August 23
Making the Case: Alfresco
by David Palmer
With the recent release of Alfresco 2.1, this relatively new entry to the “enterprise-class” open source content management system is beginning to show some very real signs of being a major go-to tool for organizations who need all of the enterprise features of your Documentums, or Teamsites or Vignettes, but being completely open source.
Alfresco’s features are impressive, fully customizable workflow, document management, user roles, remote publishing features, as well as easily integrating other applications to create mashups. Built on a JEE platform, and runs in JBoss, Tomcat, Geronimo, it has real promising of being a mainstay in an Java open source enterprise stack.
While OpenCMS is the old timer in the enterprise-class open source CMS, Alfresco is showing remarkable maturity, in particular to documentation (if you’ve worked with OpenCMS I’m sure you know about the weakness in the documentation) and its feature set. There is also a well established organization backing up Alfresco, providing professional services and support, as well “enterprise” versions of their product, while maintaining a “community” edition.
I’m currently giving it a spin, and am incorporating it into our “home intranet” to publish web content to our various project sites, so the back-end content management is completely decoupled from the front-end content delivery (web) tier. So far, it seems to be working like a champ.
The Making the Case: Alfresco by Molecular Voices, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Vanessa said on March 11th, 2008
Since it has been a while since you put it in I am wondering if you have any comments to make on pitfalls or cons of the product?
Thx
Vanessa
David Palmer said on March 12th, 2008
Yes there are a couple pitfalls, or more like “things to keep in mind.”
The first is that Alfresco is really a framework. Getting the notion out of my head that it wasn’t an “out of the box” CMS resulted in a few frustrating moments. This basically translates into allowing for a bit more time in the “setup and configuration” phase of an Alfresco implementation project.
Second, is the licensing. The community edition is not patched and not supported, and Alfresco tightly controls the source code. Sure you can have the source code, and do all the modifications you want, but you can’t contribute back, and they, the company, will not support it. So, Alfresco isn’t truly an open source system to the extent that something like Apache JackRabbit is.
Third, this thing is huge. It took some playing around with to get it deployed and working within an existing application server environment (tomcat 5.5).
With all that being said, Alfresco is still a fine product and I’ll be keeping it in my roster of recommended enterprise content management systems. Especially where an OpenCMS just doesn’t fit the bill (a site that is beyond just simple content delivery and very very simple workflow)
I hope this helps!
Vanessa said on March 13th, 2008
What caused the difficulty in the app server?
Lack of documentation , config issues?
How did you fix it did you have to reinstall the app server?
Have you heard any news about it running on clustered virtual servers?
Thx
V