Will Alfresco meet our requirements?

[alloydog]

I have been giving the task of finding a Document/Content management system for our (small) company.
I am reading through the features of Alfresco (and others), but would like some users' opinions.

Our main requirements are:
- no startup costs, and can be maintained by our team (Technical Writers) (i.e. no external experts needed)
- basic versioning; branching not needed
- multilingual support (i.e. can manage language variants of a singe source language version)
- no restrictions on type of content (format) that can be stored (XML, Framemaker files, and so on…)
- content can be searched
- automated module ID system (module ID not tied to the filenames we use)
- batch import and export
- restricted access options (ACLs)
  + we need a solution that would allow us to give our customers access to their content, but not see everything in the database

So far, we are also looking at:
- Subversion
- Daisy CMS
- Hippo CMS
- Drupal
- Joomla
- Ez

I would appreciate any comments.

thanks.

[steve]

Hi,
Yes to everything, except - what is '- automated module ID system (module ID not tied to the filenames we use)'?
Using the custom model abilities of Alfresco you can define your own object and their attributes with Alfresco - does that meet your requirements for the above?
Steve

[alloydog]

Thanks Steve, I also received a PM detailing how it meets our needs, so thanks to that guy as well…

By automated ID, I mean, when you create a placeholder for a new document, it gives an ID number, rather than the user having to create one themselves.
For example, at a previous company, we used Trisoft Infoshare.  When an XML file was uploaded, it was given a unique ID number by the system.  That way, regardless of the content of the file, if it used/reused by many documents, it did not matter what it was called. ID assignment by the database also prevents dupliacte and out-of-sequence document IDs being issued/created.

[stepwise]

If a User is doing a Search on a document that he has no rights to access - will that document be hidden from him?  Or is is a case where the document is visible but just not accessible?

Thanks!

[steve]

Hi,
If the user has consumer rights (read) on the document then it will appear in the search results.
If the user has no permissions on the document then it is as if the document does not exist for them - so it won't appear in search results.

Hope this helps,

Steve

[alloydog]

Thanks.

We're now using the online demo to try out a few thing.

One of the main requirements is to allocate a document ID number to every file, as opposed to a file, or I guess can be used as well as the file name. I have been through the online help, and played around with "Manage content rules", but cannot work out how to do it.
Any ideas?

[zaizi]

All content within Alfresco including spaces and files have a node reference. This is unique to that item. It copied over even if you export and import the content into another Alfresco instance. This is out of the box functionality.

If you want to include some additional custom id which might be linked to some back office system, then you will need to create a custom content model. How to of which can be found at ;http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2007/06/09/756

Alternatively, a quick and dirty solution would be to use of the standard metadata models already provided like Dublin core and use one of the fields in that.

[alloydog]

Thanks for the pointers, I'm looking at those now. I saw the "Dublin core" thingy when playing around with making rules and so on. I'm a complete n00b with this, as in the past I have only used DMS, not had to set one up…

What would be ideal is that when new content is created, with Create > Content (as opposed to + Add Content), a unique, preferably sequential ID is generated, for example, the very first item to be created would be 000001.