Kindly help us to differentiate between the Community edition and Enterprise edtion

[chandravd]

Hi every one,

We are new to the alfresco, we need to provide few details to our client regarding the alfresco community and entrerprise edition as below,

1) what is the main differenct between Community Edition and Enterprise Edition?
2) Latest version for Community and Enterprise
3) Features of Community and Enterprise edition?
4) Limitations of Community and Enterprise edition?
5) Hardware and storage size recommended for Community and Enterprise edition?
6) Integration Fesibility Community and Enterprise edition with (Oracle / any other)

Kindly help us.

Thanks,
Chandra

[afaust]

Hello,

there are a couple of presentations out on the net highlighting the differences between Community and Enterprise.

1) Enterprise is a special build of Alfresco that includes some additional, commercially licensed features like better transformation, better integration with Microsoft tooling, cloud conncectivity and reporting/analytics. It also includes support for some commercial databases like Oracle, MS SQL and DB2 as well as some additional administration / HA capabilities. And finally, Enterprise always comes with a support contract with Alfresco so you have a supported product with a specific SLA.

2) Alfresco Community is available as 5.0.b - Alfresco Enterprise is currently at 4.2.3(.1) and should be available as 5.0.0 soon.

3) See 1) - from end-user functionality, there is not that much of a difference unless you really need the Enterprise-only business features (cloud / reporting) or integrations (basic SharePoint Protocol support is included in Community, but an enhanced variant will be part of Alfresco Enterprise 5.0.0).
For a full overview of features, please see the <a href="http://docs.alfresco.com">Documentation</a> and do an evaluation with either Community or Enterprise - they are too numerous to try to list them here.

4) Limitations are a result of what I listed in 1 through 3. E.g. you currently cannot build a high availability system with clustering using Community because clustering is an Enterprise-only feature. Unless - of course - you add clustering yourself - Alfresco is open-source after all. There are no hard limitations regarding amount and size of content.

5) It would be unprofessional to recommend anything without knowing the use case of the client. There is an <a href="http://www.alfresco.com/resources/whitepapers/alfresco-scalability-blueprint">Alfresco Scalability Blueprint</a> that you may use for some pointers, but it always comes down to the specifics of the client.

6) See 1) - Alfresco Community out-of-the-box does not work with Oracle, MS SQL or DB2. But such support can be added by your own customizations or by Community addons if the need arises and the requirements are not enough to warrant the use of Enterprise.

In conclusion: There is no general recommendation of Community vs. Enterprise and you need to do a proper analysis of the use case of your client. There are a lot of organisations that successfully use Community in production and if the clients size or requirements (infrastructure / support / availability / cloud etc) don't call for Enterprise right from the beginning, it can be a good option to pilot using Community and upgrade when necessary.

Regards
Axel

[chandravd]

Thank you for the detailed response…

Please clarify the below details as well,

1) Does 4.2.f community edition has workflow activity process?
2) If yes do we need to install it seperately or it is built in with the alfresco installation?
3) Do we need any licence for this workflow activity process?
4)Does all kind of activities like simple to complex workflow activities can be performed in this version?


Thanks,
Chandra

[afaust]

Hello,

1) Alfresco Community (any version) includes the business process engine / workflow capability. This should not be confused with the dedicated Alfresco Activiti offering which can be used standalone.
2) The business process engine / workflow capability of Alfresco Community is embedded so does not need to be installed separately. The Alfresco Activiti offering on the other hand would be a separate install.
3) Only if you use Alfresco Enterprise or the dedicated Alfresco Activiti offering is licensing required.
4) The business process engine / workflow capability embedded in Alfresco Community is a fully-fledged engine and can be used to develop workflows with arbitrary complexity. Only limitation is skill of developers and resulting usability for end-users…

Regards
Axel

[billydoe]

I am using Version :Community - v4.2.0 (4428) and experiencing full indexing failed . I have over 6 mils records. Is there any records ( note, properties) limitation for community version?

[afaust]

Hello,

there is no technical size / amount limitation with Community Edition. Any effective limitations you may experience are typically the result of infrastructure constraints or configuration, i.e. due to database or index storage being massively IO-bottlenecked etc.

Regards
Axel