Evaluating Alfresco

[shravan_mahanka]

Hi Team,

We are evaluating couple of CMS tools(like: Alfresco, Jackrabbit, Drupal) and Alfresco being our most favorable tool, we would like your co-operation in this regard.

We are inclined towards Alfresco being it a Open source & Java platform enabled, at the same time we see Drupal has many features either built-in or as Free Ad-ons available satisfying many of their customers.

However, keeping our interest in mind, we are evaluating the Alfresco features built-in/ pluggable features, usability, performance, ease of deployment, ease of change management, Quick Support team, Quality solution at cheaper price, last but not the least good ROI.

We were looking at two key features that seem not available, they are: Captcha & Banner/ Advertising Management Could you advise, ways to integrate these features in to Alfresco.

Also, does Alfresco maintain any plug-in repository, that are deployed by community/ your dev team?

Thank You,
Shravan Kumar. M

[mrogers]

I'm not aware of Captcha & Banner/ Advertising Management for Alfresco.
Could you elaborate your requirement a bit more, because although I can guess what you may mean I'm not sure how it applies to typical Alfresco use cases?

There is a Alfresco forge for developing components and our new web studio interface does have an online repository of plug ins.

[shravan_mahanka]

Hi Rogers,

Thanks for your reply.

Captcha & Banner/ Advertising Management are just two basic features we would require in our Content Management System, being a Media Enterprise.

By querying for Captcha & Banner/ Advertising Management features, I meant to know, how can I integrate new requirements/ new features/ missing features/ new plug-ins into Alfresco system.

I was guessing that these features being very simple, those might have been already available in your repository as plug-ins.

Where can I find "web studio interface"?

Also, last day I have downloaded and installed this copy of Alfresco software - "Alfresco-Enterprise-3.0.1-Full-Setup.zip", expecting full installation of Alfresco. But after installation, I could not locate Alfresco WCM Enterprise Start menu (I have installed Typical version of Alfresco), I had just Alfresco Enterprise in my Start menu. Please let me know what am I missing?

Thanks for your support.

Thank You,
Shravan Kumar. M

[mrogers]

Alfresco WCM requires a little more configuration to get started.  
The steps are in this document : http://www.alfresco.com/products/ecm/enttrial/files/install_configure_alfresco_ecm3.pdf   basically you have to add a little more config to enable WCM.

Alfresco is built to be a very pluggable system.    It is architected with a huge number of extension points, not just at the UI level.  For example you can plug in content transformers, content models, workflows, web scripts, ui components and the list goes on.

Web Studio is not yet part of the enerprise trial.

[shravan_mahanka]

Okay. Thanks for your information Rogers. I will go through this document and get back to you in case of any issues.

Can't I even have read-only access to Web Studio? Because I would like to check-out the variety of plug-in you have. We are mainly a Media Enterprise, so, I would be interested in Media related plug-ins, like I was asking for a Banner module and many more.

We have just started evaluating Alfresco, and we would like to evaluate every minute aspect, so we are happy before we move over to Alfresco.