Alfresco Software, the open source ECM play, is now Alfresco, the trendy open source Social Computing Platform for the enterprise.

The content-searching REST-enabled apotheosis has been made possible by Alfresco integrating its ECM software with the "happening" Web 2.0 tools and services like Facebook, iGoogle, Adobe Flex, Skype, RSS Readers, TypePad, MediaWiki and WordPress.

That way it can bring Web 2.0 social networking into the workplace, and business, in turn, can quickly tap into the "wisdom of the crowds," it says.

Flex provides Alfresco's rich mashup architecture, and a way for Rich Internet Applications to be created on top of Alfresco, without the technology lock-in of Microsoft's competitive SharePoint, Alfresco sniffs.

Alfresco is currently previewing its Google Gadgets for ECM, which will let businesses create, edit and manage content from within an iGoogle homepage,

Meanwhile, there's now an integrated Red Hat-Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution for SMBs available for an annual Red Hat subscription from the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) that delivers Alfresco's Enterprise Social Computing Platform capabilities via the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform.

Think rich content services and mashups and building information-rich portals for employees or extranets for customers and partners.

It's supposed to bring a comprehensive open source collaboration alternative to a marketplace dominated by high-priced proprietary software.

The widgetry includes pre-built ECM portlets for document management and collaboration in any portal deployment; a document portlet for provisioning a library of documents or digital assets within any portal page; a forms portlet for publishing reusable content; and files portlet for managing in-progress changes to any web site.

There's also pre-built team collaboration portlets that are supposed to provide out-of-the-box integration with team blog, wiki and forum components and content rules for automated processing of business documents and digital assets.