[OOTB-hive] 5 years of Alfresco Community in production

[Ken Geis]

Hi all. I just wanted to share that my office at the University of California, Berkeley, put Alfresco Community into production five years ago today!

I work in the Research Administration and Compliance office. We use Alfresco to store documents (~150K documents, ~130GB, scanned or digital origin) related to the university’s research proposals, contracts & grants. Initially, usage was ~30 people in central offices, but a year ago we made our files visible to researchers and their administrators (total user population ~2,000, although most are not active). Our records management group uses Alfresco Explorer, and most other users use a custom interface.

We selected Alfresco for two main reasons:
no per-user licensing fee
openness; we wanted it to be a platform, not just a product
in-house Java experience

We started with 3.3 and are on 4.2 now. We use the Oracle for Alfresco Community add-on. The system has needed little attention since we implemented it.

The biggest lacking feature for me is page counts. The PdfPages Aspect add-on does this for PDFs, but I think Alfresco (the company) should support this out of the box for PDFs and other content like Word documents. I just noticed that the issue I filed (in April 2010 😞) about this was bulk-closed on 3/13/15 because of 5.0, and I was not notified. Richard, your comment says to re-open issues in this case, but people like us don’t have permission to re-open (I’d prefer this to re-filing).

One of my recent accomplishments is creating a CAS (Central Authentication Service, a single-sign-on common in educational institutions) module for Explorer. This makes it so that instead of using these instructions which involve editing your web.xml, you just apply the module and add a couple of lines of configuration to your alfresco-global.properties. I hope to publish this add-on soon, but I feel like it has little utility to the community without having a corresponding module for Share.

It’s been a fun ride, and I expect we will be using Alfresco Community (or perhaps Honeycomb) for years to come.


Ken

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