'Exciting Times' as ECM and BPM Integrate in Open-Source Bliss
The Alfresco Community ECM 3.4e update is the first with Activiti BPM integration, ahead of a major release later in the year
Posted by Killian McAleese, 26th April 2011
It's not that Alfresco and Activiti are under-selling the merits or their interesting project with this release of Alfresco Community. But you would be forgiven for letting news of it pass you by without huge excitement.
Alfresco doesn't quite seem uproarious about it just yet, but that's probably because this release is a preview aimed mainly at developers, with the main release coming out later in the year.
More Flexibility and Integration Capabilities
As to some of the details, this preview of Alfresco's open-source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system includes, for the first time, the Activiti Business Process Management (BPM) workflow engine, a feature which began development at Alfresco a year ago and should drive more efficient document-centric process management.
The Activiti BPM will replace the existing jBPM and Alfresco says it will extend their ECM's workflow features by “providing developers more flexibility and integration capabilities for process flows between Alfresco and other business applications.”
According to the company, the Activiti BPM is fully compliant with industry standard BPMN 2.0, which in the short period since its definition has gained widespread recognition as a business modelling system which can span several independent organisations.
'Exciting Times'
The production-ready integration of Activiti with Alfresco Community will be available with another major release later in the year.
But although we'll ultimately have to wait for the opportunity to adequately gauge industry reaction, we're still excited.
And it was just over one month ago when Tom Baeyens, founder of jBPM and Alfresco employee leading Activiti, predicted 'exciting times'. At that point in mid-March, Baeyens had noted a significant adoption of Activiti already in the developer community.
The signs are good, and by the time the next major version of Alfresco is released, the integration should be mature enough to get really excited about.
In the meantime, the updated version of Alfresco is available for immediate download here.
Open Plus and Alfresco
For more information about Open Plus and Alfresco in our consulting services, see our Open-Source IT Solutions page and our Alfresco page.
Related News
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Is it Time for a Move to LibreOffice? 19th April 2011
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