Alfresco Reviews

I mainly use Alfresco for content management, workflow, integration to scanning solutions, and reduction.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata. Other good features are that it's open-source and allows a lot of customization.

I think the presentation layer could be improved - currently, it's too complex, and there are too many features cluttered all over the screen. Alfresco also needs to be well-integrated with Microsoft, as it's currently a nuisance for customers who rely on Microsoft's Office 365 solutions. There's a pretty obvious gap in the overlap between SharePoint when customers go to O365 and are presented with the SharePoint license and storage to start with, which Alfresco isn't taking advantage of.

I've been using Alfresco for two years.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Alfresco's technical support is average.

The setup is straightforward as it's deployed by the vendor or integrator. It took about three weeks to get it set up and running.

The license for Alfresco is expensive - not the maximum, but close. There are also extra costs once you start building integrations, as implementation seems to be very costly.

In order to leverage Alfresco, you have to have a very large dataset. So if you're just working on a couple of million documents, it's probably not worthwhile installing it. Also, if you're looking for a look of customization, go with Alfresco, but if you're just going to use standard, out-of-the-box connectors, I would go with a different solution. I'd rate Alfresco six out of ten.

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.

We are using Alfresco for collaboration and IT project records. I am only using it for team sites. My sites are not really collaborative, but more sharing info and documents. I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar.

Sharing is easier than using file shares. Hopefully less duplication of files.

Metadata, auto class, disposition log, and legal hold.

We have used it for about two to three years, and the growth is incremental.

It was a decent deployment. We have an expert on staff.

No issues with stability at this time..

We did not have a prior software solution.

It is easy to set up, similar to SharePoint.

There are costs for any upgrade or additional functions.

I did not evaluate other options. IT selected Alfresco.

As long as they maintain DoD certification, it is a useful product. Everything will cost. I didn’t give it too high of a rating, mainly because the use is ad hoc. We do not have a lot of rules in place for governance, content, metadata, or disposition at this time.

Document Management, Content Model Manager, MS Office integration, Collaboration & Sharing, Workflow, Digital Asset Management, support for standards such as Content Management Interoperability Interface (CMIS).

We use the Alfresco product to keep track of project information (documentation), being it email conversation or office documents. Content can be easily found via Free Text Search or metadata search.

I have also been involved in a lot of Alfresco projects in the publishing area where really come into its best. The publishing area has high demands on a flexible content management solution and business process engine. Alfresco can be used to support full digitalizing of book production and publishing.

Alfresco is quite well rounded at this point but if I should pick something it would be to improve the Model Manager further so it supports the full range of content model definition language. Such as support for associations and mandatory aspects.

10 years

Not really, Alfresco works well on many different platforms either as a cluster install or a single node. However, you have to be experienced with the product for it to go smooth. I recommend training before embarking on any bigger projects.

No, but as said in previous question, Alfresco requires an experienced certified administrator to install it properly in production.

No, Alfresco scales very well in the web, application, and database layers. A typical high availability installation would consist of Apache web servers in the DMZ as SSL terminators, caching of static content, URL rewrite, and load-balancing between the nodes in the Alfresco server cluster, which can be scaled separately to the web layer and the database layer. The database layer can also be scaled separately via MySQL Master-Slave or for example PostgreSQL XtraDB cluster. The meta-data (database files) and content (content files and index) is typically stored on a SAN (such as a NetApp), making it easy to support a DR scenario. You provision application files and configuration via Puppet and content files, index, and database files are managed by the SAN.

Good, Alfresco will try and help out in any way they can to make the customer happy. It is also possible to get a lot of help from the community at community.alfresco.com

Average, this might be because I am quite experienced and the questions I have might be difficult to find an answer to quickly as I have probably already exhausted most solution possibilities before I contact support.

Have not used any other ECM system than Alfresco.

In the beginning, when I started out with Alfresco, it was quite a task as you need to know quite a lot of different areas to setup a proper Alfresco solution, you need to be familiar web server installation and configuration, certificate/https setup, LDAP. CIFS, WebDAV, application server tuning, database configuration, Kerberos etc. But these days we have guides for this, with clear steps making it easy to install the product and provide a robust solution.

You would spare yourself a lot of trouble by taking training courses on Alfresco. Check out courses on Udemy.

I was working for an Alfresco partner called Ixxus and I have worked with around 25 Alfresco projects, so my review is based on my experience from these projects.

Most clients I worked with are migrating from a shared drive setup or a home grown content management system, and they want to migrate existing content into Alfresco and start using CMS features such as free text search, metadata search, rules, fine grained permissions, automation, workflow, collaboration and sharing.

No, Alfresco is the most widely used open source ECM in the world and it has characteristics that I really like such as a Java based platform, lots of integration points, many protocols for accessing it, advanced workflow support, scripting, easily customizable user interface, a concept of a group/team based working area called site.

Start with a smaller project and bring in an experienced Alfresco consultant that is either Alfresco Certified Engineer (ACE) or Alfresco Certified Administrator (ACA). Or anyone that can provide extensive experience from deploying Alfresco into production. Preferably the Alfresco consultant should be able to talk you through a network architecture for an Alfresco deployment, content model design, how the system can be customized, how the workflow integration works, and finally how you will migrate existing content into Alfresco in an efficient way.

