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Is Alfresco for me?

ronak_shah44
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
I have started evaluating Alfresco for my project for a Goverment Agency .
Here are my requirements

1) Document managemet (quite a huge nos. of documents to be uploaded/maintained)
2) Record Management
3) Very complex workflows
4) Metadata searching
5) NO web content Management

In addition to above requirements, we have lots of Web forms associated with worflows. In few cases, forms data are spanned across multiple pages bcause of large nos. of input fields. These forms data to be stored into my own schema as it will be used for MIS reporting.

Having a quick look on Alfresco site and it;s capabilities, I feel that building so many forms driven pages (using Web forms) is difficult in Alfresco. Also not sure, if using webforms , forms data could be persisted into my own schema( I think Alfresco stores forms data into it's own schema tables which is difficult to comprehend).  Our application UI is quite different than what Alfresco offers. Hence, I feel is there will be huge amount of customization required in Alfresco.

Your inputs/suggestions are welcome whether Alfresco is a right fit for us?

I am thinking about using Alfresco as a back-end product and building Our application UI using Struts,hibernate which will interact with Alfresco using web services for Document management, RM and searching capabilities.  Does this sound viable?

Regards,
Ronak Shah
1 REPLY 1

mrogers
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
So many points…

Yes you can use Alfresco as a back end repository and use as many or as few features that are useful for your requirement.

You can also put your own UI on top of alfresco and there are several different api's available to connect your UI with Alfresco.  

I'll leave it to others to comment on complex workflows and muti-page forms.

One statement that concerns me is that you would use your own schema for MIS reporting.   Regardless of whether you eventually  choose to persist  your data within the alfresco database or your own schema it may be prudent to transfer your data from the OLTP database to a separate reporting database, typically the indexing and transactional requirements will be very different.    This consideration is not specific to Alfresco and of course depends upon the volume and nature of your MIS reporting requirement.