Afresco Enterprise 3.2 released

Alfresco has released version Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2, the subscription version of its open source enterprise content management system. The release brings together a number of features which have appeared in the community edition in the past months, such as the 5015.2 certified records management module, and IMAP support allowing IMAP enabled mail clients to seamlessly interoperate with the content management system.

The enterprise edition includes multi-tenancy to allow one instance of Alfresco to be shared by multiple companies or multiple divisions of a corporation with each share appearing as their own instance of the content management system. Paul Hampton, Product Marketing Director at Alfresco told The H that this would be useful in companies where they are required to have "chinese walls" between departments as a legal obligation. Multi-tenancy also makes the enterprise edition particularly suitable for hosted or cloud deployment and its a feature that's not supported in the community edition. Alfresco have also expanded the deployment options available for the enterprise edition by including support for creating cloud based Alfresco installations, from the simple single instance of the server in the cloud, up to a high availability, fault tolerant cluster.

Alfresco has worked on the collaboration elements of their Share front end, adding favourites and other social media mechanisms to user profiles to enable other users to navigate, not just by searching but also by recommendation. For complex storage needs, Alfresco Enterprise Edition now includes Storage Policies, allowing administrators to create rules to govern where content is stored according to business value, compliance needs or availability. Administrators will find that Alfresco has now implemented JMX support for the various subsystems, which allows detailed monitoring and the ability to stop and restart subsystems without restarting the server.

Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2 is available immediately for existing subscribers. A free cloud trial allows potential users to use the Alfresco Share front end to check out its capabilities. A 30 day trial is also available. For users not interested in the enterprise features, Alfresco Community Edition 3.2 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and as source code licensed under the GPL.

(djwm)