Using Alfresco Community in production?

Question

Anyone out there using the community (not enterprise subscription) version of Alfresco in production? Anyone with an enterprise subscription have any comments on doing so?

Answer 1

We are currently developing an application which uses Alfresco as a back end to store documents and to provide some back end functionality (login and session management, REST services for Flow management ...).

So far the experience is very good. The back end is stable and with the REST interface realy easy to use. The documentation however is (as with almost every free stuff) sometimes spare.

So bare in mind that some simple thing can eat up you time for lack of documentation.

Answer 2

Same here : an enterprise application for print/web magazine management. front end with ASP.NET and Alfresco as document repository, connected trough webservices. Documentation can be thin but community is strong enough. No experience with the enterprise edition.

Answer 3

I recently left a project that used Alfresco Enterprise for 2 years, and we were nearly in a production state. My last task on that project was actually to downgrade to Alfresco community due to lack of value we saw in enterprise support, among other things. Our sister site had a similar experience and had been using Alfresco community for at least a year. Basically, the major difference between community and enterprise is that bug fixes (i.e. patches) go into enterprise sooner. Alfresco will say that you're also getting support, and hopefully our departure from an enterprise subscription sent them the message that they need to step it up a notch.

Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like a more detailed answer (I'd be happy to edit if you have a more specific question).

Answer 4

We have just started to use Alfresco Community Edition for the document management features that it brings right out of the box. FTP, HTTP, CIFS and security were all major concerns for us in implementation.

We first started out on the Windows platform trying to run the server there, but with the Community Edition, we ran into multiple issues with CIFS and WAN/VPN access. All the issues we encountered felt like problems with Alfresco coexisting with Windows.

For our production deployment, we have dumped Windows in favor of Ubuntu running Alfresco and the experience has been much better. The issues that we encountered all disappeared and the system ran faster with CIFS which was our primary goal, but the web interface refresh was also faster. Our final production environment is ESXi with Ubuntu.

My only suggestion with the Community Edition is to try and be as main stream as possible. Since it appears that most devleopment is on the Linux platform with Windows as a secondary deployment target for them, then Linux is where you would want to start. We are excited to get away from the traditional containers used for storing files and looking forward to using Alfresco for our organization and clients. It is an interesting model that they have assembled and is a product that we can continue to build on top of as our needs change.

My vote is to trust the Community Edition as a starting point and scale up to the Enterprise Edition once it makes sense to support the community developing the product. If it is a key technology for you, you are better off depending on yourself to integrate into your environment than to rely on someone else to take all that responsiblity which is where I see the Enterprise Edtion positioned today. (My opinion...)

Answer 5

Dear all,

I would like to deploy the community edition on linux (Fedora 8) to a non-profit making organization. They need to store documents, scanned document into the system. Do anyone has practical experience on the max. no. of documents it can support before the response get too slow? Your inputs and experience would be very useful indeed before I put it into products for my users use daily.

I am trying out on a VMware VM with a few documents and everything seems OK except that the performance is bit slow.

Thank you.

Eric

Answer 6

[Disclaimer - I work for Alfresco, though I'll restrict my comments to answering some other poster's comments]:

@Eric - there is no practical limit on documents - Alfresco has been benchmarked with over 100 Million documents with no significant response time degradation.

VMWare will slow you down as Alfresco has to update db, write the document onto the file system, and update lucene index on the file system as well.

@Matthieu - I agree that documentation can be improved (can't it always?). We have been investing into it significantly over the last year, with (I think) some positive results. For example, with the enterprise release, we have gotten better at releasing some certified documentation for system administrators, and with all releases our help system is much better.

Answer 7

I have used Alfresco Community in several production projects. From web site content management to a large retailer's kiosk. It's a solid product all around.

I am currently using it as an enterprise content management solution for a custom apparel site.

Answer 8

@Eric - There are performance issues if you have a lot of documents in a single space. Have a look into the Alfresco forum entry. We experienced the same performance problems when accessing a space containing round 500 documents of 10kb size using Alfresco labs 2.9.

We have been customizing Alfresco Labs for a governmantal organization and currently a healthcare organization and run into a lot of problems. The Labs version always contains a lot of bugs. With newer versions the old bugs are fixed but since the Labs version seems to be some kind of playground for Alfresco each labs version contains a lot of new buggy "features". This is the reason why we didn't switch to Labs 3. We tried and after two days of work encountered a bug with the LDAP connector. Therefore the whole authentication was not working and we switched back.

There are also some discussions about Alfrescos licensing policy in their forum. Anyone thinking about using Alresco Labs (or Community) in production should also have a clear understanding about Alfrescos Licensing policy. (See e.g. this entry)

Answer 9

The (advertised) benefits of Alfresco Enterprise are listed at http://www.alfresco.com/services/subscription/ and there's a comparison between the two editions.

From my (currently limited) experience based on speaking to an Alfresco partner, the main benefits appear to much more QA and testing and JMX tools which allow some reconfiguration on the fly (and support from the developers obviously).

Answer 10

Matthieu we are interested in doing something similar. Can you elaborate on how you are authenticating users across from ASP.NET to the Alfresco repo? Thanks.

Answer 11

We actually have a community alfresco running on production with over 4 million documents with acceptable performance.

One of the tricks was to disperse the documents in a lot of spaces.