I'm considering Alfresco... Could someone confirm my understanding?

[ustamills]

I'm considering Alfresco for my company.  My understanding is that the base Alfresco product allows you to save and publish documents digitally, but if you have to have customized meta-data associated to a document (or document category) then you have to use the Records Management add-on.  Is all this true?  If not could someone enlighten me?

[mrogers]

You can have customised metadata without records management.   You can define your own content types, properties and aspects or use the ones already provided.   

Records management is all about the controlling the lifecycle of records.    So for example in RM you can define things like Jack can create records, and Jill will review them. Then records must be kept online for 3 years" then moved to a dusty warehouse for another 6 years.     Or another use case is that the company lawyer needs to find all documents relating to a certain product and make sure they are not interfered with or destroyed.

[rabika]

If you do any customisations (share-config-custom, custom dashlets etc) then these are not in that directory. Depending on how you do it they will most likely be somewhere in {alfresco-home}/tomcat/webapps but as you will have put them there, you will know where they are.