Alfresco Implementation

[sjharford]

Hi,

We are a document management company that caters to the building industry.  We are looking to replace our current internally built document management system with Alfresco.  

We have about 100 customers that all have their own account where we manage there documents.  Each customer has their own set of employees and contacts.  A customer has to invite someone to give them access to their projects, documents, etc.   I have a few initial questions:

1. Can one installation of alfresco handle all of our customers?
2. Do we have to create a separate repository for each customer?
3. How do we manage each customers, employees and contacts?
4. Can you extend the functionality of Alfresco Share?  We really do not want to build a new interface, only modify/add functionality.

Any feedback, would be much appreciated.  I am thinking an experienced Alfresco engineer could probably help us get setup properly.  I am really looking to set this up properly out of the gate so we do not run into problems that could have been avoided from the start.

Thanks for any help!

Steve

[jpotts]

My initial thought is, "have you looked at Alfresco in the Cloud?". You could get a cloud account, create a site for each customer, and then invite your customers to the site. You could also use the Alfresco API to build custom apps that help your customers work with the documents that live in the cloud in a way that makes sense for their business needs.

If that doesn't work, then, yes, you could install on-premise. How you handle your customers is up to you. You could use our multi-tenancy feature. This would essentially create a separate repository for each customer. They would be completely isolated from each other. Or, you could put everyone in the same tenant and use permissions to keep everyone from seeing each other's data. Under this option, though, they would see each other when they searched for users.

Yes, you can extend Share. There are standard extension mechanisms that allow you to add new UI actions to the menus, extend the functionality of the document library, or add entirely new pages to the app if that's what you need to do.

Alfresco Share customization does have a fairly steep learning curve so it will save you time and pain down the road if you find someone who has done this before. Feel free to post your project in the "Jobs & Projects" forum.

Hope that helps,

Jeff

[sjharford]

Thank you Jeff.  It does help.