Alfresco Video Blog

The City and County of Denver located in Colorado has a population of over 600,000 people and is the 21st largest city in the United States. It has a Mayor form of government and employs more than 10,000 people with an operating budget of $1 billion.

As a result of the decentralized IT environment, Denver acquired 14 separate document management systems, including EMC Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint. This required Technology Services to maintain multiple systems, which was both costly and time consuming. Document sharing was also burdensome. In addition, scanned document applications, such as the City’s contract and financial records application, were difficult to use and did not provide the required security and auditing functionality.

Denver needed to implement one centralized document management system that could serve as a platform for all its document and content applications and they chose Alfresco.

“We are extremely excited to leverage Alfresco as the document management platform for our City. Alfresco’s support for open standards, flexible architecture, rich functionality and low cost means that we can begin to standardize on one ECM system while being mindful of budgetary constraints.” Chuck Fredrick, Director, Enterprise Applications for the City of Denver.

In these video interviews Al Rosabal, Deputy CIO, talks about their experience with Alfresco:

Why the City of Denver selected Alfresco

Document Management at the City of Denver

Read the detailed City of Denver case study

Document Management:

Alfresco Document Management captures, shares and retains content, enabling users to version, search and simply build their own content applications. All with the tools they use today.

• See how the Alfresco repository is as easy to use as a regular shared drive.
• Learn how it integrates with Microsoft Office.
• Learn the rules for content applications

Web Content Management:

Real people want the simplicity and familiarity of the tools they use everyday.

• The mass of content in Wikipedia.
• The freshness of content in Digg.
• The ease of configurability and reuse of Google gadgets or Facebook pages.
• And the low cost scalability of Web 2.0.

Learn how Alfresco Web Content Management delivers. Via:

• Simple contribution by teams
• The Alfresco Surf platform
• Low-cost commodity scalability

Collaboration:

Alfresco Share is a Facebook-like solution for the Enterprise. See how it works, and ho wit could work for you.

Alfresco software focuses on: 1. Low Cost

• A low cost, open source, subscription model with minimal upfront investment that can be driven out of operating expense as opposed to capital expense. 2. Simplicity
• Rapid deployment to deliver immediate business value. And rapid application development using pre-built components and lightweight scripting. 3. Choice
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reusing existing hardware, software and skills.
• No lock-in to one ECM vendor or one stack.

(Catch the full Webinar on the Alfresco Webcasts blog stream)

Traditional document management has it roots in complex document vaults accessed by document librarians. Theses have been historically developed as large, complex, enterprise software applications.

This has caused document management system to be: * Complex and difficult to use * Very costly * Very low adoption rate typically 5% of users

The choice of a complex, robust document system or a simple to use system that lacks essential features has resulted in a very low adoption rate. The systems that users are familiar with and use are:

• Shared Drive for storage
• Email for Collaboration
• Google for Search
• Yahoo for categorization
• Folder Structures and Content for Project Plans

Alfresco Document Management

Alfresco offers document management using familiar interfaces to get rapid user adoption built on a repository that offers transparent, out-of-sight services for full ECM.

(Catch the full Webinar on the Alfresco Webcasts blog stream)

This video shows the how to get started with the Alfresco ECM system. It covers how to create users and groups, how to manage content and how to send content for review.