An Alternative to SharePoint?An Alternative to SharePoint?

Ingres and Alfresco have teamed to create an open-source alternative to Microsoft's SharePoint platform for document collaboration and management. The Linux-based appliance joins Alfresco's ECM with Ingres' database services. Alfresco has long positioned itself as a lower-cost offering that also offers the extensibility of open-source.

We continue to see strong adoption rates for application sharing platforms with approximately 80% of our recent "Unified Communications and Collaboration" benchmark depoying or planning to deploy such applications. Among those we interviewed, SharePoint holds a commanding market share, but we continue to hear concerns around cost and complexity of deployment, which in the current economic environment presents an opportunity for lower cost alternatives to gain market share.

We also see document collaboration products serving as the basis for adoption of enterprise social networking systems such as Telligent's Community Server and IBM Lotus's Connections. There's no mention yet of social networking services as part of the Ingres-Alfresco announcement, but it wouldn't be surprising to see the eventual integration of an open source social networking server.