Is Alfresco able to...

[noman]

Gentlemen and Ladies - if any

What a wonderful product. Thank you for such a wonderful piece of work.

We are… a medium size company [warehouse] with 30 users and currently 160K of documents on Sharepoint which came with SBS 2008 box. Our server is struggling with 57GB SQL DB and we're planing to move away what we have to another box however, we found Sharepoint to be somehow unfriendly in our environment and have decided to turn everything 180 degrees and look elsewhere.

Alfresco looks good but I can't get it to work in similar way to the Sharpoint which we have already customised in a certain way.

I have a couple of questions please with regards to the Community Edition.

1. Does Alfresco fully integrate with Active Directory? We use only Win 7 Pro machines connected to SBS 2008.
2. Can bunch of documents be dropped into a folder and will it appear in Alfresco? Like Explorer view in SPoint?
3. Can we scan documents directly to different Alfresco folders [Fujitsu SnapScan]?
4. Does Alfresco provide OCR facility for documents scanned to PDF?
5. Can we forward selected email messages from Outlook directly to a chosen Alfresco folder? [Archiving orders]
6. Can we add custom fields to the Document View? We need: Supplier, Freight No, Containers, Manager and so on.
7. Can the List view be customised in order to see the mentioned above information?
8. Can a Document have linked [related] documents? When a purchase order arrives, we need to attach or link 5 different document to it.
9. Are DOCX, XLSX and AutoCAD DWG viewers available?
10. What's the maximum database size if we decide to do with Ubuntu Server and mySQL for Alfresco installation?
11. Can Alfresco send an email on a document upload or modification to a person or a group], who is in charge of that folder or a document?
12. Is Document version facility available in case we need to look at the previous one [pre-modified]


6 and 7 are the most important questions please. I did have a quick look after installing Alfresco but couldn't find the way to create custom fields and the List view I'm after. And then Christmas came

Any advice, steps, directions or easy to understand tutorials please? I appreciate your help. Thank you.

Arthur.

[rjohnson]

Glibly yes to all the above with minor caveats.

4. This is not out the box, but there are open source (and commercial) products that can be used.
9. Viewers work by creating a PDF rendition of your documents using LibreOffice. DWG is not out the box but it exists in the add-ons that you can download.
10. Alfresco does not store its documents in the database so max database size is unlikely ever to be an issue. I have no idea what it is but I have seen several comments in these forums about installations with millions of documents (one with 20 million). Note however that the default Alfresco installation is now on PostgreSQL and it may be wise to stick with the default.

6 & 7

6. Is easy. You create a custom document type and make your uploaded documents this type (which you can do by rule) and they can then have any cusotm fields you want. This is also known as custom metadata or properties in Alfresco speak. Custom document types do not change the underlying "type" of a document (i.e. it can be a docx, pdf, dwg etc and have a "document type" of "purchase order").

7. The displays are fully cusomisable and there is lots of extensibility functionality in Alfresco and Share. It will however take a little while for you to get your head round.

[noman]

Dear Bob

Thank you for your help… on Sunday You're faster than light! HAPPY NEW YEAR BOB!