A few remarks after a few hours of evaluation

[miggy4340]

Hello,

I've been playing a little with Alfresco, and I think it could be a terrific product for one of our project.

I just wanted to report a few things that I think could be improved for end users.

1. In the select template combobox, I think that it should be more natural to give the description of the template,
(or a short description) instead of the name of the template.

"Displays useful information about the current document" instead of doc_info.ftl
or
"Displays a list of the documents in the current user Home Space. Text document content is shown inline, as is JPG content as small thumbnail images."
instead of my_docs_inline.ftl

What do you think about it.

Can it easily be changed or configured for a particular instance.

2. In the default setup, every users have access to data dictionary space and can add or delete documents
as they wish.

Should a more strict setup where they can only read the space
(If you cannot re&ad the templates then no template is shown) be proposed by default.

3. When I had content, alfresco can detect the type of the content, text, word, pdf.
What is the purpose of letting the user change that after loading.
In the properties, the user can change the content from pdf to autocad drawing for example but
acrobat reader will open anyway when editing the file.


These a not critics, but some positive remarks about a product that really looks nice.

Regards

BMI.

[kevinr]

Hello,

Thanks for you kind comments. We are always interested in feedback and suggestions.

1. In the select template combobox, I think that it should be more natural to give the description of the template,
(or a short description) instead of the name of the template.

"Displays useful information about the current document" instead of doc_info.ftl
or
"Displays a list of the documents in the current user Home Space. Text document content is shown inline, as is JPG content as small thumbnail images."
instead of my_docs_inline.ftl

What do you think about it.

Can it easily be changed or configured for a particular instance.

I agree! This would be a useful change. The files all have the "title" and i think the "description" attribute set so it should be very easy to check for those values and display them instead in the list. The various lists of templates are generated in the following class:
org.alfresco.web.bean.TemplateSupportBean

It would be quite easy to the list building code to use the "description" property if set on the template node. You can either try changing the code yourself or make a JIRA request for that improvement.

2. In the default setup, every users have access to data dictionary space and can add or delete documents
as they wish.

Should a more strict setup where they can only read the space
(If you cannot re&ad the templates then no template is shown) be proposed by default.

I agree again, we will definitely make this configurable in a future release - i wanted to add it for 1.4 but there was always something higher priority to be done first.

Thanks,

Kevin

[paulhh]

It's nice to have good feedback.  We have generally started from the point of allowing people to do most things by default, knowing that any significant deployments are likely to have quite specialised requirements for permissions.  So having to change the role for the  EVERYONE group on Data Dictionary doesn't seem too much work.  Particularly when newbies to Alfresco might wonder why they can't do stuff and just give up.

What might be the simple approach to making it more configurable is having a bunch of default roles for EVERYONE for different areas of the application, which is set in the config and used on the initial bootstrap.  Then as long as you do the configuration straight after an install, you'll have things set up more as you'd like.

Cheers
Paul.