Alfresco ECM

Omnys has gained high skills on the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management system, the document management platform of reference in the open-source world.

Alfresco is a  universal documents container which aims at pervasive presence within the company. As all products in this category it offers fine-grained access control based on roles and groups, revision cycle control to avoid concurrent modifications, and version management. The topology of documents storing, which is essentially gerarchic, is combined with the use of meta-data as attributes which are independent of the document format.

Alfresco is a complex product, which can be used for a number of reasons. In particular:

• As a repository (based on the JSR-170 standard) for storing and searching heterogenous contents (structured and non-structured, web- or document-based). It provides different access APIs (local and remote), dictionary services, categorisation, etc.
• Content creation services:
  • via a user interface based on web browser (the web client) for content authoring;
  • via Web Services: it allows external applications to create content via SOAP Web Services;
  • via a Shared Drive Interface (based on the CIFS protocol) which allows desktop applications to access repository contents as if they were stored on the local file system.
• Similarly, services to facilitate contents distribution and access:
  • towards Web users (e.g. publication on a website): Alfresco provides templating services (XSLT or Freemarker) and 'Web Scripts', a technology which allows to easily export contents within website portlets (‘UI web scripts') or towards dynamic or ajax-based websites (‘data' web scripts);
  • towards parts of applications or dynamic web sites: APIs are completely available remotely via SOAP, with client libraries for various languages (Java, PHP, Ruby etc.);
  • towards desktop applications via shared drive interface.
• Finally, ‘Behaviour' services: Alfresco allows you to design advanced automatic actions, even without Java programming, because you can associate automatic and workflow actions to the repository areas.