How to Convert Business Requirements into Alfresco Specifications

[tedmasterweb]

Hi,

I am new to Alfresco (and ECM in general) so please forgive me if the answer to this question is obvious.

I've been asked to create a system for a company. Since the system has elements of content management and workflow automation, Alfresco seemed like an ideal solution.

Having read through multiple articles on ecmarchitect.com and having done some SharePoint configuration in the past, I thought I'd be ready by now to start configuring Alfresco for this project. However, I'm a bit stuck and seem to have some kind of writer's block.

I need to convert the business requirements into a content model and quite frankly, I don't know where to begin. I don't know what criteria to use to determine what new content types I might need or how to (when to) define a content model (a diagram, not the code or steps to do so in Alfresco). Since I assume every case is different, I'd like to summarize what the company would like to do.

Essentially we have an extended approval workflow. The original document consists of the answers to a questionnaire and the typical metadata associated with a standard document, plus a few additional fields (nothing special). That document, however, will be associated with a host of other documents that will be supplied later and the group of documents will all be combined to represent a single document that will be passed through one or more approval workflows.

When the questionnaire answers are uploaded and assigned, I'd like the system to create a new, dated task. Along the whole process there are other moments when tasks will need to be created and status' changed.

From what I've read, the only (best?) way to automate the task creation and status changes is by creating a custom content type that has workflows associated with it, but there's a little voice inside me saying: you're over-complicating things.

Besides wanting to know if there are any good articles or books on content modeling, I'd like to know if my assumptions are accurate and if I do indeed need to create a custom content type.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this long-winded post. I am very grateful to anyone who takes the time to respond.

[pawel_rzeszowsk]

Hi tedmasterweb,
if you have read some articles form ecmarchitect site you can be sure that you have chosen very a vary good place to start from. According to your requirements I would suggest to you read the following tutorials from ecmarchitect: "Working with Custom Content Types", "Creating Custom Advanced Workflows in Alfresco".  In most Alfresco customizations creating custom data model with custom content type is a good idea. Please also see how the Alfresco rules mechanism works, because it could be helpful with your requirements.
Best Regards,
Pawel Rzeszowski.

[tedmasterweb]

Pawel,

Thank you so much for the ideas and suggestions. I've already read through about 50% of "Working with Custom Content Types" and "Creating Custom Advanced Workflows in Alfresco" is next on my list (along with several others from the series). I'm following through the tutorials as closely as I can, but I think that maybe I didn't make myself clear in my first post.

What I don't understand is <em>what factors determine when to create a new content type</em> and <em>how, exactly, do you model a business process (not in code but rather in diagrams for non-technical people) for automation in Alfresco?</em>. In Jeff's articles he uses the example of a company publishing white papers, which is fine, but in my case the "object" to be modeled is a questionnaire (a series of questions). I don't need to run statistics on the results so the questions could be stored as text files, as the "content" of the node and the name of the person filling out the questionnaire could be stored as a property of the node, I guess. Also, I could have users upload supporting documentation that would be associated with the questionnaire but I just don't know if I'm going about this the right way.

In a similar query, Jeff Potts recommends sticking with default content types and storing everything in a folder, but it is my understanding that if I want modifications to a folder to trigger workflows I *must* have a custom content type (or, at the very least, a custom content type will give me finer grain control over what happens when the contents is modified). Please, correct me if I'm wrong!

I'm certain Alfresco is the solution for us but I'm very reluctant to start down that path. I've read in some of Jeff Potts' articles that you need to be extra careful when defining new content types since, if you get it wrong, it could mean starting from scratch and, for this particular project, I have one opportunity to get it right as it will definitely cost me my livelihood if I get it wrong.

Thanks again and I hope some other kind people can point me in the right direction.