[Solved] Is Alfresco serious ?

[tamarix]

Hello,

I heard about Alfersco many time over the pastr years and recently jump into it by installing the Community v4b.

I have been quite disappointed regarding the lack of documentation and some severe drawbacks that seem to exist such as weak users rights management, no easy users management, minimal features available in the forum module …

So I wanted to know more about the commercial support.
Over the past 10 days, I contacted twice the French sale team from through that site: http://www.alfresco.com/about/contact/ to get a quote an did not get a single answer.

So I start to wonder if this Alfresco is really something serious or if I better look in other directions

Any opirnion wlecome here

Thank you
Franck

[mikeh]

Firstly, I'm sorry that your initial experience with Alfresco has been disappointing.

Addressing each point:

Documentation: Our documentation is getting better and better over time. As well as there being numerous books available (including one we wrote internally) there is extensive documentation for 4.0 at http://docs.alfresco.com/4.0/index.jsp If you find a topic lacking, please do let us know via JIRA so the Documentation Team is aware and can address the problem.

Weak user rights management: Could you expand on that please?

No easy users management: I'm slightly confused by this statement. Both the Explorer (/alfresco) and Share (/share) web apps have user management areas. We also support SSO and passthrough authentication should you want to manage users externally. What in particular did you find difficult?

Forum module: Share is deliberately designed with "light" implementations of forums, blogs and wiki as we don't think it's in anyone's best interest to spend time duplicating phpBB, Wordpress or MediaWiki respectively. If there are features you'd like to see, please raise enhancement requests in JIRA so we can consider them for future versions.


Regarding the "are we serious" question - I guess a measure of that is the hugely successful "DevCon" event we have just held in both San Diego and London. Both were attended by around 300 of our customers and community contributors, all of whom I'm sure think we're "serious", as do our 1000's of Enterprise customers.

I can't answer why the sales team hasn't got back to you - perhaps we have an IT issue in that area that needs addressing, so I'll raise that internally. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Regards,
Mike

[tamarix]

Dear Mike,

Many thanks for your swift reply.

Weak user rights management: Could you expand on that please?

Here are some example I have:

• I want to add about 50users to Alfresco installation and give them access to one site A, with no particular rights to another site B

I can upload a CSV file to create the 50 users in one click : that's fine. But then the troubles start because I am not able to link these users to any particular group while doing the CSV uploads (or did not find a way to do so).
So the only remaining options that I have is
- to add them individually to a group and then invite the group to join the site
- or invite them individually to join the site.
In both case, that is painful, in particular due to the fact that in share, you can not simply display all the users, select some of them and make a specific action on this selection, such as linking them to one group. We have to Search for a member…. Which mean that you have to make sure to cover all the 50 names that you entered because you have to enter at least 1 character in the search box.

• Access to main page items and allowing site creation

The access to items (such as 'sites', 'people', repository') which are accessible in the header of the main page can not be easily customised. I found a way to get them displayed only if the connected user has Admin rights but it does not prevent other to access these if they have the link. I do not want everybody to be able to browse the repository or to create new sites.

• Visibility (confidentiality) of other users

I made a another post on this: https://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=41736

• Visible directories

It seems that directories such as Surf-config can not be hidden whereas common users do not need to be aware of it

Forum module: Share is deliberately designed with "light" implementations of forums, blogs and wiki as we don't think it's in anyone's best interest to spend time duplicating phpBB, Wordpress or MediaWiki respectively. If there are features you'd like to see, please raise enhancement requests in JIRA so we can consider them for future versions.

I fully agree with you: I was not expecting to find here a phpBB replacement. What I was expecting for a collaborative approach is to have this forum more tightly coupled with the other modules.
For example, from a 'document' or a 'folder' of the library, I was hoping to see a possibility to launch a discussion related to that document.
Also, I was thinking that we would be able to launch group based discussions
Finally, I know that users are often not proactive in going to the forum.  Getting the possibility to receive the message directly in the email box and reply to them from the e.mail (kind of features existing in facebook for example) would be quite efficient.

I will further look to the documentation but as an example of a useful thing that I did not find up to now is the exhaustive list of parameters of the alfresco-global.properties file. Does such a list exist ?

Sorry for being that long…I hope that at least my meaning is clear.

Sincerely,
Franck

[mikeh]

• I want to add about 50users to Alfresco installation and give them access to one site A, with no particular rights to another site B

…I am not able to link these users to any particular group while doing the CSV uploads (or did not find a way to do so).

