In 2005 Technology Services Group  partnered with Alfresco, the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. Similar to TSG, Alfresco leverages an open source model which enables the use of best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to produce high quality software quickly at much lower cost. 

This successful partnership and has provided TSG a solid foundation for developing an Alfresco practice centered around document and web content management, specifically in the following two areas:

1. Migration Expertise - TSG recognizes the typical challenges of document migration such as ensuring specific business rules are applied to the migrated data and migrating data from different sources. Leveraging past experience, TSG has developed a proven migration platform, OpenMigrate, that eases much of the burden encountered during migration. OpenMigrate is an open source framework made up of highly configurable and extensible migration components including Alfresco connectors.
2. Consumer Interface - Typically Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems provide a “one stop shop” interface for authors and approvers, however for the general consumer; this interface can be cumbersome and overwhelming. These users often get lost in functionality making it difficult to quickly find what they are looking for. TSG has addressed this common interface issue by developing an intuitive streamline search interface for the consumers. Available free as OpenSource, HPI Search provides a powerful, yet easily configurable and clean interface to Alfresco for searching and viewing documents and metadata. 
   • Download the HPI Search for Alfresco datasheet.

Alfresco Functional Overview

Overpriced, overly complex Enterprise Content Management has been commoditized and consumerized. Real people want the simplicity and familiarity of the tools they use day-in and day-out. Alfresco captures, shares and retains content, enabling users to version, search and simply build their own content applications - all with the tools they use today. Popular user features of Alfresco include:

• Collaboration - Alfresco Share, allowing on-demand collaboration sites to be created including components such as Blogs, Wikis, Calendars, Discussions, and Document Libraries
• Document Management - A streamlined approach to storing content allowing accessibility to content via shared drives, Microsoft Office, and a web interface.  A rules-based approach allows for the rapid creation of content applications.
• Web Content Management - Allows contribution of content via FTP, shared drives, or through the use of simple web forms.  Additionally, provides an interface to allow "drag and drop" creation of content, simplifying the creation of content and providing greater control of the presentation layer. 
• Enterprise Portal Integration - leverage existing portals and allow the creation of JSR-168/283 portlets exposing Alfresco-based content
• Office Integration - allow users to work in an Office environment for authoring and viewing with no additional installation or training

Alfresco Technical Overview

TSG has not only assisted clients deploy Alfresco systems but leveraged the development tools available in order to meet specific client requirements.  Alfresco's architecture allows development of applications via standard SOA architectures.  Alfresco has been built utilizing Open Source technology and is one of the first platforms to support the standard CMIS specification.  TSG has extended it's open source product, OpenContent, to include an SOA integration approach for Alfresco. 

Alfresco best-of-breed technology approach offers the following benefits

• Service Oriented Architecture - Provides REST and SOAP based Web Services to access Alfresco functionality.
• SURF - A REST enabled interface allowing a set of AJAX-enabled set of content management components.
• J2EE Architecture - highly scalable, clustered architecture using commodity software and hardware
• Interface for CIFS, WebDAV and FTP - native access via the file system for standards tools
• Security - security management for documents, users, groups and roles
• Integrated workflow and content lifecycle management - jBPM integration with task manager via a dashboard.
• Data management and Transformation engine - integrated transformation services (e.g., powerpoint to flash)