The Social Computing Platform enables organizations to implement next generation rich internet applications to mash-up and present internal and external content, bringing social networking capabilities to the business end user, while retaining choice over the selection of best of breed tools and ensuring enterprise-level security and control.

The Social Computing Challenge

The new world of Social Computing changes the focus to:

• People – understanding preferences from communication and relationships vs. data and objects
• Collaboration – Sharing of ideas and contribution of knowledge in a creative environment vs. workflow and control
• Content-as-a-Service – Content accessible everywhere – shared drive, repository, Facebook … with automatic and appropriate storage, management, security, auditing and retention vs. a content suite and user driven storage
• Context of Networks – Activity driven context based on content, projects and team vs. person only
• People-Centric Tools – Tech-populism bringing the tools we know and love at home into the office vs. 1990’s interfaces and systems

The Alfresco Open Source Social Computing Platform

Alfresco has embraced this major industry trend and incorporated the following capabilities into the Alfresco Social Computing Platform:

• Social Collaboration – Knowledge Spaces, Calendars, Discussions, Wikis, Presence (Skype and Yahoo), Social Tagging, and richer Social Networking information for users
• Integrating the Outside-In – Out-of-the-box integration of best of breed open source Web 2.0 tools and services – Facebook, iGoogle, MediaWiki, WordPress, TypePad, RSS Readers & Email
• Integrating the Inside-Out – Out-of-the-box content publishing to multiple channels – Web Sites, Facebook, WordPress & TypePad
• Rich Mash Up Architecture – Creation of new Rich Internet Application (RIA) mash up applications through Adobe® Flex™ SDK, integrating front with simple, lightweight scripting APIsChoice – Choice of operating system, database, application server, portal, content creation tools, collaboration & social networking tools

The Alfresco Social Computing Platform is designed to address these needs by providing specific facilities for knowledge workers to collaborate effectively with their colleagues and work with external social networking tools and services in a controlled, secure manner.

Alfresco Open Source Social Computing delivers integration with the following Web 2.0 tools and services:

• Facebook
• iGoogle
• MediaWiki
• TypePad
• WordPress
• Adobe Flex