Alfresco Reviews

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.