Alfresco Community support

[tsirkin]

After reading/crawling the forums for some time now ,i have got an impression that Alfresco Engineers
don't have the time to answer questions on this forum.
Now ,this is perfectly fine even for OS company to support only the closed/supported version
and i do not have an intent to insult them in this post.

However before installing the Community version it is important to understand that "no support" in the context
of this product does really mean "no support" .That is : even simple questions are mostly
answered ,if at all , by community and many question goes unanswered.
Now ,as an old user and (rare) contributor to OS projects i understand that developing on top or even using a product
without it's developers is not a good idea.
For me as a user this basically makes open source of this product meaningless - there is no way i can
really get *into* the product without a support of the developer . Again ,no insult intended , i just want to
understand the model of the product before deciding if i should invest into it.

Now, about the Enterprise version.
It seems that there are plenty of bugs in it. Evaluating it gives some problems .
So ,for sure there is going to be a need in support/fixes but forums are out of question if we are
talking about evaluation ,right?
The question is : Is the Enterprise support good enough,how do i know before I invest in the product that it is
really responsive ?
Again this is a must requirement because unfortunately it seems that the community is not there.

Am I right?
Maybe my impression was wrong and there is a big ,active community here?
Maybe somebody who have the Enterprise Edition could share his/here experience with us?
Any other related comments?
Thanks

[esafonov]

tsirkin, I feel the same.
We are evaluating Alfresco Community Edition since 2009 summer.
And what I can say now:  I'm not shure this work and this time give us any valuable results.

IMHO, there is no such thing as Alfresco "community". Alfresco so-called "Community Edition" is not made by community effort.
In fact it is not a "Community" Edition. Better call it "pre-release with some features ripped out". And it takes a lot of time to make is work.

And the most interesting, If there is no community, then the future of product is uncertain. Is it clever to invest so much time to learn a product, if there is no community and future is uncertain?
Time is the single most valuable resource.  Today I invest a lot of time, and tomorrow I will need to pay for support and Enterprise version, anyway?
Well…why not to pay for a mature, well known, and working product today?

[tsirkin]

Thank you esafonov!
when you say :
  "Well…why not to pay for a mature, well known, and working product today?"
Are you actually talking about Alfresco E ?
Do you have an experience using it?
Thanks.

[mrogers]

There is clearly some level of support from the Alfresco Engineers for the community version.   For example I've posted over a thousand replies in these forums.

Likewise there are a pool of people outside of Alfresco who do contribute code, fixes, bug reports, tutorials, language packs, forum answers etc.  

I'd also contend that most postings (say at least 60%) on this forum do eventually get answered.   Of those that don't get answered a high proportion may not make sense, have sufficient detail, be cross postings, be re-hashing of previously answered questions or simply be irrelevant spam.     Of course there are still too many questions go unanswered so things could be better.

For your answer about how to evaluate the Enterprise version then I'd recommend you sign up for an enterprise trial.

[tsirkin]

Thank you esafonov and mrogers for your feedback.
Evgeny

[stuartonmaui]

I've been trying to learn Alfresco (Community) development the old fashioned way, diving in with a simple project. At the outset, I chose 5.0.c as it seems to be the "latest" path. My initial project was to implement an expense voucher process. Doing so would take me from Activiti through Aikau widgets.
The expense voucher has line items. Each line item has an account number that needs to be picked. From the bottom up I have made scripts for a url providing the account numbers (which reside in the repository in JSON), a worked on (so far without testing) a picker that is filled via the account numbers url. Finally I need to make a couple of forms for creating and approving.
I bought a few Kindle books, but only one was recent enough to be directly relevant. I have read a lot of material that is available in the wiki, ECM Architect, Ole's video on Maven/Eclipse projects, etc.
Unfortunately, it is still difficult to find information that I need. Example: This morning I decided to look into using a Share data list for the account numbers, searched for Share Javasrcipt API and found myself in the usual dilemma: "No, wait, this is enterprise.. No, wait this is pretty old.. This whole article is marked as begin out of date.." and concluded that what I was looking for isn't here yet. This scenario has occurred many times. Often time is invested learning something that's not applicable and in early stages, adds confusion. I am sure that documentation (for the upcoming Enterprise release) is underway and will filter down to the community version.
I am concerned though about when. I can continue as I have, hoping I'm on the right path, with snippets of code and information as a guide, and all the time wondering how much real progress I have made. There was a post somewhere from someone who complained that the project is too chaotic. I can understand his frustration. Of course Alfresco engineers certainly do not have the time to answer every question or hold someone's hand as they get started. But along with information such as the project roadmap for 2015, it would be of great to have some milestones about documentation and other guidance to give would-be developers like me a good feeling about the future.

