What can Alfresco solve for me?

[sakkaje]

After trying to install Alfresco for a while i was wondering why should i use it in the first place? I suppose i could use it as a knowledge management tool, but Alfresco does not know how to manage knowledge themselves. Look for example at the wiki. There are many (sort of) duplicate entries and the whole organization / categorization of the wiki does not make a lot of sense. The formal documentation is a few clicks behind the current release of the software and i wonder if it is maintained at all. So on improving the user's knowledge management does somebody think that the Alfresco guys can be of any help?
(Get the documentation right. It is a critical success factor for any project and it is a face palm issue for any developer that claims to do document management.)

Looking at the features and road map one thing stands out. It does not address any real business issue. It focuses mostly on IT requirements: acronym compliance. Alfresco therefor IMO lacks a strong vision and it might be a leadership issue. It doesn't matter how smart the Alfresco developers are: it is not making things right that is important it is making the right things. Where is the customer value in jumping from one BPM engine to another? They are almost the same but they break any upgrade. Or simply ask yourself why does Alfresco has two (almost similar) user interfaces? If you zoom in, the list of half baked decisions becomes endless: Plugins? There of course! But for programmers and mathematicians only. Version 3 installs with MySQL, version 4 with PostgreSQL. Why? Well it is cool to show it can run on both. etc. etc.

So why should a business want to use Alfresco? Because it applies to standards most have never heard of? Because it does workflow mgt, document mgt, web content mgt, xyz mgt, so there *must* be something useful in it?
I don't think so.
Experienced IT manager can smell this from a distance: Alfresco has a huge headache potential and meager business benefit potential. It is a shame because i know there are some very clever guys working on this project. I hope a leader in this project will wake up and recognize the true potential.

[sduis]

All right, here's a question from someone who's testing but has not yet implmented Alfresco Community … Is there something as good or better, that is still offered as a free, open source product? We tested various other platforms, and Alfresco certainly looks the best out of the box. Once we got 3.4 loaded on a test server, I (a non-IT and non-programmer type) was able to easily set up and create sample sites and document repositories to show my boss how it might work. Compared to the other products I reviewed and tested, it's the best looking and most flexible open source option, and it can be expanded in the future if it works well for us and we have the resources to do so.

Our only real concern with moving forward with Alfresco Community is that it may be too complex for our limited staff & budget to maintain and to handle upgrades down the line. I am personally optimistic that we can make it work, and want to go ahead and give it a shot. But there's a lurking fear that after a year or two we will hit a wall and either have to scrap it and start over with something else, or try to scrape together funds to pay for enterprise support just to keep the system functional.

We can't afford anything more expensive than $Free in our current budget climate. I don't want to have to settle for a system that will cover very basic document management for now, but that is restrictive, not user-friendly, and/or already obsolete. That's my rant. Any easy answers?