Alfresco Reviews

• 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.

The features which are most valuable to us are rapid deployment, ease of installation, ease of use, and Linux platform support.

Some of the user interface could be more intuitive, such as the new record category, where the expression is a term and not really a dynamically evaluated expression as it might imply.

I have been using the solution for 3 months.

Alfresco was a very smooth deployment, but the Records Management module 2.2.0 needed a forced deployment: total time to deploy (without file plan setup) was less than 1 day.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

The initial setup was very simple.

We implemented in-house.

We are still evaluating the ROI.

Daily cost is insignificant: just storage and backup.