Using Alfresco in retailer system

[cirruslogic]

Can Alfresco be used to build an application like this, with some customisation, perhaps?
Nature of application:
We are a small retailer and we want our suppliers to log in to this application and view the orders we have for them.
They can sort the order by the product or by our branches.
The supplier will retrieve the order, fill up the quanties they can ship, in a web form, and submit a "reply" us.
Question is whether Alfresco can be tweaked to do this.
So we have an action, a business logic layer and a persistance layer to do this part.
There is also another part of the application where suppliers can deposit their new product listings to us.
And we can also deposit our remittances to them.
So this other part is about depositing and retrieivng documents, very much like what we see in Alfresco.
Can the earlier part be done easily?

[mrogers]

While you could undoubtedly use Alfresco for that sort of system,  Alfresco is primarily a document management system and your requirements concern "orders" rather than "documents".

You probably want to use an RDBMs for your application.     As and when your requirements become document centric (for example you need an online catalog of your products) that's when to add alfresco.

[cirruslogic]

Thank you for replying, mrogers.

I would like to confirm if Alfresco is the way to go to build my application.
This is what we want to do:

We have a main application that produces text files a couple of times a day. The text file has several descriptor fields each having a fixed length. Each text file has, say, 100 order numbers and for each order number, we have the supplier number, supplier name, the product numbers, descriptions, ordering quantity, date to deliver, store outlets to deliver to.

So we, the retailer, are ordering stuff from several suppliers and the suppliers deliver the stuff to our store outlets.
The main application is capable of translating each order into an xml formatted file.

We also have a master list of supplier numbers and the supplier names.

I was wondering if I can make Alfresco work this way:

1.
We will write a program in Alfresco that takes the master list of supplier codes and creates, edits or deletes "groups" which represent these suppliers. One supplier cannot see another supplier's content. For each supplier, the program will create a sub-group called "sales", another one called "finance". These represent the departments for each supplier.

2.
Next, our administrator will create a user for say supplier  number 12345 and put that user in the "sales" or "finance" sub group.

3.
The main application will send the order file in XML format to the Alfresco server and we will have a program in Alfresco that converts the file to a readable file, say a Word, Excel or PDF file, and put each order file for the supplier concerned.

So Ace from the "sales" department and who belongs to Supplier code "12345" can only see his company's orders. People from our company can also see all orders.

4.
In addition, I am wondering if we can customise Alfresco so that at a click of a button, we can dynamicaly sort an order XML file and allow the supplier to view the order sorted by products and then store outlets or view the order sorted by store outlets and then the products. That is for each product number which outlets the supplier sends to and what is the quantity. Or for each outlet, what are the different products the supplier needs to send to.

You must understand Alfresco's architecture pretty well. Do you think I should use Alfresco to build my application?

[zaizi]

Yes, you can pretty much do what you've described in Alfresco. You can take it further and create Alfresco Share sites for each of your suppliers. So they can log in into their own sites and see the orders, etc.

IMHO, using Alfresco to implement the use case you've described is an overkill.

However, if you consider other use cases such as using Alfresco as your supplier CRM to manage things such as sales brochures and collateral, etc. it will come into it's own.

Ainga

[cirruslogic]

Thanks Ainga.

Can you elaborate about why this use case is an overkill.

Also, how do I start by programatically pushing the correct order XML or Excel file to the correct supplier user account.
The user will probabaly belong to, say, supplier 12345, PO department, Logistics.

And how do I program the part where the supplier user clicks on a button, and the XSLT transformer within Alfresco builds a new file or web page that presents the order sorted first by product number or sorted first by outlet.

I don't think you recommend changing any java files and recompiling the jar file.