Questions from potential new user

[bongo]

Hi there, I work for a small training organisation (under 40 staff) and we are considering changing to a CMS instead of our current shared drive but also would like to open up certain files for access by our students / trainees. Can you give me any advice?

Basically we're looking at the following:

* being able to set access rights for each staff member so they can only read documents that are relevant to them and of those, only edit the ones for which they have responsibility.

* similar access restrictions for each student - each student having read / write access to their own space and read only access to spaces shared by other students in their group / class. Then we'd have a number of different groups as we have lots of different classes (each student within the group having read access to their specific area etc etc).

* staff and students being able to access our internal server (and hence the files within it) from both onsite and offsite over the internet securely (currently we can't access our system from offsite, only our emails and personal calendar through a Microsoft Exchange Server).

Although we only have up to 40 staff, we currently have around 800 students on our books at any one time (and we're expanding year on year) so would need to set up a lot of individual usernames & control access rights for each student. Having looked around a bit at a few different platforms, it seems like we can use this sort of system as a cross between a student portal and a basic VLE which also stretches to allow our staff to use it in a similar way to how they use the shared drive at the moment.

I hope this all makes sense and you have an idea of what we're after. Can someone tell me which version of Alfresco would do us best and can you give me a ballpark figure (GB £s please) of what kind of cost would be involved in the setup and yearly licensing etc of such a system. I'm not looking for an exact figure by any means, just a sort of idea so I can let my superiors know if it's way out of our league or worth looking into a bit more.

Thanks,

Mike

[norgan]

Hello Mike,
I can't help you with the sizing information, but regarding versions : If you have someone, who is willing and able to dig into forums, wiki and PDf files, cope with XML, AMPs, FTL Templates and maybe even learn a bit Javascript, Freemarker and Java and ask Questions in the forum, and havfe a decent backup, then you dont necessarily need the enterprise version. Alfresco runs fine, basically. But sometimes it might be necessary and you need someone, who is not scared from looking into technical discussions & wikis.

Regarding your requirements : its Alfresco Standard, I cant see much "extra" stuff in your list (yet), but you should think about that again.

In Detail :
To replace your networkdrives with Alfreso, simply launch Alfresco, connect a network drive via LAN and copy your structure into the system.
Now you can administer the access rights in Alfresco to your desire. The users will only see those spaces, which they have access to. So you could have an internal repository plus a folderstructure something like

/trainings/class1
/trainings/class2
….

Wiht "class1" having a set of files and links to files & spaces, which are part of the class.

The most tricky parts will be : Do you want to manage all students separately or just 1 user/password per class? And do you want all your content on a system, which is reachable from the internet and do you want the students to "collaborate/communicate".
* If you want basic collaboration, you may want to use Alfresco share.
* If you just want a very basic forum function and workflows, you can use Alfresco Explorer
* if you wand better wiki, blog, and forum activities - use Liveray portal as Frontend and integrate Alfresco Explorer Spaces only
* if you dont want any collaboration - build a website and deploy the contents with the WCM components. So the "internal" client is for VPN Users only and the class-documents are available for any website user (maybe with login).

For Share installation :
* You can split alfresco basic & alfresco share between servers and only allow share to be accessed from the internet.

You will spend quite some time installing and adapting your system for you, though. It will be up and running for the first time quite fast, but to finetune the system, finetune your space structures etc, it takes time and you probably will to it more than once. Simply because you can you so much with it, you will discover a lot "Oh, I want that too"s. So it might be helpfull getting someone into the project, who knows Alfresco already.

For instance, the email-gateway function will be really neat for you, I think. You can provide spaces with emailadresses. Every Email, going there will be inserted into the space as "content".

Hope that helped a bit.

Norgan