The term collaboration describes the work people do together to complete a task, build a product or deliver a service. People have been collaborating for tens of thousands of years to solve problems facing them collectively. Today, efficient and effective collaboration are critical to the success of the 21st century enterprise and value chain. Businesses find that they can deliver a superior customer experience, garner customer loyalty, improve financial performance by collaborating across the value chain and even with competitors in some cases.

Over the years, the tools of collaboration have evolved. The earliest electricity-based collaboration tool was the telegraph. Tools improved throughout the 20th century culminating in primitive Internet tools as well as advanced and expensive proprietary portal software and enterprise content management. Only the highest “dollar value” projects could afford these advanced collaboration; others were relegated to the basic Internet tools available – email, web sites, user groups, etc. The 21st century has seen several trends – open source software, more advanced Internet tools such as wikis and blogs, and advanced but simpler to use portal and content management - converge to change this picture significantly.

Against this backdrop, Red Hat and Alfresco have collaborated to build an integrated collaboration solution that capitalizes on these trends and magnifies their benefits. The Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution is designed to bring advanced collaboration and social computing to a larger market ranging from local team collaboration up through value chain collaboration across multiple enterprises. Red Hat and Alfresco do this by bringing together the leading open source portal, the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform with Alfresco's Web Content Management.

Jboss Enterprise Portal Platform (with default content repository)

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform provides an open source and standards-based environment for hosting and serving application and information in a portal web interface, publishing and managing content, and customizing users’ experiences. JBoss Portal simplifies access to applications and information by providing a single source of interaction with corporate and internet-based information. Standards supported include the JSR168 portlet standard, Java Content Repository (JSR170) and WSRP.

JBoss' standalone enterprise portal offering provides basic out-of-the-box web and departmental content management support for enabling users to contribute, organize, and maintain content used within a single JBoss portal deployment. Users can upload documents and create simple HTML content fragments, with support for file-level version control and simple browsing using a standard content directory browser.

JBoss Portal is most frequently used as a departmental, functional area, enterprise intranet portal, or value chain extranet portal. JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform is also increasingly being used as an enterprise SOA user interaction platform. Emerging use cases for JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform also include customer and community facing portals.

Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (standalone)

The Alfresco ECM solution is a enterprise platform for managing all business documents, digital assets, and web content in an enterprise. The Alfresco solution supports integrated services for collaboration and records management and provides advanced services for content tagging, federated search, business process management (workflow), security, transformation, lifecycle management, and compliance. Alfresco ECM provides a simple to use, simple to roll-out ECM alternative to traditional products from established vendors such as Documentum, FileNet, Interwoven, and Vignette. While comparable with these traditional vendors in terms of product capabilities, Alfresco's open source business model, out-of-the-box usability, and modern application architecture centered around Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, and JavaServer Faces (JSF) make it a must-evaluate product for any organization looking to launch any new ECM initiative.

Alfresco ECM is seen in many collaboration, document management, image management, records management initiatives. It also may be found as a key product delivering many standalone (non-portal based) web content management initiative, including:

• Intranets and intranet consolidation
• eCommerce
• Corporate www site
• Customer self-service site

Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution

The Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution is a complete solution combining best of breed, standards-compliant J2EE enterprise portal and enterprise content management platforms. This solution is available through the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) which is an online environment for purchasing integrated, enterprise open source solutions.

Pre-integrated and certified on a complete Red Hat Linux / JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Server stack, this combined offering enables customers to get up-and-running quickly with a major enterprise portal application with a no compromises-architecture to provides rich content delivery and integration services via the JBoss Portal and rich content services via the Alfresco platform. This solution extends Red Hat's JBoss Portal Platform and ECM offerings with out-of-the-box JSR-168 compliant portlets for provisioning content collaboration, document management, and web content management services directly within the portal environment, and a rich, lightweight, JavaScript-based extension framework for readily surfacing any Alfresco's managed content or content services directly into any portal page.

Major Product Capabilities

• All of the capabilities provided in the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform
• All of the capabilities provided in Alfresco's WCM offering
• My Spaces portlet (pre-built portlet for enterprise document management and collaboration within the context of any portal deployment
• My Documents portlet (pre-built portlet for provisioning any library of documents or digital assets within any portal page)
• My Web Files (pre-built portlet for enabling portal end-users to simply and easily create and manage web content that can be reused outside the portal application itself for purposes of generating marketing collateral, email newsletters, RSS feeds, or other web pages for any non-portal-based website)
• Web Scripts (lightweight, REST- and JavaScript-based development framework for quickly creating new portlets embedding any Alfresco-managed content or content service).

Red Hat and Alfresco see the Team Collaboration Solution being primarily deployed in the following scenarios.

• Employee portals (Sales, HR, Marketing, R&D)
• Value chain extranets (including partners and suppliers)
• Customer portals
• SOA process user interaction and presentation with collaboration requirements

At Red Hat, we are excited to collaborate with Alfresco to bring this leading, open source collaboration solutions to people around the world working on a wide range of tasks, projects and solutions to enable them to simply and affordably enhance their collaboration experience, speed time to market, reduce error and misunderstanding and improve customer and user satisfaction.

Click Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution to get to RHX for more information.