A document management system (DMS) is a system used to track, manage and store documents. Most are capable of keeping a record of the various versions created and modified by different users (history tracking). The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems. It is often viewed as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to digital asset management, document imaging, workflow systems and records management systems.

Alfresco is an enterprise content management system. Alfresco comes in two flavours. Alfresco Community Edition is free software, LGPL licensed open source and open standards. Alfresco Enterprise Edition is commercially / proprietary licensed open source, open standards and enterprise scale. Its design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance. Alfresco includes a content repository, an out-of-the-box web portal framework for managing and using standard portal content, a CIFS interface that provides file system compatibility on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems, a web content management system capable of virtualizing webapps and static sites via Apache Tomcat, Lucene indexing, and jBPM workflow