This book is structured in a sequential way that walks you through the steps necessary to set up your Alfresco Records Management system. Chapters follow a logical progression with each chapter building on the knowledge and implementation details learned in earlier chapters. If you are a records manager, business analyst, or a software developer, and want to implement the Alfresco Records Management program for your organization, then this book is for you. You don't require any prior knowledge of Alfresco Share software to follow this book.Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software provides content-centric features in the areas of Document Management (DM), Web Content Management (WCM), and Microsoft SharePoint-like Collaboration. Alfresco is particularly
strong in handling the storage of large amounts of content and in enabling collaboration. Alfresco software is licensed as either open source Community or
with a fully-supported Enterprise license.
There has been incredible growth in the breadth of the capabilities of Alfresco software since the initial Alfresco software release in 2005. Much of that growth has been possible due to good software architectural decisions that Alfresco developers made early on. Those early decisions drove the development of a solid and extensible software foundation that has enabled new capabilities to be rapidly built out.
In late 2009, Alfresco introduced another new capability, an extension for Records Management that was not only compatible with, but also certified for, the Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 Records Management standard.
The announcement was notable, because firstly, the certification for 5015.2 is difficult to achieve. Only a few more than a dozen vendors out of an industry with vendors numbering in the hundreds have managed to be certified for 5015.2. Secondly, it was notable because Alfresco made the records software available as a free component in the open source community version of its software. Prior to that announcement, certified Records Management software was available for many tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars.