Alfresco for a user community web platform

[morphilos]

Hello everyone,
The company I'm working for plans to create a user community web platform. Here is what needs to be possible :
- Management of users withs groups
- Ranking between users (with a vote between users, a kind of "like" or "+1")
- Integration of e-learning tools (Moodle for instance ?)
- Direct inscription to courses with a calendar
- Activity tracking (alert for new content, tracking of files and connections)

I have an other possibility, Drupal, but I don't know which of these two possibility suits best to my project. Perhaps someone can help me, I need to know if Alfresco can do all the things I enumerated. The things is that I don't know if Drupal is good to manage the data, but I don't know if Alfresco can be efficient for the "web part"…

I've read that another solution is to use Alfresco for a repository, and Drupal for the web service, but I don't know if it is a good idea, because it can mean too much work (instead of one new tool to learn and maintain, we will have two)…

Thanks for the Help,
Morphilos

PS: I'm sorry for my English, it is not my best language^^

[jpotts]

The first thing to address is this: What role will Alfresco play in your solution? Let's start with the user interface. Do you like Alfresco Share as the main user interface for this solution? If not, you're going to have to develop your own. For that there is Drupal as well as any one of hundreds of other portals, frameworks, and languages. All of them can use Alfresco as the back-end.

So now let's talk about the back-end. Are you doing something that uniquely requires Alfresco? For example, maybe you have a large amount of unstructured content (files). Or maybe you have significant workflow requirements. Or you might like to have all of your content in a CMIS repository so that you can have a language neutral API for working with it from the front-end. If any of these match your situation, then you might like to use Alfresco as your repository. As you say, this may complicate your architecture beyond what you can tolerate. Or, it might be exactly what you need–multiple components working together in a best-of-breed architecture.

Multiple people have integrated Moodle with Alfresco, but the devil is in the details. I'm sure there are all kinds of integrations with Moodle from Drupal and other front-ends. The point is that your list doesn't really uniquely qualify Alfresco over any other repository. You could probably use anything to accomplish that feature set. What matters is the "how" of your solution.

I know I am not answering your question directly. But hopefully by shifting the question from "can Alfresco do this" to "how will Alfresco be used as part of the solution" you can figure out whether or not it makes sense to use it.

Jeff