Alfresco Team Provides Hosted Multi-Platform Collaboration

Are you an SMB looking for a digital collaboration platform? Maybe you use a conglomerate of tools such as Dropbox and Evernote, but you’d really love something more ubiquitous and cohesive. Enter: Alfresco Team. At first, The VAR Guy starting licking his chops thinking it was a new Italian dish, but you could be eating it up if you’re lacking in some workplace productivity. Read on for software suite details …

Alfresco puts a heavy focus on social content management and even simple team-member communication without being tied to a particular device. Alfresco Team supports a slew of browsers and even iOS devices, enabling users to take advantage of the benefits of merged social networking, document management and collaboration (not to mention sharing, converting and uploading multimedia). It’s all accessed from a web-based dashboard, and hosted on premise or in the cloud. It’s simple to deploy, because all users need is an existing server with at least 3GB of RAM and 40GB of hard drive space. Windows and Linux servers are supported, in addition to Amazon EC2, and all that’s required to get up and running is running the installer wizard.

According to Alfresco, team projects such as blogs, web forums and wiki sites can all benefit from the collaboration suite, and The VAR Guy can even think of a few uses for his own purposes. CIFS, WebDAV CMIS and SharePoint are all supported protocols for uploading to the Alfresco server, and with the technology’s new iOS apps, users can upload media content from their iDevice for collaboration on the go. What’s more, it even integrates with Google Docs.

Alfresco is offering a free unlimited trial for five users, and Alfresco promises affordable subscription rates, starting at about $2,000 a year per 10 users. Larger user licensing is available for larger collaboration needs. Alfresco also has a partner program for OEMs, solution providers and even system integrators.

The VAR Guy will be keeping Alfresco on his plate to see if it gets eaten up, especially amid collaboration initiatives by companies such as Cisco Systems and Ingram Micro’s moves to put software suites in its cloud.

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