I ran accross an interesting project last night that I’m quite excited about. I’ve been trying to find a good open source alternative to MS SharePoint for about a year now, and I think I’ve finally found one that is almost as good, and has the potential to be better than SharePoint. The project is called Alfresco. It took me about 1/2 hour to install it on my laptop (on the Windows side).
Alfresco is Java based, and runs on top of Tomcat of JBoss frameworks. It includes team collaboration spaces, version handling, wizards for administration, content handling, in-line editing of web content, desktop integration for launching and saving of content (done via windows file sharing or WebDav.
Because it is an opensource project there is not the same level of vendor lock-in. Take a flash tour of the software if you are interested. You can download here. Technorati Profile
Got the Linux Tomcat RC1 version installed in a breeze on my laptop. This is indeed an e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y interesting alternative to the current fatware products available on the market for Contents Management. One nice feature (among a long list of those available) is that the repository can be accessed as a virtual file system just like a shared disk drive.
Out of the box this is a functional, extensible product that can be used nearly immediately, unlike other solutions that (usually) require lots of configuring and and customization (and $$$). Definitaly worth looking at.
Thanks for the heads up!!
😉
Cool, looks interesting, we use SharePoint where I work, but me and some friends were looking for some simple collaboration stuff like SharePoint for our own uses.