Alfresco SPP : Gold or not ?

[deas0815]

Hallo everybody,

there seem to be some issues with the Alfresco SPP implementation, and I would really appreciate somebody experienced making an honest statement whether it can generally be seen as a decent Sharepoint  alternative (Community or Enterprise). By decent, I mean:

Does it cover a serious fraction of real world MS Office Sharepoint  use cases ?

Does it work reliably and stable ?

thank you
Andreas

[afaust]

Hello Andreas,

my personal experience with Alfresco SPP in Enterprise editions is that it has been getting a lot better / more stable since I started using it / working with it in customer projects. In Alfresco 3.2 and early 3.4, we had some major issues with Office version compatibility (between different SPs and major versions) and standard corner cases of file names / encodings, but later 3.4 and 4.x have been pretty reliable / stable so far. I hope they fix the issues currently in 4.2 Community before Enterprise - last I tried to setup a demo system, I could not get it to work (with a reasonable amount of effort).

Most - if not all - of the pain points we have at the moment actually relate to stupid MS bugs / issues on the client side. I.e. for a specific customer "Edit Online" via SPP stopped working from one day to the next, probably through a change in Windows patch level / group policy, as Office would suddenly not provide the already obtained session ID in a later request and stubbornly refuse to reauthenticate when asked to by Alfresco. Only after deactivating the Windows Web Client service on affected clients did this problem disappear - at the risk of interfering with other services in the customers IT. Additionally, when trying to implement the <a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/sharepoint-server-help/require-check-out-for-files-in-a-library-H...">"Require Check-Out"</a> option on sites via SPP, Office would stubbornly refuse to adhere to the relevant parameter in Alfresco responses - although identical in that respect to traces from a Sharepoint conversation and verified with Microsoft "documentation".

In terms of serious fraction of real world Sharepoint use cases, it certainly depends on what you consider real world or common Sharepoint use cases. Apart from simple document repository and vacation data list usage in my first project in IT consulting, I've rarely been a user of Sharepoint and don't usually have access to installations at a customer site, so I actually don't have any substantial practical experience of what use cases Sharepoint supports nowadays.

Regards
Axel

[deas0815]

Hi Axel,

Thanks a lot for the quick, detailled and helpful response !

By "Real world MS Office use cases", I mean common things MS Office Sharepoint users really do in practice. Like for example "saving documents".  If you have to tell users "this is Alfresco under the covers, so you must not do [long list of usages]", I wouldn't consider it covering a decent fraction.

Regarding stability, I mean "extra headaches admins face" when using Alfresco instead of Sharepoint providing the SPP server part.

cheers
Andreas