Frustration big time ... what a piece of ...

[anna_kane]

Not trying to offend anyone, I've spent almost two months evaluating Alfresco, and so far, there's nothing but frustration.

1. We first started with PostgreSQL, Alfresco can't even pass the basic functionalities without throwing error all over the place when doing some workflow. See the issues reported in Jira. Spent almost a month trying to get pass it, so that we could have something to demo to the boss, and have the budget approved. No luck. PostgreSQL 8.1.4, 8.2.1, 8.3.0, 8.3.1. Nothing.
2. We then tried Oracle. Same issues. A lot of people are reporting in Jira too. No luck here either. Oracle 9i and Oracle 10g.
3. Tried Sybase, can't even get pass bootstrapping. Sybase Anywhere 10.0.1. No luck.
4. Tried MySQL. Ok, that one works, and we are not going to use that, it doesn't even have proper collation support for utf-8 encoding. That's not even a consideration.
5. Tried MS SQL Server. Ok, that one works too, but we are a Unix shop. Are we going to have to buy a Windows server just for that? We already have Oracle, Sybase, and PostgreSQL.
6. Is Alfresco really open? The front page said that is is fully open, but I doubt it. There's a community code, and there's some other code which we don't see. From the Jira information, we can see that bugs fixes are going into the other repository only, the open repository don't get much bug fixes. We saw that the bugs are fixed, somewhere, but I keep checking the latest from SVN, and I still don't see it. We are not talking fancy functionalities, just those simple ones. Just basic database access is driving us nut already, I can't imagine going farther than that.

We like open source, we are ready to pay for support, but the first impression sucks, big time. We are talking about advanced functionalities, just basic database access. And out of the 5 databases test, only 2 have passed (one, MySQL, can't even be considered a pass). And those are the databases advertised as supported!

I'm joing another in our company to evaluate Sharepoint and FileNet. The guy evaluating Sharepoint got the system up in 2 hours, with the equivalent functionalities as Alfresco, with all kinds of customizations already.

[rscheele]

What version of Alfresco did you use? there is currently an Alfresco 2.2 'enterprise' version with a lot of fixes, which to my best knowledge the community version doesn't have at the time. The latest community builds dates back to december 2007; nightly builds are turned off and a preview of the upcoming 3.0 release is not available (which was promised to us at one of the community conferences). bit dissappointing.

[mabayona]

I´m long time Community user. Now in 2.9C_dev and my impression is somehow different. I´m routinely installing alfresco in about 5 minutes. I use:

Tomcat 60
JDK 1.5.0_14
MySQL 5.x
Linux / windows

I have no complain so far. Remember it is OSS and, if you don´t like it, either change it or pay somebody else to do it for you. You know, as per sharepoint, but without the licensing issues and with access to the source.

As far as your message: I do not quite understand what do you mean with:

Tried MySQL. Ok, that one works, and we are not going to use that, it doesn't even have proper collation support for utf-8 encoding. That's not even a consideration.

no collation support for utf-8 encoding?

Anyway, as you say, you got always Sharepoint and Filenet as alternatives…. well, I asume that you got plenty of budget as well and little innovation drive.

Good luck and, please keep us informed of you experience with other proprietary ECMs.

[rscheele]

I am also able to install Alfresco in no time on a Vista, XP or ubuntu test box. Our IT department was able to install 2.1 community with mysql on a CentOS with the wiki-installation page in 30 minutes.

The database is used to store metadata and some administrative settings, i don't think that mysql would be wrong to choose.

[chen_shaopeng]

If you are using PostgreSQL, I have a small patch here:

https://issues.alfresco.com/browse/ALFCOM-1691

It works with PostgreSQL, but doesn't solve Oracle's or Sybase's problem. That patch is not really correct, but it gets around the PostgreSQL problem for now.

Hope that helps.

[chen_shaopeng]

As far as your message: I do not quite understand what do you mean with:

Tried MySQL. Ok, that one works, and we are not going to use that, it doesn't even have proper collation support for utf-8 encoding. That's not even a consideration.

no collation support for utf-8 encoding?

Well, yeah, that's true. You are using MySQL with english collation, you won't see the problem. MySQL's support for other languages collation sucks, especially if you have to use utf-8 encoding.

[mabayona]

It seems MySQL has such support:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-collating.html

and, seems also easy to configure or adapt in case it does no fit with your needs.

Just a note: the biggest, and most heavily used databases with multinational content are running on MySQL. Google runs all its business under MySQL…. and Yahoo as well.

[unknown-user]

Hi everyone,
You should use the Linux community bundle of Alfresco and Ingres (http://community.ingres.com/forums/home.php). I did not meet any issue as far as now with UTF-8 encoding, and the installation part is done in 5 minutes (everything is pre-configured).

Have a nice day

[andersg]

I'm joing another in our company to evaluate Sharepoint and FileNet. The guy evaluating Sharepoint got the system up in 2 hours, with the equivalent functionalities as Alfresco, with all kinds of customizations already.

I apperciate your frustration, but you must realise that much of the simplicity with SharePoint stems from the fact that you do not have a choice. You cannot choose OS, Webserver, Servletrunner, Database. You also pay a much higher price. I know that Sharepoint is "free" from MS, but not when used for any serious web work. I do not have the pricing handy, but the following comment from Microsoft might be illuminating:

"Most customers elect to split up the purchase price over a three-year period"

I would very much like to know what issues you had with MySQL and UTF-8? The latest versions support UTF just fine.

I can agree that Alfresco needs improvment. Some stuff like changing the port from 8080 means you have to edit several files by hand and I have not found any docs that list them all. There is also some lack of consistence between modules. ie in Alfresco you get to choose language, in Share it picks up whatever the browser is set to etc.

[bwakkie]

I have created a small how to to get Alfresco3.2 on tomcat6 and with PostgreSQL 8.4 (but it could work on 8.x I guess) question of downloading the correct jar file
http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21103

Cheers