• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 29, 2011

Socially inclined open-source software provider Alfresco announced a partnership with Jive Software to jointly offer clients cross-platform publishing, a common user database and other integrations. 

The companies are collaborating with Jive consulting partner SolutionSet to offer what they are calling an Alfresco-Jive "connector" to both companies' content.

"Social business systems like Jive are enabling new ways of collaboration in the enterprise, and users are adopting them quickly," explained John Newton, chief technology officer at Alfresco.

As a result of the partnership, Newton added, "enterprise content becomes both social and organized ... resulting in more effective employees and well-managed enterprise content."

The integration will be based on Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 using the CMIS open standard.

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is a content platform that can coexist with social business systems such as Jive to help manage and retain the content created by such systems.

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4's recently redesigned Share interface adds status updates -- like those of Facebook and Twitter -- to its collaboration and document management platform.

The broader aim of working with Jive is to manage internal social content and deliver a single coherent message to external social media. Per the partnership, documents can be created in Alfresco and published to Jive or created in Jive and published to Alfresco. Plus, within Jive, users can bring in an existing Alfresco document.

In order to maintain consistent content visibility between systems, users can synchronize ACLs between both Jive and Alfresco systems.