Alfresco: Suitability for our project?

[jdmckay]

Hello,

First time poster.

I'm a "jack of all trades" for an environmental 501c in Albuquerque.  Maintain our website, do scientific research, organize community meetings and more.  We don't get paid. 

I have programming background in the Windows world (for about 15 years) ending about 10 yrs. ago.  Gradually getting up to speed on Linux/Open Source/PHP etc. since I've been involved with our 501c.

I've never done or worked with a DMS.

We have an immediate need, which is why I'm posting inquiring here.  We (Citizen Action New Mexico) have been fighting Sandia Labs and EPA to get them to excavate the contents of a toxic dump used by Sandia going back to WW II's Manhattan project. They dumped toxic waste in unlined open pits right up until the mid-80's.  They have both claimed the waste was entirely low level radiation.

This toxic stuff is migrating downward towards our water table… Albuquerque's primary source of drinking water.

After years of legal battles, we just received +/- 5000 pages of Freedom of Information (FOIA) documents from DOE listing massive amounts of very high level waste.  This is, essentially a smoking gun: we've been in court for over 7 years but never been able to prove presence of high level waste.

Getting these documents available online in about 3 weeks (our next court date) is the task at hand. 

We received all of this on paper (no digital). 

Information on FOIA documents: they are mostly DOE "forms" containing security level information, dates of material received and date put in the pits, and description of specific materials.  Many checkboxes, and most of the material descriptions written by hand.  These are non-OCR when scanned.

I want to be able to build meta-data fields describing contents, volume (and/or weight) of materials described, dates received/put in pits, the pit ID, and (for reasons legal) security clearance at the time.  We want to be able to search by this criteria though meta data, and return both the meta data AND scanned document. 

I want to be able to expand the meta data fields as needed over time. 

I need a web interface (preferably browser) capable of producing reliable results for searches by any combination of above criteria.  Printing would be nice.  Searching must not require SQL in the interface as it will be used mostly by non-techies (our lawyers).  If there's a plugin for Joomla that would be a home run!!! 

We don't have a budget for this, so I'll be using the community edition. 

Really appreciate any detailed feed back on this… we've got a tight window to get this up and running and I'm going to choose a platform in next couple days. 

If anyone would like to see some of the forms I described, I can post them for viewing.

Thanks.

[rjohnson]

Alfresco would work well for you but in 3 weeks…… I don't think you can physically do it.

You would need to set up some custom document types (perhaps one, perhaps several) and create the schema for those document types so that each document has the data you want to search on associated with it.

You would need to create input, edit & search forms for each document type.

Then you need to scan & upload the documents and cross key the data from the scanned image.

There are extensions to Alfresco upload to allow categorisation of documents and input of metadata at the time of upload to Alfresco which I suspect would make your life easier.

If not then you should scan them in and FTP them into a series of folders (one per document type)each with a rule that will set the document type when a new document is created and put them in some sort of sensible folder structure then implement the very simple extension to the Edit metadata form to allow you to display the scanned image next to the input form so you can easily cross key the data.

You will need another rule on the FTP folders that executes on update to move the documents to a Share "site" in a sensible folder structure (year and month of origination perhaps) that keeps documents per folder to something between 100 and 500, that way browsing works quickly. 5000 documents is a trivial amount for Alfresco it deals with millions regularly but site & folder structure is important for a responsive browsing environment.

You need to consider your indexing carefully as you define that in your custom document type and you need the indexes to search for documents.

[jdmckay]

Appreciate your thoughtful response. 

Couple questions:

- I haven't found screenshots (or better some type of online demo) for:
    a) Alfresco's interface(s) for setup on the backend
    b) interface(s) for (user) frontend.

  eg. I need to consider not just my work in getting this ready, but usability for our small handful of endusers.

- >> There are extensions to Alfresco upload to allow categorisation of documents and input of metadata at the time of upload to Alfresco which I suspect would make your life easier.

  Could you tell me what you have in mind (links would be helpful?).

I've looked at several of these packages (OpenKM, DocMan)… all seem generally similar in concepts although back end tools to implement them are difficult to find on my short window (I know something like this should allow the 3 weeks I have just to play with tools before choosing).  I was good DBA back in the day (a little rusty), and considering just building my own database schema, populating it, and building a simple front end for search/display… almost seems more direct and measurable in terms of time/eiffort then  learning Alfresco which (like the others) seems to employ narrow contexts for specific common tasks in business well beyond my needs.

Anyway, thanks again for your detailed response(s).

[rjohnson]

There isn't an on-line demo but you could look at the YouTube channel, there is lots on there about Alfresco.

https://www.youtube.com/user/alfresco101

Is a start. You could also sign up for a free cloud account which would give you experience of the vanilla interface and sites / libraries / folders / searches / edit metadata (limited). But there is no ability to customise anything on the cloud accounts.

Upload & categorise at the same time extensions are at

https://addons.alfresco.com/addons/uploader-plus  (open source)

and

https://addons.alfresco.com/addons/edit-meta-data-during-upload (commercial)

Uploader plus looks perfect for your needs.

The extension for editing metadata and viewing the document side by side I can give you if you proceed.

Te real issue is your timescales. Alfresco will do you very well for managing these document plus your doubtless extensive legal case documentation in a very easy to use, flexible and efficient manner but if you are going to customise (and you will need to do a bit) 3 weeks including loading 5,000 documents is a big ask.

There are tutorials about creating Custom Document types on the internet (Jeff Potts has done some good ones).

In the long run I suspect that Alfresco would be better than a home brewed DB + document viewer because it will do much more by way of sharing, editing, versioning etc which is likely to become more important as you case progresses because my experience is that success in early stages generates a mountain of documents for appeals which need to be circulated and review and prepared into case bundles and cross referenced back to other documents (something which Alfresco is good at).