How about a nice simple guide? Anyone?

[pagenix]

It's a cool product. I see how most of the functions will help our business. Ran the full install and the demo has us mostly convinced.

Here's the annoying bit… can someone responsible for this product just provide a "how to make this work on more than localhost" guide? For the love of Mike, based on a standard install, can we please be guided as to what apache and/or tomcat changes to make so they will actually talk together and serve the product to a consuming browser out there in user-land?

I wait in anticipation for either help or flaming   :?

John

[williamgh]

"How to make this work on more than just localhost" is like asking about the basics of server farms and configuring Tomcat to talk with remote databases and other alfresco servers.
There's a 149 page manual on some of the basics that could help you get started but the rest of the info looks to be assumed knowledge of advanced computing and server farms.

I had the same question, "why isnt there better data and how-to's" and while searching the forums, I came across some conversations about the reasoning behind it. Alfresco dev team simply doesnt have the time, means, or will to keep up with forum replies, manuals, wikis, etc. Plus there is the paid services that make it so you dont need to know how to do all of this…

maybe someone else will chime in but i think your question is a bit too broad to have a good answer for right off the bat. and yeah, i'd love a more in depth guide too. 

[pagenix]

Well, yes it is a basic question, but I think it would be attention to tiny details like this that would encourage its adoption. Oh well, I'll muddle through and try to get the 2 servers to cooperate.

[beren]

I like alfresco enough to actual license the commercial product, but I gotta agree with the original poster. Its a major pain to have to figure out how to get alfresco working right on anything except the basic "easy" installers. I would love to get alfresco working on my Mac with jBoss 5 and MySQL. I'm having a go at it, but piecing together exactly how to do this is a major PITA. I also eagerly await the flame…but to ameliorate the heat I am working on an install guide for the above. I'm very close to having it all working right.

[mrogers]

can someone responsible for this product just provide a "how to make this work on more than localhost"

  

Can I just point out that the community documentation is the community's responsibility.   The developer wiki is open for all forum members to contribute and I'd urge community members to improve the documentation rather than sitting back and waiting for someone else to make changes.    I'm confident that many people out there are capable of writing such an article.

[unknown-user]

Hi,

Alfresco is VAST.

How to learn alfresco :

1) Follow a course :
http://university.alfresco.com/training/courses.html

2) become an alfresco partner, you will have then access to a lot of documentation.

3) read all the documentation
- go to : http://ecmarchitect.com/
This guy has the best tutorials and books.

[pagenix]

I get that it's the community's responsibility to build the product and supporting information. I really do…

However, if this product is supposed to be able to do real work for real companies to make (and not lose) real money then something's gotta change. Small enterprises can't be bothered with gizmo-products that are labyrinthine in their structure and take the same support effort as one of those multiple spinning plate acts in the old circus. Managing an Alfresco community server for real must be a labor of love and those folks must be constantly on call mopping up the "blood on the floor".

My original question was born of the desire to have a basic, out-of-the-box, generic install that could quickly support at least a meaningful demo/evaluation. If a small business IT guy can't get a single, coherent "how do I get this on a machine and use it", he/she will just click uninstall and move down the Google results list to the letter "B"… It's very simple.  Example - Invites don't work unless arcane smtp lines are not hand-edited inside obscure properties files deep in the structure. Finding out about that, and how to fix it, was like unraveling a devilishly complex puzzle or riddle.

Now I love the promise that Alfresco has. I am still leaning heavily towards it as a solution for our small company. However, it would have to be as a hosted solution and, while there are many out there, I really do wonder if I will get a nasty shock when the ISPs guy can't keep it working for lack of timely info.

Perception is everything, people. These days risk is a 4 letter word in more than one sense, and my original appeal is asking for it to be reduced.

[mikeh]

Installing and Configuring Alfresco Community Edition v3.3

Thanks,
Mike