Most of the software the company I work for is based on Java. Still I do not agree that’s a reason to prefer Alfresco to Plone. In fact we chose Plone for many compelling reasons:
– We don’t intend to extend or adapt Plone or Alfresco, just use it.
– Even if we had any reason to extend it, Plone Archetypes tools makes it much more easy to the point that we can do it with graphical UML tools and some snippets of Python code.
– Plone is extremnly easy to install and maint, even in its clustered version.
– The underlying Zope platform on wich Plone runs is a master piece of act. To say the true I hace copied many of its designs patterns in my java software.

Even how, poeple are used do qualify Plone as a CMS, but i think it has most of qualities of a ECM system, which make it very usuful for this task. By this way, a single search in google with: plone cms, can return more than twice results than Alfresco and CPS.

I would not expect that Plone and Alfresco would be a good match for integration. Plone is built on the the Zope platform (Python) and Alfresco is Java. While these two technologies do have a common interface (WebDAV), I would recommed sticking with either Java or Python if for no other reason than managing the skillset of your IT organization.

There are two ways that I could see front ending Alfresco with a WCM: store XML files in Alfresco and use a WCM type presentation engine (such as Cocoon) do dynamic display; or have the WCM system manage structured web content and have references to Alfresco for significant binary content (for example: white papers). You could also have Alfresco push the binary content into the WCM at the end of the workflow. In the latter way, Alfresco and Plone could be used in concert. However, it may be better to standardize on one technology for maintenance purposes. If you want to use Plone, Zope has some excellent document management capabilities too.

1. It lacks ECM features like a decent workflow.

2. Some important parts of Alfresco, that differenciate a CMS (like Plone) from an ECMS (like CPS) are not open source.

We did our homework last week with two blog entries, one providing a “scientific” assessment of who the most popular open source ECM is, this other one explaining more in depth why we feel that CPS is the right choice when it comes to “true” open source ECM.