The leader in open source enterprise content management, Alfresco Software, announced a few days ago that Alfresco Labs 3 would be offered by Canonical within a pre-built software download in Ubuntu. New users can now be reached by Alfresco, as they are a simple apt-get away from executing a full installation.

As result to being pre-built and tested, each download includes the necessary drivers and dependencies, which greatly reduces the amount of work done by the user.

Martin Musierowicz, VP Alliances, Alfresco Software, commented: "Ubuntu is fast becoming the new star of Linux as demonstrated by the findings of Alfresco's most recent Open Source Barometer. Accounting for nearly a quarter of all Linux OS rollouts as of January 2008, Ubuntu was also the fastest growing Linux distribution over the second half of 2007. With the backing of a professional organization such as Canonical, we're delighted to be driving the growing trend towards easy to install and easy to manage open source products."

"We're excited to work with Alfresco on delivering an enterprise-class content management system for Ubuntu users, for which this is the first step. Users have a great opportunity to assess Alfresco on Ubuntu and see the benefits these two great Open Source solutions can bring organizations. We will jointly deliver a pre-packaged enterprise version of Alfresco later in the year," said Malcolm Yates, Global ISV manager at Canonical.

Based in London, Alfresco Software is the first company to bring open source to the enterprise content management market, enabling a reduced cost of ownership, while being widely spread. Alfresco has become increasingly popular because of its open source ECM (enterprise content management) system, a proof to that being the one million downloads, as well as the company's 500 enterprise customers, among which NYSE, Los Angeles Times, Boise Cascade, Sony Pictures, Activision, Kaplan, FedEx and KLM are included.

Very prolific in the field of development and distribution of open source products, Canonical Ltd is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, which has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions.