[OOTB-hive] Workdesk, Case Management?

[Richard Esplin]

You make some excellent points Heiko. Thank you for writing this up.

No one has explained to me the reasoning around our end-of-life of Workdesk, but I do regularly hear discussions of how we will be bringing Workdesk functionality / case management functionality into new products.

It will take some time to bring these products to market, and we recognize that leaves a feature gap it. If anyone is interested in maintaining or modernizing Workdesk, the source code of the last release is available here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/alfresco/files/Alfresco%20Workdesk%20Community%204.2.0/

Cheers,

Richard

On Tuesday, February 21, 2017 11:43:42 AM MST Heiko Robert wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> case management and the Alfresco repository are not the best friends if 
> you don't implement a separate (preferable relational) layer for the 
> case and business object master data. That may be the reason why this 
> road hasn't been continued.
> 
> Alfresco made some architectural decisions which works good for 
> archiving (dead documents) but which conflict with the requirement to 
> _relate_ objects by metadata and processes as you may have already seen 
> in other case management systems:
> * by default metadata is queried from SOLR (which is not designed to be 
> a replacement for a relational db)
> * you can't garantuee when metadata is stored in the index (async)
> * alfresco search doesn't support joins / complex queries, metadata 
> inheritance (I mean inheritance from data, not from model) which are 
> important principles in cases
> * the alfresco db schema is not optimized for mass metadata queries / 
> case like queries and therfore not an alternative if you want to support 
> millions of nodes except you create your own BI like autogenerated 
> schema on top using mechanisms like materialized views.
> 
> With this in mind any case like layer would be very limited on vanilla 
> Alfresco because you can only query on metadata directly stored on the 
> node but your users want to define complex queries for their case logic, 
> dimensions and they expect joined acces to other internal or external data.
> 
> We decided to go the american way: love it or leave it (as it is). But 
> don't try to change it.
> 
> To be happy with alfresco as it is we only store in alfresco:
> * metadata which will never change
> * references to master data as link to the case objects managed / stored 
> outside Alfresco (e.g. case-id, business-partner-id, process-id, ...)
> Additionally we extended Share to use the external stored metadata and 
> query capabilities from our mastadata and case middle tier using 
> configurable controls which no longer require expensive Share 
> customization to support case views and showing relevant external data.
> To work around the query restrictions in Alfresco to enable expected 
> case views we don't use smart folders but create associations controlled 
> by our custom rule based configurable layer (you may call this links to 
> other nodes). This scales much better and gives more flexibility than 
> just being restricted on metadata stored on a node.
> 
> To make the long story short:
> Alfresco is not the perfect layer for case management. You may want a 
> separate layer for that and either another client instead of Share or 
> configurable extensions for Share (as a supported, managed product) to 
> implement the expected behavior and UI.
> I would not encourage anybody to customize Share for this as a single 
> customer project. You would be surprised about the huge efforts to 
> support and migrate this over several Alfresco Share versions.
> 
> If there is enough interest from others we may discuss this in detail 
> and by examples in a private web meeting but be warned: our solutions 
> are not open source and not for free ;-)
> 
> Regards
> Heiko
> 
> Am 21.02.2017 um 01:18 schrieb L. David Zuluaga Botero:
> > Hi Bees, sorry for writing so many times, but we're pretty new to the
> > community and would like to contact people who have the same questions
> > we have!
> >
> > I am writing now because according to some client's requests and some
> > inquiries I've made, seems that the perfect solution is Alfresco
> > Workdesk!. (case management and similar applications)
> >
> > However, the project seems to be deprecated, which I cannot
> > understand... Since it seems to be an increasing need from the public,
> > and are integrated systems that alike systems like Nuxeo has integrated,
> > according to what can be seen really quick on their web.
> >
> > Anyhow, I though the Alfresco Share would have something similar.. but
> > there's no trace of it.
> >
> > Luis Sanchez, a OOTB member, suggested us to retake the most recent
> > workdesk version. But we'd like to know whether someone else is involved
> > with workdesk use, usecases, implementations, etc.
> >
> > Should we have to develop it, refactor it?
> >
> > I'll be looking forward to your response,
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