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Alfresco Software on Wednesday announced the availability of Alfresco Content Services for Lotus social collaboration products, an integration between the Alfresco open source enterprise content management (ECM) system and IBM Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal. This integration brings together a combination of the Lotus social collaboration capabilities and Alfresco’s lightweight, scalable, full-featured ECM, which is simple and low cost to use, deploy, maintain and support.

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Alfresco and IBM worked together to develop a seamless, fully featured integration between Alfresco ECM and IBM Lotus social software in record time due to the modern, open, REST-based architecture of Alfresco’s ECM software and the forthcoming Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard.

Unlike Microsoft SharePoint, Alfresco Content Services for Lotus delivers an economical, scalable and open platform while allowing flexible access for programmers to extend the integration from Lotus Notes, Domino, XPage and Portal applications using a wide choice of languages, APIs, protocols and services, including Java, JavaScript, JSP, PHP, CMIS, JSR 168k CIFS, IMAP, JCR, WebDAV, FTP, NFS, SMTP, XForms, SOAP, and .net. In addition, this integration brings features to Lotus software not available through Microsoft SharePoint, including 5015.2-certified records management capabilities, and content services for Lotus collaboration in the cloud.

“As an organization using Lotus technologies and Alfresco, we see real business value in this integration. Users can be assured that they are working with the latest version of a document regardless of the tool they are using – Alfresco Content Services for Lotus will give us the power and flexibility to do this with the ease of drag and drop,” said Dr Michael Wagner, Director of BPM, Paul Hartmann AG, one of Europe’s major international manufacturers of medical and hygiene products. “Integrated collaborative content management functionality is a cornerstone of our ‘desktop of the future project’.”

For organizations who want to provide a more functional and flexible content management alternative to Microsoft SharePoint without disrupting users, Alfresco Content Services for Lotus includes an implementation of the SharePoint protocol. This provides users with seamless access from Microsoft Office, while giving companies the freedom of choice in their IT architecture. Organizations will experience the best of both worlds -- providing workers with easy-to-use content management and collaboration tools that integrate with Microsoft Office while lowering overall IT costs and increasing return on existing investments.

“We have delivered on a critical customer need by integrating an open, easily deployable back end ECM platform into the Lotus social collaboration suite," said Jeff Schick, VP of IBM Social Computing Software. "A match seemingly made in CMIS heaven, this integration not only provides Lotus users with a strong content management foundation, but also makes Lotus’ innovative social collaboration tools available to the Alfresco community.”