Alfresco releases open-source content management software

Alfresco Software Inc. Monday released the first version of its open-source enterprise content management (ECM) software aimed at small to midsize businesses (SMBs).

The 13-person U.K. startup's coming-out party will be at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) East taking place in Newton, Massachusetts, on Tuesday and Wednesday. At the conference, Alfresco will be one of 16 startups focusing on the open-source market chosen to exhibit at the event's Emerging Elite Showcase, according to the show's organizers. Additionally, the conference's director Matt Asay will become Alfresco's first U.S. employee as he starts work Tuesday as the company's vice president of business development. He was previously director of open-source strategy at Novell Inc.

Alfresco launched a preview version of its repository back in June and to date has already seen "between 30,000 and 40,000 downloads" of that software from its Web site, according to John Powell, the company's co-founder, president and chief executive officer. "We released it to give people an idea of what we're doing," he said in a phone interview. Version 1.0 of Alfresco's software adds in enterprise support for security and caching, Powell added.

Before forming Alfresco, Powell and John Newton had formed Activiti, a U.K. startup focused on the financial services sector with applications that merged ECM and analytics software.

Despite favorable reviews from analysts and potential customers, Activiti didn't take off as hoped. "It wasn't the right time to sell into banks," Powell said. He and Newton decided to close Activiti down at the end of 2004. At the start of this year, after stripping out the analytics piece from the software they and their team had developed for Activiti, they worked on making the product more generic, took it open source and established Alfresco. Powell and Newton personally funded the business until June when they raised US$2 million in Series A funding from venture capital Accel Partners.

What the Alfresco team realized was that traditional ECM software was very complicated and very costly. "It was hard to get content into the system," Powell said. "We wanted to alleviate that and made Alfresco look like the Microsoft file system." That way, users weren't aware they were using an ECM product, with saving content to the Alfresco repository being as easy as saving files on a Windows shared file drive, he added. The Alfresco software includes automatic rules so that a piece of content can be dealt with in specified ways, whether rendered into HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and output to a Web site or turned into a PDF (portable document format) file or put into a workflow application. A company's developers can customize the Alfresco system through wizards or Java and other programming languages and can set up their own specific document life cycles rules as well, according to Powell.

Alfresco is establishing an open-source release of its software as well as three kinds of fee-based support.