designed to highlight the successes federal, local and public sector agencies have experienced in solving the latest document management challenges.

In the spirit of this year’s theme centered around open government, open standards, transparency and collaboration, this is the first in a three-part series that continues the conversation around the tools and resources used to manage government agencies content chaos.

The first US Deputy Chief of Technology, Beth Noveck, kicked off the day encouraging the discussion around President Obama’s Open Government Initiative (OGI) and the US Government’s commitment to building a system of transparency, public participation and interaction. She highlighted that the US Government is moving toward an open platform to foster a smarter government, a better government and a government transparent to its citizens.

Following our keynote address, the audience of over 200 broke out into two separate tracks – technical and business to tackle best practices around records management as well as hear from the Patent Trade Office on how they successfully used Alfresco’s case management solution to enable document workflow, secure file-sharing and records management.

Partners from Zia and Armedia were given the opportunity to highlight the innovative solutions they’ve built using the Alfresco platform while customers ranging from the FDA to AWS shared stories around why they chose Alfresco, the challenges they needed to overcome and how they are well positioned for future projects. Mil-OSS also spoke about open source in the military and how it is changing the way our government does business.

Below are links to all the presentations given during our time together so stay tuned as we welcome others to share their experience at Content.gov and how they are managing, organizing and enabling regulated content to proactively meet open standards!

*Photo above taken by Pete Souza 

Business Track

• James Bailey: Armedia FDA Story
• Max Peterson: AWS and Alfresco solutions
• John Scott: Mil-OSS
• Chirayu Desai: FFE

Technical Track

• Pat Myers: Agency Modernization
• Joe Wolf: PTO 
• Dimy Jeannot: Armedia Solutions
• Ryan McVeigh: Case Management Solution

It has been six months since Alfresco launched Alfresco One with support for hybrid open source enterprise content management (ECM) scenarios.  Alfresco’s enterprise sync capabilities let organizations put content in the cloud to support mobility, collaboration as well as other use cases, while still powering processes that need to access on-premise data or back-end systems.

This hybrid ECM model is resonating with our customers as they are in various stages of moving content and process to the cloud.  They like the flexibility it gives them to support a variety of scenarios and all of their users without forcing them into a cloud-only situation or creating new silos.

Like many of our customers, industry analysts are seeing value in Alfresco’s hybrid model as well.

In a new SWOT analysis, Ovum writes of Alfresco:

A powerful capability is the hybrid cloud model, which allows organizations to combine an on-premise implementation for office-based employees and cloud access for remote workers and partners. This allows specific content to be made available to mobile workers and partners, which can be worked on and then synced back to the on-premise version.

Ovum found a number of others strengths in Alfresco as well, such as strong support for mobile workers, an active developer community and low-cost compared to legacy ECM providers.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe of 451 Research also made note of Alfresco’s hybrid model in a recent write-up on Alfresco’s acquisition of WeWebU.  He says:

WeWebU’s MobileWorkdesk application should play very nicely with Alfresco’s new hybrid cloud offering. Overall, as Alfresco moves toward an IPO, expanding its commercial offerings to specific business applications makes good sense.

Learn more for yourself from this report and others available on Alfresco’s web site:  http://www.alfresco.com/resources/analyst-reports

 

 

I’m very excited that as of today, users of Amazon Web Services can run Alfresco Enterprise on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with just a few clicks through the AWS Markeplace -

This availability follows our initial AWS Marketplace release, where we outlined the benefits of rapidly deploying Alfresco Enterprise without the hassles of installation and configuration that normally accompany these kinds of deployments.

Building on our previous release by teaming up with Amazon and Red Hat, Alfresco Enterprise is now fully available on a supportable open source stack giving customers the option to purchase enterprise-grade support from Alfresco and additional support from Amazon Premium Support, backed by Red Hat.

Alfresco Enterprise for the AWS Marketplace defaults to a 30-day trial and works with our existing mobile apps for iOS and Android making secure file sharing fast and easy.

Getting Started

Assuming you already have an AWS account, you simply need to visit the Alfresco + RHEL listing on the AWS Marketplace and click the “Continue” button to login and launch.

Step-by-step directions can be found at the Alfresco Wiki, but please visit the AWS Blog for more details on the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the AWS Marketplace. You can also learn more about the benefits of secure file sharing with Alfresco on AWS by viewing the recent webinar recording.

Give it a whirl and leave a comment here to let us know what you think!