Alfresco was founded in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects . Its investors include the leading investment firms Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund.

Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. The open source model allows Alfresco to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost.

Alfresco’s goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings such as Documentum or Microsoft SharePoint in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community.

Alfresco is unique in that it is:

• Open – Open Source, Open Standards.
• Source – Best-of-Breed Open Source Components.
• Enterprise – Enterprise-Scale, Enterprise-Infrastructure, Enterprise-Control.
• Content – Documents, records, Web Pages, Images, Rich Media.
• Management – Most Experienced Team in Content Management in the World from Documentum and Interwoven.

Industry leaders such as Electronic Arts, Activision and Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive use Alfresco to provide advanced user experiences, create communities around their products, and deliver this at dramatically lower cost through the benefit of open source. These new community oriented product micro-sites need to be highly-scalable with the ability to integrate rich media with user-generated content, and support rapid content updates for a fresh customer experience, while promoting a consistent brand.

Experience with these next-generation websites has driven the enhancements in the company’s flagship content management product, Alfresco Enterprise.

Alfresco Key Strengths

• Alfresco is built by a team of original leading members from Documentum and Interwoven with 15 years experience in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), including the co-founder of Documentum.
• The track record of the Alfresco team has enabled Alfresco to rapidly become the leading open source enterprise content management system. This has enabled it to communicate with governments and corporations at a high-level to shape open source strategies.
• Alfresco has emerged over the past three years with a completely new approach to content management that is user friendly, familiar, and highly affordable. Over one million people have downloaded Alfresco software and the active deployments of Alfresco have exceeded 30,000 worldwide.
• In May 2008 Alfresco Software announced the release of Alfresco Enterprise 2.2, which in particular is designed to power Web 2.0 properties and online communities. New feature enhancements support the creation, deployment and update of scalable Web 2.0 sites that can be developed using any web application language.
• The benefits of using Alfresco include ease-of-use through the deployment of an Intelligent Virtual File System, and Google-Like Search and Yahoo!-Like folder browsing.