Today Jeff Potts, Alfresco’s Chief Community Officer, writes on Social Content that the Alfresco AVM (Alternative Versioning Model) will no longer be supported from Alfresco 5. The AVM was an alternative repository implementation in Alfresco to support Web Content Management use cases. It was designed as some sort of version control system with support for repository virtualization. It was originally designed by Kevin Cochrane who left Alfresco in 2008 to work for Day Software. 

I am must say that I am very happy with Alfresco’s decision to get rid of the AVM store. The whole idea behind the virtualization was interesting, but having to work with two repositories always caused a lot of problems. The solution was also too complex for most end users. At Incentro we support a couple of publishers who use Alfresco and publishing to the internet is only one of their channels. For these customers we always had to write custom actions to copy content from one repository to the other using the CrossRepositoryCopyService. End users, including non-technical authors, had to execute a copy action and then they where forced to navigate to the Web Project in order to deploy the content to a web server.

Starting from Alfresco 4.0 you can deploy directly from the DM (Document Management) repository to a web server. I haven’t tried it yet, but you might even be able to add a publishing channel to do the job.