Alfresco has added SharePoint Protocol support to the Open Source ECM Alfresco Labs (Beta) 3. If the name Alfresco rings a bell but you can’t place it, perhaps it’s because former InfoWorld Open Sources blogger Matt Asay is VP of Business Development at Alfresco and runs the company’s US operation in Palo Alto. In any case, Alfresco is in the open source Enterprise content management business.John was calling from England, where it was about 8 in the evening and an uncharacteristic 80 F. We started off by talking about how Alfresco has been doing, and the numbers John quoted were impressive: roughly 1.3 million downloads, about 10 thousand installations, and 500-600 paying customers. According to John, Alfresco has expanded faster using an open source model with paid services and support than Documentum did at the same point in its history with a traditional proprietary software model.As a result of the recent EU legal actions against Microsoft, Microsoft released the specifications of all their Office interfaces. The news that John wanted to share is that Alfresco has taken advantage of that to add SharePoint Protocol support to Alfresco Labs (Beta) 3. Have a close look at the screen shot at the left of Word accessing a document in Alfresco over the SharePoint protocol — click on it to open a copy full size.Why does this matter? For one thing, as popular as SharePoint has become, administrators and users don’t always like its restrictions. When you install SharePoint, you must also install Microsoft SQL Server, even if your standard database is Oracle or DB2 or MySQL, and you must install it on Microsoft Server 2003 or 2008. When you use a SharePoint site, you must also use Microsoft Internet Explorer to be able to access its full functionality, even if your standard desktop is a Macintosh or your standard browser is Firefox. Alfresco removes those restrictions, as well as being open source. Alfresco Labs 3 is immediately available for download at: https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Labs_3 Software Development