Eating Alfresco: the healthier FOSS alternative to SharePoint

David M Williams
Wednesday, 13 August 2008 21:05

Opinion and Analysis

Firstly, and most importantly, Alfresco protects businesses and individuals from a wholesale lock-in to Microsoft. A SharePoint solution necessitates a Windows server platform, an SQL Server based database and Windows client computers. Additionally, Microsoft Office is required to get the most gain.

This isn’t mere Microsoft bashing; the problem of vendor lock-in is a genuine concern for many corporations and governments around the world. Most all software vendors would probably love to implement such “brickwalling” of customers, to use marketing-speak, but only Microsoft can really pull it off. Neither SAP nor Oracle Financials, for instance, would force you to use “SAPOS” or “OracleOS” on your desktop computers, because neither of those vendors sells an operating system – or an office suite.

This concern has been echoed by Forrester Group’s 25-page report published last month, “Now is the time to determine SharePoint’s place in your application development strategy” which highlights that SharePoint is a closed environment not allowing for other databases or non-Microsoft products to be added.

Lock-in can’t be understated. It gets you in two ways. Firstly, your current spending is influenced. If you adopt SharePoint then you are implicitly committing yourself to purchasing more and more complementary Microsoft products.

Secondly, your data can potentially be lost to your forever.

Consider important information held in a plain text file. This can be opened and viewed anywhere; every system has the capability to open and display plain text.

However, imagine if the important data was contained within a Microsoft Works 2.0 document. The program used to create the document is no longer available for sale. Current versions may not support such an early document format. You likely can find a translator which will permit the document to open in Microsoft Word. If your original document format is more obscure you may have no success penetrating it today or in the future.

This is why battles have been fought over open file formats: if the way the file is structured on disk is known then tools can be produced to deal with that file.

Now imagine we’re no longer talking about a single document but an entire repository of documents, as in a SharePoint content database. Your company’s entire set of QA manuals and forms and procedures might be in there. Or your history of purchase orders, quotations and tenders. Or many other things.

By stark contrast Alfresco offers scalability on a set of loosely coupled, low cost commodity hardware. The software is built on standards such as web services, WebDAV, SQL-compliant databases, ODF, RSS, OpenID, FTP, AJAX, LDAP and more. This makes integration into existing infrastructures much simpler. It also means you can extend Alfresco in ways that Sharepoint cannot bend, yet you still retain the benefits of directory-integrated authentication, workflow, high availability, advanced search, document libraries and the like.

Alfresco was already a top-class content management system. With its SharePoint integration now bedded down, Alfresco also makes a better SharePoint than SharePoint – and leverages your existing database and productivity software platform whatever it may be.