Alfresco is an open source enterprise content management solution founded by one of the co-founders of Documentum.

Alfresco Enterprise Network Release Candidate Announced. Alfresco, Inc. announced that it is making available the Alfresco Enterprise Network Release Candidate. This integrates closely to the JBoss Cache, JBoss Application Server and Hibernate utilizing the underlying scalability and high-availability features. Alfresco utilizes JBoss Cache's ability to distribute and maintain data caches, making it possible to build large-scale systems which allows Alfresco to deliver cached data at in memory speeds. Alfresco also utilizes the clustering, failover and load balancing facilities of the JBoss Application Server to increase scalability. Content models are more complex than traditional relational database tables. Alfresco utilizes Hibernate to control the content management schema. Alfresco complements these products with content replication and use of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) to integrate to different, configurable authentication systems. Features of the Alfresco Enterprise Network are single sign-on through Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) across the JBoss Portal and portlets,fail-safe content services, a massively parallel content grid, and distributed high availability within the data centre and between disparate data centres. http://www.alfresco.org [Gilbane Report News]

12:52:20 PM    

This is an interesting thread on Slashdot. Someone asked about capturing, organizing, and sharing knowledge in an IT department and the majority of folks are responding with various wiki tools and open source portals. Although the question was directed at the needs of an IT department, the advice is probably applicable to any department in an enterprise, provided the UI of the chosen tool scores high in the usability department.

Knowledge Management for an IT Department?. Slashdot Sep 30 2005 8:25PM GMT [Moreover Technologies - Knowledge management news]

The key issues, as I've mentioned before are:

• it has to be easy to contribute content
• it has to be easy to find content (via search and possibly taxonomy browsing)
• it has to be secure
• it has to have all of the "-abilities" (eg, scalability, extensibility, usability, etc.).

Something like a combination of blogs, wikis, possibly a document repository, and a search engine for the whole thing ought to do the trick.

11:37:52 AM