Differences : Workdesk Community / Enterprise

[deas0815]

Hallo everybody,

I have been attending the recent
<a href="https://www.alfresco.com/de/veranstaltungen/webinare/optimierung-sie-ihre-geschaeftsablaeufe-mit-alf...">Workdesk Webinar</a>. The product looked pretty nice so I tried to get hands on, downloaded an installed the 4.1.1.0 Community Edition and imported the HR sample application. I would say it works as expected at this point.

As pointed out at https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Workdesk , there are differences between the Enterprise and the Community Edition. Some of them are obvious, others not.

The ones that are not really clear to me are:

<ul>
<li>Business Integration</li>
<li>Productivity Enhancements</li>
<li>Database Role Manager</li>
<li>Database History Manager</li>
</ul>

The ones I am most unclear about are Business Integration and Database Role Manager.

Is it correct, that the Community Edition does not allow one to introduce and honor Business Roles (e.g. Finance, HR, Marketing, IT etc.) at all ?

Can somebody please clarify and give some more details on these differences ?

thanks
Andreas

[deko]

Hello Andreas,

first of all I want to thank you for your interest in Workdesk and for attending the latest Workdesk webinar.

From my side of view (as a technical support engineer) I would say that the biggest difference between Workdesk Community and Workdesk Enterprise is that you can only access professional support portal and professional support hotline if you subscribed to the Enterprise edition. Having said this, you will only get maintenance hotfixes and fixpacks as well as Workdesk upgrade versions using the Enterprise edition, whereas with Workdesk Community you always have to wait for the next Community release, which appears every 2 to 3 development sprints.

<blockquote>
The ones that are not really clear to me are:<ul>
    <li>Business Integration</li>
    <li>Productivity Enhancements</li>
    <li>Database Role Manager</li>
    <li>Database History Manager</li></ul>
</blockquote>

In Community Edition you are for example missing all the Workdesk add-ons like Office integration and Mobile Workdesk server to configure the Mobile Workdesk iOS app and bring your Workdesk views also to your mobile devices. Also other productivity enhancements like drag and drop functionality to add documents right from the desktop into the Workdesk browser app are missing in Community edition. Furthermore, you won´t be able to attend special Workdesk trainings and you won´t be able to order professional services, which could be in fact very useful when planning to roll out Workdesk for your business as fast as possible with the help of a great specialist team all over the world. You are also missing database role manager, so one of the most powerful Workdesk features - role based view depending on the user being logged in - is missing at all.

If you want to test Workdesk Enterprise so that you can compare the difference, you could download a 30 day Workdesk Enterprise trial version, which comes along with all the Workdesk features. The Download can be found here:

https://www.alfresco.com/products/workdesk/trial

Please enjoy the power of Workdesk now and don´t forget: Work less with Workdesk 😉

Best regards,
Dennis

[deas0815]

Hallo Dennis,

thanks for clarifying.

From my (current) personal perspective (trying out functionality) support matters much less than functionality.

Personally, I consider Office integration, Mobile Workdesk and Drag & Drop nice to have. I agree business role support is a very powerful  (core) feature. Not including it heavily degrades the Community Edition. Technically, I wonder what exactly is missing and how Community Users could possibly work around that limitation. Using multiple role dedicated installations may a very basic approach for some scenarios.

At the end of the day, today I am wondering whether I have any use for the Community Edition - as a user and as a developer. Looks like this  question boils down to whether I want case management limited to one role.

thanks
Andreas

[rapa]

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for attending the Webinar and thanks for asking.

Workdesk Community Edition is recommended for developers and highly-technical enthusiasts who deal with non-critical information. It provides user-friendly applications for case management and retrieval and supports all CMIS compliant ECM systems. It can be downloaded for free and is licensed under the GNU Public License.

The early availability of Community Edition releases allows using the latest features very fast. Customers can use the Community to develop their own solutions. Combining Workdesk Community with a CMIS-compliant Open Source ECM repository like Alfresco ECM Community Edition provides a low cost way of managing and retrieving documents and cases.

So the main purpose of the Community edition is to give technicians (like you) a simple possibility to test the main features of Workdesk and to inspect the source code. We left out the Business Role Management and the audit trail features because they require some conceptual work and configuration effort that we wanted to avoid since we want to keep it simple. Having said this I think it is clear that Workdesk Community is limited to small departmental solutions and that for using Workdesk on an enterprise level we suggest subscribing to the commercial version.

If you want to test this full featured version free of charge for 30 days please register here: http://www.alfresco.com/products/workdesk/trial
Please call me for further discussions or meet me in Barcelona or Boston at http://summit.alfresco.com/
Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Rainer

[deas0815]

Hallo Rainer,

thanks for your response.

I understand that the community edition primarily targets people like me - alfresco developers. And indeed, as a developer I do care a lot more about (end-user) features than support, stability, availability, scalability and so on.

You say you want technicians to try main features and inspect source code.

I have to say I consider business roles a main feature. I could live with the fact that a community edition does not provide me with a shiny user interface to manage business roles/rules and the like, but I would expect the framework to ship core-system functionality. You say you left it out for the community release due to efforts and to keep things simple. Alfresco gives away an entire (most likely far more complex) repository away for free and most devs don't mind anyways. On the other hand, I do understand that technically isolating business roles may mean significant implementation effort you do not want to put into the community edition today. I may volunteer doing that. Still, even in small scale scenarios one quickly wants an application to respect business roles. Assuming I want my customer care application evolving to support other kinds of people, I guess my choices are:

<ul>
<li>Building Business Roles myself and bake it into the app</li>
<li>Building another app</li>
<li>Upgrade to Enterprise and build it on top of it</li>
</ul>   

I definitely need to now this before going deeper with the product (and the code).

Would you dare to make a rough guess how many Community Workdesk installations are running in production worldwide ?

Regarding the source code, I have to say I don't really feel "invited" to dive in. Source jars wrapped in a zip and coming without a build file are not very convenient.

Please don't get me wrong:

I very much appreciate you giving a community edition away for free but as is, I can hardly imagine it gaining momentum, driving innovation, giving you valuable feedback or serving as an entry point for a later upgrade to the Enterprise Edition.

best regards
Andreas

[lule75]

Hello Community I have Attempted to follow this link http://www.alfresco.com/products/workdesk/trial but it just keeps on redirecting me to http://www.alfresco.com/products/one/trial What could be the problem. is it likely that we can no longer try out the enterprise trial version of workdesk.. I would really like to try it out I already have the community well installed but it has so much limitations in terms of customization in relation to what we need.