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Alfresco Document Management Review
Updated April 08, 2015

Alfresco Document Management Review

Jeff Neeve | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Alfresco Enterprise Edition

Modules Used

  • Document Management

Overall Satisfaction with Alfresco

We use Alfresco to manage digital documents for both our HR department and Student Records departments. We have over 12,000 employees and 85,000 students who's records are all managed using Alfresco and a combination of a custom interface and back end process applications.
  • Document Management - The ability to store documents, manage custom aspects and metadata. Plus full control over versioning of documents with the ability to check in and out.
  • Custom API's - Alfresco supports multiple API's both internal and external and pretty much allows you to customize and integrate with any application
  • Searching - Lucene and SOLR which are integreated into Alfresco offer a multitude of ways to find documents/folders.
  • Auditing - They have a fairly powerful (although somewhat confusing) auditing system that lets you audit almost any action or service.
  • Documentation can be challenging -There can be pages of documentation on features and api methods, but they often lack real world examples and are quite often out of date
  • Early adoption of features can be problematic - Alfresco seems to change quickly and often trying to use newer features can be frustrating. Especially when they keep tweaking/modifying functionality between versions. There has been cases (IE: Records Management) where they've completely re-worked how it works.
  • Customization of share interface seems cludgy and sometimes limiting
  • Instant document lookup - No paper files to mail which saves in all areas of postage, truck delivery, physical storage warehouse space, printing, etc
  • No longer losing important documents - Previously with paper files things would go missing and those could be costly reports/assessments.
  • Ability to secure documents and provide access to only those who should be allowed to see that content
  • EMC Documentum,MS SharePoint
Ultimately a cost decision - Alfresco community is free and has a decent community and various forums, books, etc available. The enterprise version is far less expensive than other options (although costs can add up depending on the the hardware it's running on). It is built upon alot of other mainstream products such as lucene/solr, spring, java and fits into our environment nicely.
It seems to handle a large number and volume of documents. However, if you want to deviate from the 'Out of the box' experience, you will need to determine how much customization would be required and how that would be implemented. (Full blown custom UI, dashlets, java programming, scripting, etc)

Using Alfresco

We have too much invested into it now to choose a different product. We have been using them from almost the beginning, and have seen decent improvements in documentation, functionality and customer support.

Alfresco Implementation