Suitable use of Alfresco? Job candidate tracking/workflow

[paul2]

Hi,

  I'm working on a proof of concept demonstration of Alfresco for my employer. So far I'm having a great time with Alfresco but I'm having trouble coming up with a solution to one requirement: employment candidate tracking.

  We need to track a person from the time we receive a resume to the point at which we're done with the candidate, that is, hired or not hired (and the reason, such as "no openings", "not qualified", "rejected offer").  Associated with the person is their resume and any notes written by interviewers, managers, HR, etc.  My boss also wants to be able to see at a glance how many candidates are in the pipeline and where they are in the process ("interview scheduled", "awaiting response to offer", etc.)

  My initial thought was a custom content model and work flow, and perhaps a data grid to show the status at a glance.  Before I tackle this steep learning curve I'd like to get some feedback on if what I want to do is a good use of Alfresco and if so, am I approaching the problem the right way.

  As a side note, my normal job is as a Java web developer and I'm very familiar with Tomcat, Spring, JavaScript (including YUI), though I've no practical experience with rules engines.

  Thanks for any help!

Paul

[jpotts]

This is definitely the kind of solution that Alfresco was built for. Your intuition is correct: Create a content model to capture the business-specific metadata, create a workflow to shepherd the documents through the process (you could start with simple workflow or even no workflow at all and do everything manually if you wanted to), and then create a page that queries your data and displays it in a way that makes sense to the managers.

Note that starting with 4.2 it is much easier to customize the document library with such a grid.

Another idea would be to use data lists to represent candidates and their status, then link off to the supporting documents for folders as necessary.

Jeff

[rroic]

Hi Paul.

You are at he right place. We have fulfilled the same requirements w/ Alfresco in a few ways for different clients and in-house:

a) Building a workflow on top of Alfresco Share as Jeff outlined in more detail - should be the easiest approach if you are fresh into Alfreso. Some knowledge of YUI might come in handy.
b) Bulding a workflow on top of Activiti Explorer. Activiti is the BPM engine included in Alfresco and it features a UI of its own for such a purpose. - should be fairly easy, though a bit less documentation is available.
c) Building a custom application in any rapid development technology, such as Grails, PHP, Java and UI such as ExtJs/YUI/GWT/JQuery and using Alfresco and its BPM through SOA/REST - should be the most flexible and difficulty will depend on your previous expertize.

Hope you have fun.

Regards,
Roko

BTW, rule engines will not be a needed expertize, you should read a little bit into BPM as an approach to building applications.