Most enterprises and organizations haven’t resolved their problems around storing, handling and searching documents. Files are still stored on shared file systems or – even worse - local hard disks, many companies have implemented multiple document management applications that don’t interact. Searching across repositories is not possible, workflow support is often marginal. There is a clear need to act.

While the open source movement brought up hundreds of new (web) content management solutions, the landscape of open source document management is far less crowded. Document management as a topic is quite well suited to generate good open source offerings, as most companies do have a need for document management and the requirements are similar from company to company. Helpful also is the fact that "open standards"€ for content/document formats or access and exchange methods have been established and serve as the basis for the development of individual open source components (e.g. repository, search, transformation). Based on these standards and components, new open source solutions such as Alfresco have been developed and matured in less than a year.

Seven open source document management solutions have been compared in this white paper: Alfresco, Plone, CPS, Contineo, KnowledgeTree, Owl and Open sTeam. These applications are based on different technology platforms and each has unique features and uses. Quality and maturity of some of these solutions is more than satisfying even for enterprise usage. The final choice depends on the applicable technology strategies (e.g. Java versus Python), on the requirement priorities (e.g. collaboration versus traditional document management needs), on the need for integration with other solutions as well as on operational needs (e.g. scalability-goals, departmental versus enterprise usage, etc.) but in many situations final contenders will include Alfresco, CPS and Plone. In any case, a proof of concept or pilot involving users is recommended before making final implementation decisions.