The most valuable features of this product are that it is easy to install and configure. The Community version of this product is also easy to use.

It has improved the working of our organization in terms of document collaboration, record lifecycle and search functionalities.

There is need to improve features such as the record management and case management in the product.

I have used this solution for seven years.

We did not encounter any stability issues; only some minor improvements are needed.

We did not encounter any scalability issues; only some minor improvements are needed.

The technical support provided is good.

Previously, I was not using any other solution. I started with the Alfresco product.

The installation is pretty much straightforward and for standard settings the installer is the best solution. However, if you decide to customize the product more, then the documentation explains all the steps very well.

I did not evaluate any other options.

If you are looking for a product which has all the common functionalities such as document and media management, record management, workflows, document indexing and searching, then in that case, Alfresco is the platform that you need.

Alfresco is a very good product that has very good inbuilt features. At the same time, it is customizable and we can customize this product the way we want. Surf framework makes your work easy for customization.

With its content model feature, we can create our own content model with our own metadata.

There are other valuable features in this product such as the rules facility to automate documents and integrated Activiti BPM engine for workflows.

We are a service-based company and are providing solutions for other organizations. In the other organizations where we provide this solution, their work is reduced in terms of maintaining documents and facilities like record management and automated workflow are even better.

It is a very good product. As a developer, one of things that they can improve is their development environment. They are providing a Maven-based plugin for development but it is all a manual process that we have to do as compared to other open-source products like Liferay. The best part of Liferay is its development environment. Similarly like Liferay, if Alfresco will provide an Eclipse plugin, then it will be very easy for developers to work with it.

In regards to the customization that we are doing from the back-end, they should provide some features so non-technical people can also do some level of customization easily.

The reporting feature is not there in Alfresco by default. If we want to create some reports and show them in the dashboard, we have to create a custom module for that. This can also be improved.

I am using this for the past three to four years.

We did encounter some stability issues when there were many simultaneous requests on the server. At such a time, the server may go down but actually we avoided this by setting up JVM parameters.

We did not experience any scalability issues. We are actually following the Alfresco guide for the required resources.

Technical support comes with the Alfresco Enterprise Edition. If you are facing any problems, you have to raise a ticket and they are mostly positive to provide a solution for that.

However, generally we have worked with the Community Edition. When we had a problem, we found posts on the forums in regards to that issue and in most of the cases, we got a solution from there.

We are a service provider so for our organization we are not using Alfresco but we are providing the solution based on the Alfresco product. The organization to whom we are providing this solution are using Alfresco from the beginning only.

It is very easy to set up this product initially, since they provide you with a setup file along with two default options and a custom installation as well.

In regards to the various Alfresco products that are available, the pricing and license options vary as below:

• Alfresco Two Edition
• Alfresco Community Edition - Freely Available
• Alfresco Enterprise Edition - Yearly License

The Enterprise Edition has more features than the Community Edition such as clustering, graphical workflow editor etc.

If you want to go with basic Alfresco features then you can use the Community Edition. However, if you want to use Alfresco on a larger scale, then the Enterprise Edition is preferable.

We evaluated other products, namely Nuxeo that is an ECM tool but we found the Alfresco product to be better.

If you are looking for features such as storing your content centrally, an automatic version, content automation, record management, access from mobile/desktop/web, automatic metadata extraction from electronic documents then Alfresco is a good choice.

• Document repository
• Metadata
• Searching

I would like them to consider document capture functionality.

Currently, for document capture functionality (ocr, read document metadata automatically, automatic doument classification), Alfresco needs to be integrated with document capture such as : kofax, ephesoft, etc.

While other Alfresco competitors already make document capture functionality as their default functionality.

I’ve been using Alfresco for 6 years.

I have not encountered stability issues.

I rate technical support 4/5.

The initial setup was straightforward, because Alfresco also provides a stack installer that includes the required supporting software.

It is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors.

We also looked at KnowledgeTree.

If you have a large amount of documents, go for Alfresco Enterprise Edition.

• Model type and metadata capabilities
• Categories, searches and the tree structure of information
• Capabilities to improve ECM services and development processes
• Open-source model

One of Alfresco's strengths is the data modeling. Document domain experts can model type and hierarchical associations and metadata constraints in a declarative way (such as an XML definition).

Moreover, Alfresco added a graphical user interface model manager in the last product version, so users that don't know XML formalisms are able to build models.

Alfresco supports category concepts, so users can categorize all documents and add expressiveness to data and conduct more powerful searches.

Alfresco services can be extended in a simple and well-designed way, such as Maven and pre-designed Alfresco module package Java projects. Learning paths are well documented and developers can add your new ECM services at the top of the platform.

The Alfresco community source code is public, so developers can study it or extend it in the desired way.

We would like to see improvement in the numbers of documents that can be managed by the repository. We would like them to introduce NoSQL DBMS for modeling metadata and document types.

We have used the Alfresco ECM platform since 2009.

For large repository sets, the architecture must be well sized.

The product uses state-of-the-art J2EE frameworks and libraries.

I rate technical support a 3.5/5.

Involve an Alfresco partner for the project. The training is basic. Buy Alfresco certifications and boot camp trainings.