Migration from existing commerical CMS to Alfresco

[jharvey]

Hi all,

I apologise in advance if this is the wrong place for this posting - let me know and i'll move it!

I work for an IT and Business solutions company that is evaluating the possibility of migrating a client from an existing commerical CMS (that has been in place for 2 years) to Alfresco. I have a limited amount of time to do a product evaluation (and POC) and would appreciate some help in answering a few specific questions regarding it:

- Content types
I assume that by this thread title (content aspects) it is possible to create user-defined content types. However, it is possible to create templates for these content types. For example, say I'm a letting agency, could I define a content type called 'House' and put a constraint on a 'House' that it must have at least one 'Bedroom' type?
Also, can I configure the UI so that users entering information for the house only have to enter data into fields? (The frontend CDA will deal with presentation).

- Workflows
I have briefly looked into defining custom triggers for content rules. However, the most important one that I am interested in is the ability to define a forward date for publishing content (or an expiry date for content). Does this functionality come "out-of-the-box" or can it be custom written?

- Languages
Is there a plugin available to transform content from one language to another? The client has a number of different language websites that are running from a single CMS currently.

EDIT: Found this already!
- User permissions
Is it possible to create ACLs for operations? <SNIP>

- Spell checking
One of the overlooked functions in a number of existing CMSs is the ability to spell-check content. Is there a connector for any 3rd party spell-checkers available?

Thanks so much for your time, even if you can answer even 1 of these questions.

Best regards,

[davidc]

Hi,

- Content types

The http://www.alfresco.org/mediawiki/index.php/Data_Dictionary_Guide provides an explanation of content types (how to configure etc) as well as how to customise the web client for those types e.g. property, edit dialogs.

[jharvey]

Hi,

- Content types

The http://www.alfresco.org/mediawiki/index.php/Data_Dictionary_Guide provides an explanation of content types (how to configure etc) as well as how to customise the web client for those types e.g. property, edit dialogs.

Excellent - taken a look and it seems as though the modelling architecture would allow for the simple relationships that I described in my original posting. However, as a newcomer to the CMS domain, I'm still a little unclear about the distinction between aspect and type. Would anyone be able to shed some more light onto this?

[davidc]

The following link may help - http://www.alfresco.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=222.

[jharvey]

The following link may help - http://www.alfresco.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=222.

Thanks David. Reverting to OOP-esque notation, so long as we can define the Alfresco equivilent of an object, and it will contain a reference to another object (eg. declare a House which will contain 1..* Bedrooms) to reuse the Bedroom object somewhere else (eg in an Apartment object) that is all we need.
The Data Dictionary seems to allow for this so its looking pretty good at the moment!

Best regards,