With regard to Alfresco, I am trying to use Alfresco share capability to enable small and medium companies to have their own collaborative ECMs. I feel, Alfresco Share is decent enough to do the job. I am using 3.4b version. I have done look and feel change to the theme, the changes are kept to color and logo only. Even though the layouts can be tampered, I feel and suggest not to tamper with.
Alfresco share uses FTL for UI layouts and JS for providing dynamic behavior to the UI. One needs to spend a lot of time to in decoding the links between context files to do even the smallest adaptation that may be required. Once, you know how to read and related context files, then this exercise becomes pretty easy. I hope, that good documentation may ease the process, if you go for enterprise edition.
It is important to understand the business intent before jumping guns on customization. For example, the firm wants to maintain the daily recruitment tracker to find out how many candidates are offered, rejected, so that candiates with the status 'rejected' can be sourced to some other company's requirement. If we take 2 steps back and analyze, the firm needs a mechanism to find out those candiates with rejected status. The maintainence of the daily tracker may not be the actual requirement. In such cases, one can model the solution using simple rules and spaces in the document libray of Alfresco.
Alfresco share is nicely structured as components, templates, web scripts, site data and so on.. Whats confusing is the the folder structure repeats itself in more than one place, leading to more mapping work for the analyzers. The central idea of the layout is to define page component, page template in which page layout will be provided, then use java scripts to render the page controls. I personally felt, the developers have over-designed this to provide the feel of easyness. I would definitely think, simple things would have been better.
We can provide customized data list creations like Sharepoint's data lists. But, a big minus is that we cant filter the list based on the parameters. If we need to customize, we have to put lot more efforts in finding out the actual way of doing it inside Alfresco share. As an alternative, I would design front end components like page, js, template to fit alfresco share requirments and model the backend services as a separate war deployed in the same alfresco container. The data exchange can be REST based. In this way, we can augment missing functionality by writing extended application.
What goes well with Alfresco share, is its inbuilt features are good enough to implement business processes and document management without much customization. Alfresco exposes the APIs so that one can use it as document repository. This is good for organizations who already have portal solutions and want to enable it for DMS.
I am still exploring .... May be I find easier way to work with Alfresco. Opinions may change !!!
Alfresco share uses FTL for UI layouts and JS for providing dynamic behavior to the UI. One needs to spend a lot of time to in decoding the links between context files to do even the smallest adaptation that may be required. Once, you know how to read and related context files, then this exercise becomes pretty easy. I hope, that good documentation may ease the process, if you go for enterprise edition.
It is important to understand the business intent before jumping guns on customization. For example, the firm wants to maintain the daily recruitment tracker to find out how many candidates are offered, rejected, so that candiates with the status 'rejected' can be sourced to some other company's requirement. If we take 2 steps back and analyze, the firm needs a mechanism to find out those candiates with rejected status. The maintainence of the daily tracker may not be the actual requirement. In such cases, one can model the solution using simple rules and spaces in the document libray of Alfresco.
Alfresco share is nicely structured as components, templates, web scripts, site data and so on.. Whats confusing is the the folder structure repeats itself in more than one place, leading to more mapping work for the analyzers. The central idea of the layout is to define page component, page template in which page layout will be provided, then use java scripts to render the page controls. I personally felt, the developers have over-designed this to provide the feel of easyness. I would definitely think, simple things would have been better.
We can provide customized data list creations like Sharepoint's data lists. But, a big minus is that we cant filter the list based on the parameters. If we need to customize, we have to put lot more efforts in finding out the actual way of doing it inside Alfresco share. As an alternative, I would design front end components like page, js, template to fit alfresco share requirments and model the backend services as a separate war deployed in the same alfresco container. The data exchange can be REST based. In this way, we can augment missing functionality by writing extended application.
What goes well with Alfresco share, is its inbuilt features are good enough to implement business processes and document management without much customization. Alfresco exposes the APIs so that one can use it as document repository. This is good for organizations who already have portal solutions and want to enable it for DMS.
I am still exploring .... May be I find easier way to work with Alfresco. Opinions may change !!!
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