This is actually a great idea and would make a sensible enhancement to the current user import. I'll let our Product Management team know. Incidentally, the following entries in share-config-custom.xml will remove those search defaults (assuming you're using v4.0)

<alfresco-config>

   <!–
      Overridden Search config entries to:
         - remove minimum search term length for all searches.
   –>

   <config evaluator="string-compare" condition="Search" replace="true">
      <search>
         <!– default minimum length for search terms –>
         <min-search-term-length>0</min-search-term-length>
         
         <!– default maximum number of results for a search –>
         <max-search-results>250</max-search-results>
      </search>
   </config>

   <!–
      Overridden form-config.xml entries to:
         - remove minimum search term length for people searches.
   –>

   <config>
      <forms>
         <default-controls>
            <type name="association:cm:person" template="/org/alfresco/components/form/controls/authority.ftl">
               <control-param name="minSearchTermLength">0</control-param>
            </type>
            <type name="association:cm:authority" template="/org/alfresco/components/form/controls/authority.ftl">
               <control-param name="minSearchTermLength">0</control-param>
            </type>
            <type name="association:cm:authorityContainer" template="/org/alfresco/components/form/controls/authority.ftl">
               <control-param name="minSearchTermLength">0</control-param>
            </type>
         </default-controls>
      </forms>
   </config>

</alfresco-config>‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

• Access to main page items and allowing site creation

The access to items (such as 'sites', 'people', repository') which are accessible in the header of the main page can not be easily customised. I found a way to get them displayed only if the connected user has Admin rights but it does not prevent other to access these if they have the link. I do not want everybody to be able to browse the repository or to create new sites.

Yes, this is a known limitation we are hoping to fix in a future version. In the meantime, you can override the page config in the site-data folder and change the "user" authentication value to "admin".

• Visibility (confidentiality) of other users

I made a another post on this: https://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=41736

I hadn't seen that post. Currently this isn't possible without some code modification - i.e. changing the webscript that picker uses and making sure the current site (if you are in one) is passed in the query. You should raise this as an enhancement request (or bug if you consider it one) in JIRA.

• Visible directories

It seems that directories such as Surf-config can not be hidden whereas common users do not need to be aware of it

Once you've hidden the Repository Browser, normal users should no longer see these. I agree it's somewhat of a User Experience issue however.

What I was expecting for a collaborative approach is to have this forum more tightly coupled with the other modules.
For example, from a 'document' or a 'folder' of the library, I was hoping to see a possibility to launch a discussion related to that document.
Also, I was thinking that we would be able to launch group based discussions
Finally, I know that users are often not proactive in going to the forum.  Getting the possibility to receive the message directly in the email box and reply to them from the e.mail (kind of features existing in facebook for example) would be quite efficient.

The model backing the "Comments" functionality on documents and folders is actually the same used for discussions, however we took a decision early on to deliberately simplify to a flat structure - with hindsight we could have made that more nested through configuration.
Group based discussions are not something we've considered yet - again JIRA would be the place to submit your requirements in order to get them considered for the roadmap.
Email notifications are possible through folder rules - this could be done via a rule on the top-level Sites folder.

…the exhaustive list of parameters of the alfresco-global.properties file. Does such a list exist ?

I don't think there is - the approach taken is to cover the settings for each configurable item in the relevant section, rather than just a big list. It might be something our Documentation Team can put together however, as our source docs are Dita-based, hence quite modular.

It sounds like Share isn't a million miles off your requirements - some of which could be accomplished via scripts being invoked via rules, or minor customisations - but there are some gaps it would be useful for our Product Management team to know about.

Thanks again,
Mike

[tamarix]

Dear Mike,

Thanks for the support.

I created 2 posts under JIRA …Do not hesitate to adjust as necessary:

• https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALF-11454


• https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALF-11455

You convinced me: I am going to pursue investigations.
I will also phone the commercial support .. .To at least wake them up 🙂

Sincerely,
Franck

[jasonsfa98]

The sales team seems to be non-existent.

Phone calls. E-mail. Contact page submissions. No contact.

[mrogers]

You should receive a response within 24 hours.

If you don't get a response soon then post again and I'll find out what has happened.

Which country are you trying to contact?

[jasonsfa98]

A co-worker and I have been trying for nearly a month.

[aasifkhan_91]

Hi, there.
I'm new to alfresco community.
I'm using alf community version 3.4d.
I'm finding it difficult to manage the user permissions.

I created my own templates for advance search, but i dont know how to assign particular templates for particular user and other templates to be hidden…..

For example, i have created two templates like projects and documents and two users A and B.
I want user A to see only projects in advance search list and user B to see Documents in the list…
Can someone help me to solve this problem or is it not possible at all.

And one more thing, can i create my own dashboard page?

[mrogers]

I suggest you start a new thread rather than posting to a topic that is long dead.