Feasability of Community ED and pricing of Enterprise ED

[magnusfs]

Hello,

I have tried to read forum-posts in order try to find an answer to my question, but without success. I am grateful for your answers to my inquiry.

I am wondering if anyone can explain my how feasible the community edition is for people who want to use Alfresco for document sharing. It says that it is for "Developers and Technical Enthusiasts for Non-Critical Environments". Does it mean that it is unsuitable for end-customers? I am putting the information we traditionally have used folders and word-doc's to organize in the Community Edition, but it is really several bugs there and I am wondering if this is only the start, and if it is useless in the long run? 

We are a fertility clinic with about 10 persons. We need a system for sharing clinical guidelines. Alfresco seems to handle this job very well, but the pricing for the enterprise version puts it out of our reach (Annual cost 16125€). I am trying to correspond with sales about a different pricing alternative, but the lack of response makes me ask here instead.

What I really need is to know if the community edition is something that people actually are using as described, or if we need the Enterprise version. And if we need the Enterprise version, does it exist any pricing options that suit a company of our size.

Best regards

Magnus Finset Sørdal
Medicus AS
Norway

[gronfelt]

The main problem with the Community Edition in a production environment is probably that there will never be a truly stable version, since one of the purposes (as I understand it) of the CE is to test out new features that might be incorporated in the EE. There are few, if any, official patches, which means that in order to get rid of a bug you might have to use a nightly build, which may very well contain new bugs.

With that said, I still use Alfresco CE in a production environment and I know that many others do that as well. There are some stability issues from time to time, but to me the EE is not an option because of the costs, so it's really the CE or nothing and I think the benefits of having a DMS system at all outweights the problems that comes with not paying for it.

But I agree that the pricing is a bit steep, which makes the EE a non-existing option for most small companies or startups

[magnusfs]

Hi! Thanks for your veiw on this. Good to hear that this is not something which is really crazy to consider to implement.

Best

Magnus