One of the coolest (at least in my book) things that was released with Alfresco 2.1 (we are actually up to 2.1.1 now) is the Microsoft Office Add-on. It is not just cool because it allows you to work from Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly in Alfresco, but because it is an excellent example of Web Scripts in action. The add-on is actually launching a web browser that hooks into these MS Office Applications. Web Scripts are a powerful integration point for Alfresco. (Search here for write ups on Web Scripts.)

The Alfresco add-in allows you to:

browse the repository

search within the repository

open, save, delete content

access version history and compare versions

transform documents to PDFs

start workflows

insert documents into an existing document (think of a folder with documents that are actually standard response to RFP or RFI questions, you can insert these responses directly into the RFP/RFI using the add-in.).

Alfresco is normally a zero-foot print install on the client side (You use your browser and/or mapped drive into the repository.) But this is really worth the 6MB for the whole bundle.

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