Some document workflow, can Alfresco 1.3 already do this?

[j-wicz]

Dear alfresco community.
We are evaluating content management systems for one customer, and in my tendency towards well structured professional  open source software (Alfresco) and standards (JSR-170) I would look forward to choose this project rather then SharePoint which other team members suggested.

Maybe someone could give us a hint if the following is a easy task for Alfresco and if we can accomplish it with the current work flow capabilities of Alfresco 1.3 or if I need the advanced jBPM based work flow of 1.4.

We need a "content collection monitoring" thingy. Management people decide, that a new collateral is needed and pick a team of editors, external graphics consultants and other responsible persons. They would then assign tasks, responsibilities to these members. These members then have to deliver some content into the repository (in its simplest form documents) and the manager needs to be able to see who has delivered, who is late and notification by email (or RSS) would be nice. Also people higher up in the hierarchy must see if their collateral managers are doing fine. So some potential reporting (Jasper? BIRT?) capabilities would be great.

Of course this would be just the start of a bigger enterprise content management application for this client based on Alfresco, but oddly our first user base are the sensitive management guys.

I hope that someone just replies, that this is peanuts for Alfrresco and that we can stick with you guys. If 1.4 features (as described here http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Workflow ) would be neccessary, then it would be nice to know if they are already checked into the trunk and one could test drive them.


kind regards
Philippj

[davidc]

Hi,

You can probably support your scenario in v1.3 with some model, script, rules, action customisation.

v1.4 will introduce the concept of tasks (and a task list for each person).  jBPM provides support for due dates and reminders with the possibility of invoking any alfresco action (e-mail….), script on jBPM events.  We'll also have the notion of a workflow package - a collection of content that's routed through the workflow.  Not only does this allow mutliple items to be reviewed etc, but it also allows the collection of new items (i.e. the creation of new content).

v1.4 out-of-the-box won't provide too much reporting, however, as it's all based on jBPM, it's possible to query the jBPM schema from any reporting tool - I've think that Pentahoe may do something in this area.

v1.4 workflow is currently in development and therefore mirrored to our public SVN.  It's only just begun, so there's nothing to test drive today.

[j-wicz]

Dear David,

thanks for the hints.

Alfresco will be our prefferd implementation over Sharepoint. Also your end-user tutorial was helpful from an technical point of view, if you read between the lines and extrapolate introduced concepts. Wiki was also good information source. Roadmap seems one or two month behind, but thats ok for an open source product.

Looking forward to implement this.
Philipp