need an urgent review!

[hearthacker]

hi,

we plan to use alfresco for our portal, hence want to evaluate this product!
i have a couple of queries!

1) how exactly WCM is different from ECM?
2) what are the limitations and benefits of using alfresco?
3) are there 3rd party plugins availaible for alfresco?

I would really appreciate if someone could guide me for this issue!

Rodney!

[rdanner]

hi,

we plan to use alfresco for our portal, hence want to evaluate this product!
i have a couple of queries!

1) how exactly WCM is different from ECM?
2) what are the limitations and benefits of using alfresco?
3) are there 3rd party plugins availaible for alfresco?

I would really appreciate if someone could guide me for this issue!

Rodney!

1.
WCM is a component of ECM (Document Management, Records Management, Asset Management, Web Content Management)
WCM is different from Document Management in that it is focused and tooled for managing the development of websites and web content.  Some of the concepts are and tooling is transferable. Web Forms and Sandboxes for example are useful for needs outside of the WCM space but haven't yet or are just recently finding their way in to the Document Management side of thing. From a purely intellectual perspective the difference web document and content is very fuzzy and probably finds it's boundaries around the rendition concerns and use cases for the artifact.

2. Let's get a little more specific… what are yo trying to accomplish.
Alfresco has a lot of benefits from its business model to it's technical capabilities but it's not everything to everybody, can you give us a little more definition?

3. Check out forge.alfresco.com
The short answer is Yes there are, the longer answer is not as much as everyone would like.  Plugins in alfresco take many forms from language packs to templates, to java code modules to web script installs.  The primary means of distributing all of these is the AMP architecture.  Not every "plugin" has been packaged to be distributed as an AMP yet (many were developed before the AMP architecture was in place.) 
To be blunt, if you are asking if Alfresco can compete on plugins with the likes of Drupal or Wordpress the reality is: not yet.