More than one company in Alfresco instance

[gscheibel]

Hi All,

When I install Alfresco, it creates a Company Home. So I have spaces, user spaces, etc from this company.
Now I need to create another company in the repository with the same alfresco instance. Some users will access one company and another user will access the other company. Users from company "A" can't see spaces and documents from the company "B".

My question is: Can I do this with Alfresco?

Thanks in advance.

[billq]

I think you are mixing two concepts here:

First, it is easy to create two spaces and create different rights/authorities/owners (ACLs) for those spaces. Then you could have branch below those spaces to build other spaces (each with their own ACLs). This would be a single shared system, unified administration but simply many users with their own spaces.

However, in my lowly opinion, Alfresco is a LONG way from supporting multiple, unrelated companies in a single instance. One may possibly support divisions within a company but not really if that company/division is very large/mature. Breakdowns begin to occur as you think about…

Security and Administration

You need to allow creation of users in one company but not allow the authority to create users in another company (sub admins).

Other company users can see all of the users in my company – and their email addresses.

Users can freely share their content with other companies and management can’t effectively prevent it.

The Data Dictionary implementation is very immature. Many components/wizards depend on the specifically named directory. However, both companies will not want to share the same items (like workflows, forms, etc.). Worse yet, end users are allows to save content in the DD like searches. So, all companies may see all saved searches from all companies, etc.?

Backup/restore

I have not seen any work around making this granular enough to support multiple, independent organizations. Say one company needs to restore back to a date/time (user ids, groups, ACL, content, etc.) but the other companies will not agree.

There’s more but this highlights the problems that will arise.

[gscheibel]

Hi, thanks for the aswer

I just found another subject in the forum that discuss this.

http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=275