Using Alfresco, you can implement document management solutions such as Enterprise Document Management, Digital Asset Management, and Contracts Management.

Alfresco document management features provide organizations with all of the services necessary for creating, converting, managing, and sharing electronic documents. Built on industry-standard open source platforms, Alfresco provides version management and search capabilities.

The document management administrator interface allows you to import and export workspaces and documents, define security, and provide user management through the definition of users, groups, and roles. Cost effective upgrades and data migration administration are some of the key benefits.

A built-in data management and transformation engine provides you with the ability to transform the data into required formats, based on business rules. Integrated workflow provides you with full control over the document life cycle, management, and process flow.

Presentation templates and dashboard views provide you with a personalized and real-time reporting of your content. The preview feature is useful for viewing the content in combination with other content elements. Similarly, the composite document feature helps you to logically group documents and digital assets for your marketing projects.

Digital Asset Management provides a single access point for all of your rich digital media and their underlying metadata information throughout the extended enterprise. Alfresco centralizes storage and provides easy, efficient, enterprise access to digital assets, and allows them to be quickly repurposed, which streamlines processes and saves money.

Whether it's an employment contract, a purchase agreement, a maintenance contract, or a collaboration agreement with a business partner, in order to protect a company's commercial interests, one should guarantee completeness, validity, traceability, and inalterability. Alfresco's document lifecycle management features ensure that people in various departments, divisions, or regions of a company can work together to support all of the processes relating to a contract throughout its lifecycle—from creation, through fulfillment and modification, to termination.

Key features include:

Using Alfresco, you can implement records management solutions, such as enterprise records management, compliance, imaging, forms management, and business process management.

Alfresco's record management features provide a secure, auditable environment for creating, declaring, classifying, retaining, and destroying records. Organizations can ensure compliance by defining and enforcing policies for records use, storage, and disposition, with a legally-defensible audit trail.

Records management capabilities are modeled to support the US Department of Defense 5015.2 Records Management standards. Alfresco provides file plan templates for numbering, classification, disposition, and other metadata-driven population of records. Disposition includes the transfer of records and/or the ultimate destruction of the records.

Predefined reports will provide you with information about recent records, records due for cut-off, records due for expiry, records due for transfer, and records due for destruction.

The lifecycle determines the disposition of the record, including when the records will be cut off or grouped together, how long the records will be held, and what happens to the record after the holding period expires—whether they are transferred to a records holding area, or whether they should be destroyed.

By integrating with scanning and OCR technologies, Alfresco provides an end-to-end solution for collecting paper documents and forms, transforming them into accurate, retrievable information, and delivering the content into an organization's business applications. The information then becomes full-text searchable, and goes through various lifecycles based on the organization's defined business process

Emails are considered as records in some organizations. Alfresco enables you to drag-and-drop emails from Microsoft Outlook into the file plan space. The system will extract the metadata from email files and populate information such as who the e-mail is from, who the recipients are, and the subject of the email. Email content is stored in a secure and scalable repository, and is also full-text searchable.

Key features include:

Using Alfresco, you can implement web content management solutions with a scalable content repository, a web 2.0 AJAX-based user interface, flexible workflow, multi-language support, and a robust search engine.

Alfresco web content management features provide a rich environment for creating, managing, and publishing web content, along with an infrastructure for supporting multiple sites. This managed content can include text, HTML, XML files, graphics and photos, video or audio, and specialized programming required for user interaction. Through this solution, organizations can integrate multiple disparate sites and data formats, and give users (often sales people, partners and customers) rapid access to information, and in a timely manner. Because, Alfresco web content management is built on open source platforms, supporting, managing, and expanding these systems can be straightforward and cost-effective.

Alfresco supports a wide range of protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, web services, XML-RPC, FTP, and RMI for the exchange of content with external systems. With the help of technologies such as RSS and web services, the content is delivered to various channels such as public internet sites, internal marketing sites, and portals.

Alfresco leverages the existing infrastructure for membership such as LDAP, Active Directory, and Relational databases. A granular level of security enables content authors to secure a single web page and also the files, embedded images, and videos within a web page.

Users of the Alfresco web content management system are typically nontechnical business users, or subject matter experts who do not understand HTML syntax. Alfresco includes inline editors to edit text, HTML and XML content, and connectors to edit the office documents using desktop tools of your choice. The transformation engine is used to transform content from one form to another. For example, all of the incoming images of various types and sizes can be transformed to a standard format and size.

Drag-and-drop layout development lets users customize the look and feel of web sites without waiting for assistance from developers. Alfresco speaks your language and supports multilingual content management.

A robust, full-text search engine lets you search your web content (HTML, PDF, MS-Word, PowerPoint slides, and so on) based on your security access permissions. Advanced search features enable you to search web content based on its metadata and keyword values.

Key features include:

Using Alfresco, you can implement collaboration solutions, such as corporate and departmental intranets, knowledge management, and client and project extranets.

Alfresco collaboration features provide the infrastructure, integration points, and tools required for accessing, sharing, and distributing content among users or systems. Built upon industry standards, open source platforms, Alfresco helps you to quickly define and develop environments for teams (project teams, associations, research, and so on) that will streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve time to market. Users can manage and collaborate on documents, web information, and forms within a single system through a consistent user interface.

A comprehensive security model that is based on individuals, groups, projects, and team spaces provides you with the highest level of control. The solution leverages the existing infrastructure, such as LDAP or Active Directory, for authentication and authorization.

A web-based rules engine enables business users to define the business and content rules appropriately, without the help of programmers and IT. Alfresco supports a graphical tool for defining the workflow and business process management for content flow in collaborative environments.

Users can discuss content by using the discussion forums and discussion threads tied to the content. Users can subscribe to content and receive email notifications when content is added or updated. The solution supports both inbound and outbound RSS syndication for sharing content beyond the corporate firewalls.

Interfaces such as Common Internet File System (CIFS) and WebDAV allow each team member or department to map the folder on the server as a local network drive. This enables the bulk transfer of files between your local system and the central server repository. Users can use their favorite editors to edit the content that is mapped in the local network drive.

Knowledge Management (KM) refers to a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for re-use, awareness, and learning across the organization.

Key features include:

Most ECM systems do not consider search to be an important part of Enterprise Content Management. Search functionality helps us to locate information quickly, to generate business reports, and to make business decisions. The following features of Alfresco will provide you with an enterprise search solution:

Because the architecture is flexible and extensible, you can build various applications using Alfresco, such as:

Alfresco's web site (http://www.alfresco.com) has a list of customer case studies. Going through these case studies will help you understand the type of applications that you could develop using Alfresco.