Enterprise content management (ECM) is the fastest growing category of enterprise software. Customers who are implementing or upgrading ECM systems are facing issues such as vendor lock-in, high maintenance costs, and lack of standardization. Open source technologies and open standards are becoming powerful alternatives to commercial closed-source ECM software. Alfresco being a stable player in this market has gained a lot of momentum by providing content management solutions to enterprises using open standards and open source based technologies. Alfresco is positioned as "Visionary" in Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management (as per Gartner's ECM report 2012).

The latest release of Alfresco has an Enterprise Edition as well as a Community Edition. The Alfresco Community version is an unsupported product and is designed for use by developers and technical enthusiasts in non-critical environments. It serves as the research vehicle for new features and as the platform for the Alfresco Community. Constant innovation of the Alfresco Community renders a daily build, offering the latest functionality.

The Alfresco Enterprise Edition is production ready, stress tested and certified build that is supported by Alfresco Software Inc. It is fully a supported, Alfresco product that can provide support to corporations and governments that require commercial Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

This chapter provides an introduction to Alfresco and outlines the benefits of using it for your enterprise's content management requirements. It also introduces the features of the latest release of Alfresco, Version 4.2, as of May 2013.

By the end of this chapter you will have learned about: