CMS Weekly

Posts Tagged ‘SharePoint’

LinearCube Debuts SaaS Document Management Based on Alfresco
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

If you are not quite as adventurous, you might consider a SaaS solution – and with a 30 day trial and pricing starting at $99 a month, it could be a very cost effective solution.

LinearCube, a new offering built for the SMB market, has a pretty high quality core — it’s built on the Alfresco open source document management solution.

Associate multiple files with a single document type (i.e. an RFP Package). No file size limit.

Tag documents with one or more keywords to group related documents and improve document searching.

Enable full document version control with “check-in” and “check-out” functionality.

Microsoft Office Integration — check-in, check-out documents directly within Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Rollback to older revision or purge certain revisions

Associate documents with other records managed in LinearCube along with e document-specific comments and discussions via linked discussion threads containing text, images, links, tables, etc.

As a service – there is no long term contract – so that might be attractive as well. LinearCube’s capabilities fall in line with many other hosted document management systems such as Xythos, KnowledgeTree, SharePoint Online, SpringCM and others.

This Week’s Episode

Alfresco Wants Enterprise Content Management in the Cloud
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

The open source enterprise content management company has unveiled a developer program for those looking to host both the community and enterprise versions of its software on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform. Alfresco is a leading open source alternative for document and Web content management, competing strongly with ECM giants like Open Text, Documentum, and SharePoint.

The core of what Alfresco is offering is an AMI (Amazon Machine Image), a pre-built software package for creating a virtual machine on EC2. The first Alfresco AMI is only for the community edition, and doesn’t include their SharePoint module or the mobile browser UI for accessing Alfresco from smartphones. Alfresco is planning future releases that will support all editions.

See the last TechPodcasts roundtable for a simple introduction for getting started with Amazon cloud services – that used an older AMI from Bitnami – so put in the new image, and you should be ready to go.

This Week’s Episode

Google Goes After SharePoint with New Sites API
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-28

Given the amount of data that sit in SharePoint worldwide, given how eager Google seems to be about enterprise apps these days, and given the size of Google’s appetite for data, we must say — it’s about time.

With the introduction of Google’s new Sites API — and some tools that explicitly pull stuff out of SharePoint and place it into Google Sites — the real heat between Redmond and Mountain View is finally starting to build. Finally, the missing link. Google is finally providing a way to share data between Google application, through their Data Liberation Front.

Google Sites, an application that allows users to create a website, is now supported by the Data Liberation Front. Previously data and content couldn’t leave or enter a Google Site. The new API supports creating, modifying, deleting and retrieving pages and content, up and downloading attachments, accessing revision history and displaying user activity.

Now Google has another avenue to challenge SharePoint. In fact, Google Enterprise partner LTech has already designed a data migration application called SharePoint Move for Google Apps. It migrates files, documents, lists, events and more, and generates a detailed report about the migration.

This Week’s Episode

Alfresco vs Sharepoint vs Nuxeo
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-10

After an opening caveat that all product comparisons are flawed, Sirius Corp blogger tcallway proceeds to compare open source ECM products Alfresco and Nuxeo with the deeply entrenched Microsoft SharePoint.

SharePoint claims a broad range of functionality including BI, records and document management, web content management and eForms. But it comes with a hefty price tag, and you never stop paying – it’s a lease program with license fees on a host of products – in fact, everything in the Microsoft Stack that is also required to make the package complete.

By comparison, Alfresco is free and runs on Linux, Unix and Mac, in addition to Windows, and supports any LDAP server. Use MySQL or PostgreSQL with Alfresco, and don’t fret purchasing an environment to extend Alfresco – it’s all included. And you don’t need licenses to provide your services to your clients.

However, it’s only the Labs Edition that’s free. The code for the Enterprise version is not available, and this version does have an annual subscription, but is worth it.

The reviewer went on to compare Nuxeo, another open source solution, with Alfresco. He claims both are beautiful, fast and feature-rich, but liked the Nuxeo UI with it’s drag and drop file management better than Alfresco. Nuxeo runs on all mainstream OS’s and is very extensible, and the code is available for its enterprise version. Close, but not close enough. But when the reviewer tried to reach a live person, in the main UK office, or the French office they were forwarded to, the Nuxeo offering came up lacking.

This Week’s Episode

#alfresco says #SharePoint “is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology”
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up, after breaking the $1 billion revenue mark last year. A quote from Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco who we met at CMS Expo Chicago: “SharePoint is saving Microsoft’s Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in. It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping.”

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has talked about SharePoint as the company’s next big operating system. Currently it is used to create web sites and manage the content, it is used for project and document collaboration by team members, and it includes business intelligence tools too, at a price point that rivals what some niche companies charge for just one piece of the package. While it lacks sophisticated features offered in the point tools, Microsoft is confident that it has the necessary features for most users.

That said, a new release planned for next year promises to be “packed full of more advanced features”, such as tying into the corporate search technology acquired by the purchase of Fast Search and Transfer. Even free open source solutions have a hard time competing when Microsoft offers free basic SharePoint licenses to Windows Server customers.

This Week’s Episode