Alfresco Reviews

The best feature is extensibility. Hands down, the best feature of Alfresco is what is "not there yet". The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way. Alfresco, as a company, is supporting this approach by improving the Alfresco Maven SDK and extending native APIs.

Alfresco plays a core part in our business, where we use the platform as a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) as opposed to a "simple" CMS. We have developed a proprietary solution to integrate Alfresco with a third party Learning Management System (LMS), which is the key success of our business.

I've been working with Alfresco (both with the product and as a partner with the company) since 2010.

There were no particular stability issues. Alfresco underwent a major refactoring in a few areas of the product, such as:

• Migration from ANT to Maven building environment
• Migration to Solr first, and Solr4 eventually
• Introduction of Dojo JS framework
• Angular2JS

These changes require engineers to pay particular attention when migrating or upgrading older versions of the product. As long as they follow the recommended upgrade procedure, there wouldn't be any major issues.

Alfresco has a very steep learning curve, and unfortunately, during the learning process, it's very easy to make errors, which often are unforgiving.

This is also why usually companies interested in buying Alfresco have to rely on companies that are specialized in administrating and customizing the software.

There were no scalability issues at all. Alfresco Enterprise is top notch with its clustering capabilities. Even in smaller installations, the software requires just minor adjustments to server resources and a few configuration changes.

It's been a big selling point of the software for years, and that's easily one of the strongest Alfresco features.

Technical support is good, but their internal workflow is very slow. Even if you end up getting the correct answer or suggestion, a good Alfresco engineer will probably find it's way through a bug, question, fix or whatever he's having difficulties with, before the technical support.

This doesn't absolutely mean their support is not able to answer, but due to their complex internal structure, the answer fails to arrive within a "decent" time frame.

This also shouldn't affect you if and when you considering buying Alfresco, since usually you'd rely on a re-seller or partner for that. They can provide, most of the time, a better and quicker Alfresco support.

Never. But I came across different solutions for previous clients and I did perform migrations from Documentum and SharePoint. I also integrated Alfresco with a lot of other business software (eg. SAP).

Alfresco offers two initial setup options: basic and advanced. If you're not comfortable with terms and concepts like ports, DNS, hostname, database etc, the basic setup will do all that for you and will set up Alfresco with defaults parameters.

A Zero Day guide is available through the official docs, which can help then configure Alfresco accordingly and in relation to each specific use case.

The advanced setup requires a little bit more knowledge, but then again, if you're installing Alfresco on your own, you should know what are you doing anyway. You'll most likely need both system admin and DBA to configure the server and the database properly. Other than that, the initial setup is not complex at all.

Alfresco did change some things about the pricing and licensing recently, and I've always been on the other side of the fence. In other words, I worked as an engineer and not as a "business partner".

My top priority has always been developing against Alfresco and not selling the product. That said, if you buy Alfresco through a partner, there is usually a OEM licensing option (this depends on each Alfresco<->partner contract). Otherwise, the smallest individual business license will allow you to have a single instance Alfresco (that is 1 license = 1 server), with up to 300 users.

It's also worth mentioning that Activiti has recently become a standalone product and now has a separate license and pricing. The Activiti engine within Alfresco is still included in the Alfresco license though.

The choice of the product depends exclusively on what the requirements are. However, Alfresco is the only enterprise CMS that has features like contribution, sharing, workflows, automation and robust content and record management, that are also Open Source.

Find expert people with years of knowledge. Alfresco is a complex platform. The better the engineer, the less the chance of having major issues with the product.