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Alfresco - A Great Option for Your Enterprise Content Management Needs
June 13, 2014

Alfresco - A Great Option for Your Enterprise Content Management Needs

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Alfresco Enterprise Edition

Modules Used

  • Document Management

Overall Satisfaction with Alfresco

Sony Pictures Entertainment started using Alfresco in 2009. They started with migrating data from Stellent (their then existing document management system) to Alfresco. Alfresco was mainly introduced at Sony Pictures to become their primary software applications' document management system. Their existing system Stellent had lot of issues and the cost of licensing etc. was very high. Currently Alfresco is used at Sony Pictures across the whole organization. Mainly it serves as their software applications' document management system.
  • First of all, Alfresco is newly developed compared to old content management systems, so it has adopted some of the best practices and it has avoided the problems faced by earlier systems.
  • Alfresco is open source so it is very easy to find problems if any and to extend it. The cost of licensing Alfresco is very less compared to other systems.
  • Alfresco does very well in performance, design, API design and has lot of great features such as auto PDF conversion, auto compression, etc.
  • The customer support and community support is very good.
  • Some more APIs can be added although the existing APIs very well provide the required features.
  • Their other tools such as collaboration, etc need to be marketed well so that companies adopt Alfresco as a whole package.
  • Alfresco needs to be on the lookout for immediately introducing any new functions provided by other competitive products.
  • At Sony Pictures, Alfresco had a direct impact on efficiency. Since the documents upload was faster and more robust, the users across the departments were able to access the documents via their software applications very quickly and they no longer had to wait.
  • The cost of licensing and product support for content management was reduced.
  • The number of support calls for IT staff got reduced by huge margin.
  • Stellent Content Management System,Microsoft Sharepoint
As already explained earlier, the cost of licensing and support comes down very much by using Alfresco compared to Stellent and Sharepoint. Plus the overall performance and feature set is much broader for Alfresco. Since it is a newly developed content management system, it combines the features and best practices from already existing systems.
As per the current market and the line of products that are available for content and document management system, Alfresco is a very good option compared to other systems in terms of features and cost. Plus the community support is great. Also since the product is open source, it can be extended or understood in a better way.
It is well suited for document management system enterprise wide. Key questions to be asked during selection are - 1) Do you have a good in house IT team to extend the product if required and to check its implementation code so that maximum advantage can be taken from the product? 2) Are willing to spend less on a content management system?