Top Reasons Why Enterprises Prefer Alfresco for Enterprise Content Management

Summary
Alfresco content management has gained fame since its inception. Here are top features that make Alfresco the most suitable platform for document management.

Unstructured and poorly distributed corporate data can create a big hurdle in the path to growth for your business. Also, a lot of paperwork can impair the productivity and efficiency of the workforce. Here, Alfresco enterprise content management lends a helping hand and enables the company to store and organize all sorts of valuable business information. Read on to know how the Alfresco platform enables companies to manage critical corporate information.

Before going through key benefits of Alfresco content management, let’s have a brief introduction of Alfresco.

Alfresco- Brief Introduction of Excellent Document Management System
Since inception in 2005, Alfresco has remained a popular open-source ECM (Enterprise Content Management). Easy customization, easy extension, and a seamless integration capacity make this platform a choice of developers and entrepreneurs alike. Irrespective of size and nature of the business, companies can readily leverage its benefits by managing the content.
Today, Alfresco offers two editions- Alfresco Enterprise Edition and Alfresco Community Edition. Businesses can select the most suitable version for their document management requirements. The Enterprise Edition of Alfresco further divides into four packages namely ACS (Alfresco Content Services), APS (Alfresco Process Services), AGS (Alfresco Governance Services), and Alfresco Digital Business Platform.

Let’s go through nine top features of Alfresco that stand it apart from other platforms:

1. Collaboration is easy
   One of the biggest benefits of Alfresco content management is it provides an easy and seamless collaboration. Alfresco Share acts as a collaboration tool and provides a rich environment for web-based collaboration. It is useful for managing documents, calendar, wiki content, blogs, and the like.
2. Simplifies business process
   Alfresco has an integrated workflow engine to validate the content before adding to the repository. What’s more, it enables the team to define approval processes for content validation. In a way, this workflow capability can simplify the business processes and manage the content efficiently.
3. Offers secure access
   The content repository has a pile of data in different types. Also, users are of different types like content creators, reviewers, customers, and team members. Based on their requirements and authorization, there is a need to allow them secure access to the data stores in a repository. Alfresco has robust permission modeling to achieve this objective with ease.
4. Provides effective search mechanism
   Alfresco has an effective search mechanism to enable users to access the content on the move. The searching capability of the Alfresco platform is based on the content’s metadata and the body of the content. It makes the users easy to find the right content in relatively no time!

1. Integrates with external apps
   A reliable and reputed Alfresco development company can readily integrate external applications with the Alfresco platform. On the other hand, it is also possible to integrate Alfresco as a repository of a front-end business application. Technical architects prefer Alfresco for its seamless integration capacity with external systems and applications.
2. Easy transformation of content
   When it comes to the contract management system, the contract document remains in the word format and various teams review it. In the end, the contract becomes active and editable word document is converted into non-editable PDF. Alfresco makes it possible through its robust content transformation abilities.
3. Higher versioning capability
   Usually, enterprises have a well-defined workflow review process in place. Various departments review the content and necessary modifications are based on their inputs. Alfresco has a versioning capacity to create new versions of the same content or keep the record of existing versions.
4. Identifies business rules
   Business rules play a vital role in ensuring your company’s seamless document management and auditing of reports. Also, they can provide actionable insights to the management. For example, the contract status is changed as we move the content from one folder to another. If teams are reviewing the contract details, then the document remains in the Review folder. But once it moves to Active folder, the status Active is shown in front of the contract detail. Alfresco can easily define such business rules.
5. Audits the content
   The content is passed through three major stages- access, review, and edit. Alfresco not only offers secured access to the corporate documents but also give information about the users who access specific documents. It is necessary to find any malicious attempts and loopholes in the content access mechanism. Auditing of content is possible thanks to the Alfresco platform’s content auditing functionality.

Wrapping Up
Enterprises witness challenges like real-time monitoring, productivity-related issues, and regulatory compliance. Alfresco services are aimed at addressing all these challenges and providing higher security at reasonable costs. These are major reasons why Alfresco is a preferred choice of modern businesses worldwide.

As a leading Alfresco development company, Tridhya Tech has delivered robust enterprise content management solutions globally. Our experienced Alfresco ECM developers can readily address the complex requirements of modern business.