Records Management Alfresco Style

September 26th, 2006: Alfresco Software is pitching itself as the first provider of an open source enterprise content management with the release of its Alfresco Records Manager.

The release is currently in preview and offers, according to Alfresco, an “unobtrusive, simple to use, drag-and-drop approach to records management.”

The London-based company boasts the New Zealand Government, the American Stock Exchange, NASA and Harvard as customers and says that its solutions enable unprecedented scale and a much lower total cost of ownership than proprietary systems.

“Our goal was always to deliver a full ECM suite and this is another significant step in that direction,” says John Newton, chief technology officer for Alfresco. “Through the power of open source we are dramatically reducing the cost of records management while delivering a simple-to-use, enterprise class system, where records managers and business analysts, rather than developers, can set-up and implement records requirements such as DOD 5015.2 and other regulatory standards.”

Alfresco says that thanks to a shared drive interface, its Intelligent Virtual File System supports the necessary rules to implement the file plan, archival, disposition and schedule of events.Currently, Alfresco Records Manager includes features such as:

• Fileplans – to automatically classify and schedule records based upon pre-existing plans and standardized structures.
• Drag And Drop Entry – providing a file system view where records can be dragged and dropped using the standard Windows Explorer interface with metadata and disposition assigned according to fileplans and workflow handling.
• Automated Lifecycle Change - enabling schedule, content and metadata change activation based upon simple scripting rules.
• Retention and Archival Policies – the management and archival of obsolete records, recovery of archived records or complete destruction of records based upon retention policies.
• Disposition – to provide controlled and scheduled handling of archiving, holds, transfers, accessions and destruction using rules and automated processing.
• DOD 5015.2 Requirements - Templates designed to support US Department of Defense records and filing requirement for metadata definitions, fileplans and functionality.
• Metadata Validation And Workflow Handling - ensures the integrity of records using model-driven validation and handling of newly entered records.
• Automatic Conversion - convert from proprietary office formats to long- term vendor neutral formats such as Open Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF).

Alfresco Records Manager is available now in its 1.4 preview release form, it has announced no date as yet for a full release. The company says it intends to submit it for DOD 5015.2 certification later in 2006 or early in 2007.

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