Alfresco is a collection of information management software products for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems developed using Java technology. Their primary software offering, branded as a Digital Business Platform is proprietary & a commercially licensed open source platform, supports open standards, and provides enterprise scale
John Newton (co-founder of Documentum) and John Powell (a former COO of Business Objects) founded Alfresco Software, Inc. in 2005. Its investors include the investment firms SAP Ventures, Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund. The original technical staff consisted of principal engineers from Documentum and Oracle.
In July 2005, Alfresco released the first version of their software.
While Alfresco's product initially focused on document management, in May, 2006, the company announced its intention to expand into web content management by acquiring senior technical and managerial staff from Interwoven; this included its VP of Web Content Management, two principal engineers, and a member of its user-interface team.
In October 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report described Alfresco as a leading Java-based open source web content management system.
In 2010, Alfresco sponsored a new open-source BPM engine called Activiti.
In July 2011, Alfresco and Ephesoft announced a technology partnership to offer document capture and Content Management Interoperability Services brought together for intelligent PDF capture and search and workflow development.
In October 2011, Alfresco 4.0 was released with improvements to the user interface. The new Alfresco moved additional features from Alfresco Explorer to Alfresco Share, as Alfresco Explorer is intended to be deprecated over time.
In January 2013, Alfresco appointed Doug Dennerline, former President of SuccessFactors, former EVP of Sales at Salesforce.com, and former CEO of WebEx, as its new CEO.
In September 2014, Alfresco 5 was released with new reporting and analytics features and an overhaul of its document search tool, moving from Lucene to Solr.[14] In November 2016, Alfresco launched an AWS Quickstart[15] for building an Alfresco Content Services server cluster on the AWS Cloud.[16] In March 2017, Alfresco 5.2 was released and rebranded as the Digital Business Platform. This included the release of the Application Development Framework with reusable Angular JS(2.0) components.[17] On February 8, 2018, it was announced that Alfresco was to be acquired by the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P.