Alfresco has been hosting a series of regional events across the country. Today the Content Management Roundtable was held at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle. The topic was focused on positioning Alfresco One.

In attendance were records and content management professionals from the Government, Legal, IT Services, Environmental Science, Engineering and several software companies including Tibco and IBM. Alfresco seems to be raising the bar in terms of visibility and attracting the attention of industry veterans and competitors alike.

The approach that ‘One’ takes is to provide a content management platform that is installed in both your data center and Alfresco cloud infrastructure. Providing a syncronization between the two environments accesible through mobile apps primarily on iOS, a new Android app is being release soon. They have announced a stack of products that they are offering for deployment coupled with professional services to get you up and running smoothly.

• Alfresco ‘One’ Stack
  • Enterprise On Premise
  • Cloud
  • Mobile + Sync
  • Desktop + Sync (beta)
  • Kickstart Services

Case Study
A local Seattle partner Reva Solutions provided an overview of how they deliver Alfresco solutions to clients. A customer PhenoPath Laboratories was in attendance and provided an overview of the electronic document control system to manage the volumes of information produced during the diagnostic and contract research services provided to hospitals and local physicians. They evaluated Documentum and found it was way to expensive and PhenoPath was concerened about vendor lock-in. SharePoint was an option but did not offer the Apple Mac and mobile support that PhenoPath was looking for. In addition the IT department had a disaster recovery concern about storing documents in the database as BLOB’s. Interesting comment because this is not an issue for SP2010 when using the remote BLOB storage options. This real issue was cost to implement, with the open source licensing model PhenoPath was able to invest more in integration and deployment. In the future the products workflow capabilities will be used for Corrective and Preventive Action Processes (CAPA).

During implementation it was important to be able to manage document updates using an approval process workflow. This provides an audit trail when changes need to be made to specific procedure documentation. One of the biggest benefits was the visibility this gave document control specialists for regulatory compliance. The ability to see where a document change procedure was and who made the changes.

Many documents are now stored in Alfresco, including Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS). This has given anyone with secure access the ability to find the MSDS documents. The archival of this information is very important to provide e-discovery in case an employee has exposure to a harmful and regulated substance. These must be archived for 30yrs. after an employee or former employee is deceased.

Announcements
Several unconfirmed announcements were shared with the audience. The upcoming Gartner report will include upgraded positioning for the company as a leader that continues to provide an innovative content management platform highlighted in the Magic Quadrant. Also work is being done to provide Google Drive integration for document check in/out. No additional details were shared but look for another post on this when we have more information.

Comments and questions welcomed.