[resplin]

stuartonmaui raises a lot of good points. Alfresco is a complex application and has a steep learning curve. We have made a lot of progress at making it easy to get started as a developer, but we recognize that we still have a long way to go.

We discussed this topic during Community Office hours last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_1cRaRw68

A few things we have recently done:

* The documentation has gotten a lot better. This page in particular is really good for new developers:

http://docs.alfresco.com/community/concepts/dev-for-developers.html

Note that Enterprise Edition and Community Edition are very similar. Except for the system administration documentation, it is rare to find documentation that only applies to Enterprise Edition (Enterprise Edition has some easy-administration screen that depend on the Enterprise-only JMX capabilities). Enterprise-only docs should be marked with a green "Enterprise Only" tag. If you find that to not be the case, please leave feedback on the offending pages in the docs.

* The search function in the documentation works much better.

* The new SDK has a lot of great examples.

* The videos from the last Alfresco Summit are also very useful:

http://summit.alfresco.com/

* Aikau should be much easier to learn than the old Spring Surf approach, but unfortunately the current transition requires most developers to understand both approaches.

* There are expanded formal training options at http://university.alfresco.com

Things we are doing soon:

* I still need to post the final Summit videos from last year.

* We have split out the internal roles related to Alfresco Community Edition and Developer Evangelism. This should allow our new Developer Evangelist can focus on improving the experience of new developers.

* We have more changes planned related to documentation, developer tooling, and easier APIs.

* We are updating our formal training to include the best practices for Alfresco 5.0.

We understand that what we have completed is not enough, and we hope you can be patient with us as what we have planned will take additional time to roll out.

In the meantime, we hope that you can make enough progress on your projects that you won't get discouraged.

[stuartonmaui]

I'm still at it and the documentation is much improved. With it and the conveniently integrated and source code, I've been able to figure out most of what I need without asking for help.
Unfortunately, a lot of what a developer needs to understand is conveyed though somewhat specific examples. Some of them will tell a developer exactly what he or she needs to know. Others will take a specific track that may be irrelevant to a developer, but somewhere along the way illustrate one or more techniques that everyone should know. Sometimes you have to learn things you aren't interested in to try and find a hidden gem. This is a real burden when getting started because it adds to the considerable information overload. That being said, the examples, posts and documentation are usually enough if you stick with it.
Every once and while though, progress may halt for a day or more when something has to be figured out. This contributes to the scary part: One is never sure how well a block of the code is going to turn out. It may be a matter of learning a few things or be a small disaster because things don't work the way you thought they did. There are areas of the platform where examples show a number of things that can be done, but don't describe generic functioning of the concept. After examining some examples to see something might be used, the reader may still have a blank look on their face. This makes it difficult to discern a concept that has broad domain. One often marks progress but cannot see a completion date until a piece of code is nearly complete, and continues hoping assumptions they've made were not rash. Finally, some small things are more difficult than they should be, such as these examples.
o Figuring out that Lucene search is still around even though Lucene was deprecated. (That's what it sounds like to a newbie. It begins with the insanity of the search object defaulting to something you're sure you read was deprecated.;-)
o Looking at all sorts of things applicable to full text search, when all you need to do is neatly handled by cmis.
o Finding out model is not available in Java even though it's said to be everywhere, you just didn't realize the scope of the statement was limited by the section of documentation.
o Learning about widgets publishing things. It seems so simple and is, once you realize the topic is the fieldId.
o Understanding in general about views and how to use them. Here the examples are great but one still needs a "Never mind what's holding it up, keep hammering" attitude to go forth and apply them.

[mrogers]

Thanks for the feedback.  But with respect to your comment about the "model" object above and search.  Have you commented on the documents you looked at that confused you?