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

[Ken Geis]

The issue was ALF-2334. Sorry to implicate you on the notification; I didn’t get it because my JIRA profile was tied to an old email address!

About publishing the story, I think avoiding my institution’s name would resolve the problem. I ran into that before when I accidentally gave a testimonial to a company, and the University told them to take it down or remove the name; the vendor chose to take it down. I’ll ask my resource here, and if that’s all that’s needed, it’d be great if someone else could edit what I wrote to fit into the site and run it by me.


Ken

On Jun 2, 2015, at 3:42 PM, Richard Esplin <richard.esplin at alfresco.com> wrote:

> Great write-up Ken.
> 
> What is the number of the issue you want reopened? I don't understand why you 
> didn't get notification when I ran the bulk-close. The permissions on our JIRA 
> install are a mess at the moment.
> 
> This sounds like a feature request, which means we don't really have a good 
> way of tracking it at the moment. I'm not certain that reopening it will be 
> the right course of action, but I'll know more after I look at it.
> 
> Also, perhaps you can publish your story as being from "a department in a 
> leading US University"?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Richard
> 
> On Tuesday, June 02, 2015 09:45:33 Ken Geis wrote:
>> 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
>