Re: Have you used/worked with Alfresco? #content-management
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Cornejo Castro, Miguel <miguel.cornejo@...>
Hi Gian,
I've done several concepts on it (practical trials mostly),
no full roll-outs. It's a very solid document management platform, very friendly
for developers, with nice touches that will or will not be relevant to you
depending on goals. Integrates very well with other tools, and supports both MS
and open standards. The coming version 3.0 showcased in Barcelona adds a further
layer of collaboration tools and tricks, plus better tools for building
interfaces, that make it a great KM tool.
Sticking to current features and comparisons with tools
I've worked with and implemented, IMHO... :
- It's nimbler than FileNet but (on a document management
level) at least as good, without some of the worst gaffes of IBM's acquisition.
Alfresco is much more friendly for customization. Good support (on both
Community and Enterprise versions) beats my experience of FileNet. No per-user
(or other) license costs makes it cost-effective on both large and
cash-strapped organizations. You can get quality integrators for both. On the
process automatization level (BPM) they are not on the same league: while
Alfresco supports administrative routing and can be proficient for most uses
(indeed I've used it to teach practical BPR), FileNet's processes can be
exponentially more complex, leading to powerful integrations with other
tools.
- It's far more serious than Sharepoint. While MS's tool
does a decent job of supporting team collaboration, Sharepoint is very
bad at the document management angle (lack of serious searching, for one, makes
it a bad KM solution), a poor integrated web solution, and not though for use as
a serious development platform. It's like a house without the foundations.
Alfresco has very good foundations and currently a nice collaboration feature
set (conversation support stands out), but as of today, the MS solution
incorporates some tricks that Alfresco does not have (wiki, blog). Still,
Sharepoint's integrated tricks are substandard: neither the bulletin boards nor
the blog nor the wiki are especially good nor stand well against the
competition. And Sharepoint locks you into a Microsoft environment while you can
use Alfresco in a mixed house of Linux, Mac and Windows (and Open Office and MS
Office and...).
Re the "open source vs corporate support" question,
Alfresco has hit a sweet spot because it has both:
That's about it for current features. If you're looking for
the collaboration toolset, though, you would do well to browse the new
Community feature set... full integration of wiki and blog stalwarts such as
Mediawiki and Wordpress are just half the fun. I especially like the way they
manage collaboration with people outside the organization.
Hope it helps a bit. Of course, the relevance of all this
depends on the goals you want to attain with the tool... there's better tools
for many uses.
Best regards,
Miguel De: sikmleaders@... [mailto:sikmleaders@...] En nombre de gjagai Enviado el: lunes, 30 de junio de 2008 22:45 Para: sikmleaders@... Asunto: [sikmleaders] Have you used/worked with Alfresco? Hi,
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