What's keeping me from using Alfresco in production-CIFS

[scottl]

Hi,
I figured I would give the powers that be at Alfresco some feedback. I am an Admin for a small company of about 100 PC users in the U.S.  We are looking at DMS products that can help us search and categorize and tag all our files that are currently on a traditional windows 2003 file server today. We have a mix of traditional plant employees who open the same couple excel sheets everyday(and keep them open throughout the day) and other power users(office people ) which open many office files throughout the day and have many linked excel files.

Alfresco is the only solution that I can find that can offer a windows file share experience via the CIFS interface to our users so they can easily browse to the file like they do today in windows and just edit that file.  They don't have time to check-in/check out a document nor do many of them even have the skillset to do that.

What is stopping us from adopting Alfresco today is the CIFS  interface in a Windows environment.  While you are the only company to offer such an interface in a DMS, It's just not currently usable yet for employees who keep files open all day long or open these files multiple times a day using any of the latest Office variants(2007/2010). In our trial testing from 4.0.x CE on we get constant problems with Office 2007/2010 documents(mostly excel) being locked in Read-Only.  I have to restart the server every time to get the file unlocked.

I have jumped on a few of the open JIRA tickets out there that deal with this problem in CIFS and stated "Me Too & I'm on version CE 4.0.x'  , but most of the tickets are for the  3.x series. Being new to Alfresco I find it hard understand if these JIRA tickets/bugs carry over to the 4.x release of your products or not. If they don't are my cries of CIFS problems being heard or do I need to create new identical JIRA tickets to have these get addressed in the 4.0.c release cycle?   I know I'm using the CE version of the product right now and you're not making any money off of me, but to be honest that's the version I am going to be testing first before I think about spending money.

Of all the other products out there(KnowledgeTree, Nuxeo,etc) you come closest to what we need. 

You guys are so close to an awesome product fit for us, but right now Alfresco just does not deliver the goods.

Hopefully a future customer,
-Scott

[kevindorr]

Scott -

Thanks for your feedback on CIFS. My understanding is that there has been an extensive refactoring of the CIFS code, and that the new code will be available in the 4.0.1 version of Alfresco Enterprise. It has also been backported to version 3.4.9 as well. The word from engineering is that the majority if not all issues currently understood with CIFS will be resolved by these releases. I'm less clear when these fixes will make their way into the Community Edition, but they should be available soon. Please see if you can find a version with the new CIFS code and report back on what you find.

Thanks,

Kevin Dorr
Alfresco

[scottl]

That's awesome news Kevin. I will try to download latest nightly release early next week. Thanks for the info!

-Scott

[scottl]

I downloaded a nightly snapshot 1 week ago. I am still getting file in use messages with excel file in office.  Seems better, but still happens just on a lesser frequency.

[steves]

Hi,

by any chance is there any resolution of this bug for the community version? Or a hint where to look for it (svn, other?)

Thanks

Steve

[scottl]

Steve,

I did notice this in the JIRA tickets. This is supposedly fixed in 4.0.2 Enterprise as of 5/12 .   —> https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALF-13852

I'm not sure if it made it in the nightly release yet.

-Scott

[steves]

Scott,

good to hear.

Thanks a lot for your reply!

Regards