Deployment Architecture: Multiple Repositories

[tolu]

Hi folks

I'm looking at the deployment of Alfresco 3 Enterprise in a large public sector organisations.

We have various business units that need to manager their documents and due to legislative requirements need to tightly manage access control. The question now is: Should we go with one huge repository and manage access through roles/permissions (eg ACLs) or would it be useful to have separate Alfresco installations/repositories.

The business units are ferociously guarding their docs and what can't happen is that a document from unit A happens to appear as search result for unit B.

There is obviously a tradeoff here and we don't want to end up with a proliferation of documents and the resulting maintenance nightmare. Now the question really is:
* Are there any good reasons to go for separate repositories or is this an idea of a screwed mind in the first place?
* Are there any experiences/best practices/guidelines that can be applied?

Any thoughts appreciated.

Cheers

[pmonks]

ACLs are taken into account by Alfresco's search functionality, so that won't be an issue.

Assuming the departments never share content (which would strongly imply a single repository), I'd say it's mostly a question of operational cost - having a single uber-Alfresco instance will be less costly to maintain (backup, tune, scale, etc.) than having a plethora of smaller instances.  That said, there are some relatively rare cases where different departments could collide in their usage of a single instance; for example if one department requires complex customisations to the Alfresco logic or UI.

Perhaps start out with a single instance as a "straw man" and see how far you can go with it?  You might find that that model will work well for a majority of the departments, and the small number of special cases each deserve their own dedicated instances.

Cheers,
Peter

[tolu]

Thanks, Peter.

I've also just discovered that Labs 3.2 has support for multi tenancy. Hopefully that makes its way into the Enterprise version. It would be good to have options for content segregation. Looks like in our case one customer group is speacial enough to justify a separate instance, but the others will coexist.

Cheers
Tobias