Alfresco has the social enterprise in its sights with the launch of Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 for collaboration and document management.

“Social Content Management is where the capabilities of social business systems and traditional enterprise content management (ECM) meet,” said John Newton, Alfresco CTO.

“It is communication and collaboration with a business purpose and it requires a platform that can deliver content for discussion and engagement that then captures the results of that discussion. Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is that platform – delivered as open source with open standards like CMIS, JSR-168 and RESTful API’s -- in order for developers, customers and our partners to manage content and expose repository functionality inside of social business systems.”

Alfresco’s refreshed Share interface for collaboration and document management now includes status updates (similar to Facebook and Twitter), content activity streams and enhanced search capabilities to make content easier to find.

Business users can now set-up simple document workflow, such as approvals or content transformations, inside the Share interface. Alfresco Share now exposes workflows created with standards-based enterprise business process management tools.

Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to support large geographically dispersed companies, reducing access time, removing single points of failure, and removing the dependency on a single system.