Liferay or Alfresco...How to Choose

[mrrosenthal85]

We are a property development and management company and we have a fairly large sized specifications request for the application we want to make. In general

It is heavy on workflow and process—requiring webforms, document management and BPM

It requires information pages allowing users to interact status of the underlying data (property/customer information)  (CMS)

In total its about 100 pages of data entry forms and information pages from data entered, not including business logic behind all these pages

It will need to connect to a separate CMS+UI for our Website and APP

It will need to connect to our finance and hr software(currently handled by Odoo ERP)

I have talked to many developers, and have many many solutions including
liferay, alfresco, liferay+alfresco, and even cuba.platform. 

Is there any input form the community on what tool and **WHY** we should choose one tool or method over the other? 


Our tech environment probably will look something like
Confirmed
Odoo(HR+Finance)
Redmine(Project Management and team Communication)
Alfresco (Document Management)

Alfresco or Liferay(or both?) for workflow and CMS

Forecast
GLUU/CAS for SSO
pentaho eventually for BI

[jpotts · Accepted solution]

There's not a lot to go on here. I'm sure you have all sorts of details you haven't shared which would steer you one way or the other.

It seems you need to focus on (1) what is managing your documents, (2) what is automating your processes, and (3) what framework you are using to build the front-end.

For documents, that's going to be Alfresco for anything but the most basic requirements.

For automating your processes, that could be Activiti running embedded within Alfresco or it could be Activiti standalone.

For the front-end, it really depends. Alfresco is not a CMS in the way that you are probably thinking, so cross that off the list unless you can live with Alfresco Share as your UI.

Liferay might be acceptable but the last time I used it on a client project it felt like a lot of overhead for very little benefit--but of course it depends on how you are using it. It is primarily indicated when you have a lot of integration with other systems and you want to expose those systems through a common user interface that is personalized based on the role of the user. Committing to Liferay also means committing to a certain style of development. I can't tell from these requirements whether or not you actually need something like Liferay or not.

An alternative would be to use a modern app dev framework like AngularJS to create the front-end which can interact with Alfresco via the REST API and/or CMIS.

[cesarista]

Hi:

Maybe the picture of this post can be useful:

- Proyectos en tecnologías de portal con Alfresco y Liferay - zylk

Best regards.

--C.