Alfresco Share Community Edition

[dhansaliya]

Hello All,

I hope everyone is doing well and safe. I am new to Alfresco. Currently, we use OnBase from Hyland. Because of the increase in the cost of OnBase, I wanted to see what other options are there in the Open source world. That brought me to the Alfresco Community. I am writing this post to know a little more about Alfresco Share Community Edition and to make sure it will be a good replacement for OnBase. I already installed a development environment with Docker. Some of my questions are:

• What are the differences between the My Files tab, Shared Files tab, and Repository tab?
• Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have options to create custom metadata for Scanned/Imported Documents? I believe this can be done using the Alfresco addon called Uploader Plus but I was wondering if the community edition has a built-in option to do this.
• Does Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of routing documents?
• Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of workflow?
• Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of document versioning?
• Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of Annotation?
• Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of Workflow tasks for each individual user?

I will greatly appreciate it if someone can help me with these questions. Thank you so much!! Stay Safe!

[angelborroy]

What are the differences between the My Files tab, Shared Files tab, and Repository tab?

* My Files = private files for the user
* Shared Fields = public files for everyone
* Repository = internal files for administrators

Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have options to create custom metadata for Scanned/Imported Documents?

* Alfresco supports the creation of custom metadata for every document. You can learn how to work with Custom Content Types in https://ecmarchitect.com/alfresco-developer-series-tutorials/content/tutorial/tutorial.html

Does Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of routing documents?

* Alfresco supports different mechanism to route documents, probably using Folder Rules is the simpler approach. You can learn more about that in https://docs.alfresco.com/6.1/tasks/library-folder-rules-define.html

Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of workflow?

* Alfresco supports simple and complex workflows. You can learn about workflows in https://ecmarchitect.com/alfresco-developer-series-tutorials/workflow/tutorial/tutorial.html

Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of document versioning?

* Yes, this is an out of the box default feature.

Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of Annotation?

* Alfresco Community doesn't support this feature, but Alfresco Enterprise does.

Does the Alfresco Share Community edition have a feature of Workflow tasks for each individual user?

* Yes, you can check the link I posted before related with workflows.

[dhansaliya]

Thank you for this. I appreciate it. I really appreciate the links and documentation. I hope it is okay if I post again if I have further questions. I will look at these links and documentation.

[EddieMay]

Hi @dhansaliya 

Feel free to post again if you have any problems after reading the documentation.

Cheers,

[Ashok29]

Need installation instructions provided by the analytics and reporting tool for the alfresco community edition and determine the specific reports needed (e.g., document activity reports, user access logs, content distribution metrics, etc.

[EddieMay]

Hi @dhansaliya & welcome to Alfresco!

I can't answer all your questions in one go, but I'll do what I can & perhaps others will chip in with their observations.

First thing is nomenclature:

For document management we have the open source Community Edition and the enterprise ACS (Alfresco Content Services). For differences between the two, see the comparison table on this document.

For BPM, we have the open source Activiti and the enterprise APS (Alfresco Process Services)

Share is one of the two user interfaces that ships with Alfresco, the other is the Alfresco Content Application (ACA). The ACA is geared towards ordinary users while share has Admin features and better support for workflow.

Now, to your questions:

1)

• My Files - these are files that you own
• Shared Files - files that have been shared with you
• Repository - all the folders/files that you have access to

2) Alfresco has custom models and aspects - here's a good tutorial outlining the concepts and how-to - this covers creating custom medata, etc. Rules & Actions automate applying things like Aspects to uploaded documents. So, basically yes, Community can do this to uploaded documents out of the box.

3) Routing documents - if you mean, on upload can documents of type X be put in folder Y? again, Rule and Actions take care of this. The same tutorial covers this scenario.

4) Workflow - yes, out of the box Alfresco has basic workflow. You can plugin Activit for more advanced workflow construction.

5) If the versioning aspect is applied, then yes, versioning works.

6) Annotation - not out of the box. There is an Enterprise Viewer add-on for the enterprise version.

7) Yes, see #5 above. You could assign a document 'Review' task to one user & an 'Accept' task to another user.

I hope that's helped you get some of the way in your assessing of Alfresco.

Cheers,