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What is Alfresco?

Alfresco is for every business- from small to enterprise class. As simple to use as a shared drive mounted on your desktop, but with all the web 2.0 bells and whistles of web-based collaboration project tools like Basecamp and Box.net. Alfresco is Open Source enterprise-class software, ready to use out-of-the-box with options for enhancement and customization.

Unlike Microsoft Sharepoint, Alfresco's Open Source licensing means you pay $0 for unlimited users. And if you like the web-based file management or collaboration features of hosted products like Basecamp or Box.net, get all of their features and more, integrated, and on your own private server, without storage limits or one-size-fits-all approach to features and pricing.

Why Choose Alfresco Community Edition from Cloud Controllers?

The advantages of having a dedicated Alfresco Community Edition server hosted on Amazon Web Services EC2 infrastructure are substantial.

• You have all the benefits of true cloud computing which allows you to scale storage or computing power based on actual usage.
• Unlike Software as a Service products, like Basecamp and Box.net you own your dedicated server instance, providing control, portability, and higher bandwidth.

While every Alfresco server subscription is managed and monitored by Cloud Controllers, your company retains total control over your data and your Amazon EC2 server. Review the subscription details, then demo a free trial server and contact sales for more information.

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File and Collaboration Choices for Small Business

Software as a Service (SaaS) or your own server? Companies have seen the success of Salesforce.com and tried to address document management needs of smaller businesses using the SaaS business model. These products come in two flavors:

• web-based project management and collaboration applications which helps teams of users manage files and important information on a project-by-project basis 
• file synchronization applications, which store files on a central server and keep them synced on the hard disks of multiple computers as an alternative to the traditional shared drive

Let's see how hosting your own Alfresco server compares to two popular SaaS products:

Comparing Alfresco Share To Basecamp

Basecamp is a hosted software as a service (SaaS) product which, like Alfresco Share, allows teams to upload files, plan projects and have online discussions. Project members receive and respond to email notifications. Both applications allow you to quickly create project sites to manage files, discussions, tasks and calendars. Here are the other areas Alfresco Share has advantages over Basecamp:

• Alfresco Share also offers wiki and blog components 
• Alfresco Share offers easy embedding of external websites and RSS feeds on the project home page 
• Alfresco offers mounted shared drive or ftp access to your files while Basecamp is strictly web browser based.
• Basecamp limits you to 75GB of file storage and a 2GB file size limit, after which you must delete files in order to upload new files, but Alfresco on EC2 is virtually unlimited in file size and storage allotments.
• Basecamp locks you in: you do not have the option of running your own Basecamp server on-premise or in another data center environment. With Alfresco on Amazon EC2 you own your data and server application and cantake it wherever you choose.
• Basecamp is a Software as a Service- you have no control over compute resources given to your account. Alfresco on Amazon EC2 let's you scale resources based on need.

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Comparing Alfresco To ECMs like Sharepoint

Thanks to Microsoft's dominance in the file and mail server market, Sharepoint has introduced Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to a wide audience. Alternatives to Sharepoint like traditional Content Management Systems (CMS) and ECMs (EMC Documentum, OpenText) are a 1990's legacy. Regardless of their age or features, all of these competeitors suffer in comparison to Alfresco, as they are:

• Too expensive
• Too difficult to use, rollout, integrate and scale
• Too difficult to use as a foundation for developing content applications
• Too proprietary

How do you increase simplicity and effectiveness while decreasing cost? Switch from proprietary system to Alfresco Document Management.

Alfresco Document Management is:

• Built on open standards and open source
• Built on a Java architecture
• The most scalable CMS

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Alfresco Community Edition 3.4.d on Amazon EC2

Product Summary:

• Deployed following AWS best practices on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
• Application and user data storage isolated on independent Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes for maximum protection and fast recovery from failure
• 365/24/7 monitoring and alerting of server availability, application response and storage usage
• Scalable for thousands of users and terabytes of data (contact sales for a detailed estimate and demo)
• No vendor lock-in! Configured for secure management without depending on 3rd party management services.

Product Support

Bundled and Pay-As-You-Go support charges

Bundled benefits covered by Cloud Controllers Hourly Runtime charges include the following:

• assistance activating AWS services, launching and configuring servers following AWS best practices
• pro-active administration with 365/24/7 monitoring and alerting of server availability, application response, storage usage and data backup
• planned or unplanned maintenance of the server or user data volumes
• user account setup- including Active Directory/Open Directory/OpenLDAP account integration
• login problem support
• best effort application support via email
• assistance migrating application data to another cloud provider or your on-premise infrastructure upon cancellation of service
• eligible for pay-as-you-go support (see below)

Pay-As-You-Go support is available at the rate of $99 an hour, billed in 15-minute increments, and generally applicable only to incidents where a remote screen sharing session (such as system administrator mentoring or VIP end-user support) is requested by an authorized contact at your company.

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Billing Procedures

A $25 setup fee is charged at sign-up and covers configuring your Amazon Web Services account and services needed for your cloud server(s). Billing for your server is done at or around the 1st of each month for the previous month's server time and support. You will see two charges on your credit card statement each month:

• Charges from Amazon Web Services on or about the first of each month for the previous month activity, itemized by service which will include:
  
  • EC2 server runtime
  • Amazon EBS and S3 (data storage)
  • if applicable, Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) or other AWS services configured for your application with your consent.
• Charges from Cloud Controllers on or about the first of each month for the previous month activity, itemized by service which will include:
  
  • Bundled support and management services
  • Any Pay-As-You-Go support charges from the previous month

AWS Account Setup Terms and Conditions

By purchasing this subscription you understand you agree to the following:

• You grant Cloud Controllers permission to create an Amazon Web Services account for your company dedicated for use by this server product and other Cloud Controllers server products your company may subscribe to in the future.
• You grant Cloud Controllers permission to create an AWS Identity and Access Management policy and associated user for use by Cloud Controllers support personnel in administering your server.
• You understand that Cloud Controllers will only subscribe this AWS account to AWS services needed for your server configuration
• You understand that once the initial configuration of your AWS account is complete, Cloud Controllers will request a password reset from Amazon Web Services for the account which will effectively transfer all control of the account to the user of the email address designated by your company.

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