Alfresco Services

Alfresco is an Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management.

Alfresco was created in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, COO of Business Objects. They were later joined by Kevin Cochrane, founder of the Teamsite product sold by Interwoven.

This team have created the most advanced and also the most simple ECM solution on the market...and its open source.

With Venture Capital funding, an impressive management team and over 400 enterprise customers already, Alfresco is re-defining the standard for Enterprise Content Management.

Lateral Minds is a Gold partner of Alfresco Software. We have been using this platform from its inception and have been involved in performance and scalability testing of the software. Lateral Minds can offer consulting and advice on implementing and configuring Alfresco, as well as certified customisation, training and support across Australia and New Zealand.

Lateral Minds have been delivering successful strategic Enterprise Content Management projects since 2002. Enterprise Content Management projects combine four different streams of methodology together, making them unique in the software industry. The four streams include standard project management methodology, software development lifecycle methodology, strategic information architecture definition and Business Process Management design. As a result ECM projects can not be treated like any other software project. Our focused methodology takes an iterative phase-based approach, drawing from the commercially proven elements of the Agile software development methodologies and combines this with a workshop driven discovery, validation and execution of the defined Business Processes on the platform.

All four streams fall under one core methodology which has the following phases in any given project:


However each of the four streams may be sequenced such that activities occur in parallel to reduce the elapsed time of the project. For instance, system installation can occur at the same time as the Discovery phase for the Business Process. We focus the Discovery workshops around five core themes which cross the streams discussed earlier and this allows us to guide the customer to a successful conclusion. These are:

Typically Lateral Minds provides 3 core resource types to a project:
• Architect (Responsible for Discovery and Solution Design)
• Senior Consultant (Responsible for Technical Delivery)
• Consultant (Development Team member)
Most Project Management activities are handled by the Senior Consultant, although often our clients prefer to provide their own Project Manager, to reduce their exposure to risk on the project.
Once into actual implementation we prefer to take a more “Agile” approach based short iterative cycles that are prototyped with the customer :