In the past, developers have chosen to develop their own content-centric apps from scratch or by leveraging low level libraries. A content repository like Alfresco can save time and cost. Even if you don't choose Alfresco, you should still consider leveraging a standard API like CMIS as much as possible.
"We're drowning in documents (or videos or images). We don't know what we have and none of it is organized. We waste so much time and money recreating stuff that probably already exists, if we could just find it.""We've got serious business risk caused by people using the first thing they find instead of the right thing.""We have a process for sending stuff around to the rest of the team for review and approval, but we have no idea what's in flight or who we're waiting on or why.""We have teams of people from both inside and outside the organization that need to be able to work together efficiently. They need to share files, of course, but really, it's more than that.""We've got business systems that generate, store, and process things like reports and images at an alarming rate."
May start out simple, but the system tends to morph over time. Let’s look at three “levels” of content-centric app complexity.
Process, Security, & SearchSome open source search engines that are out thereJBossjBPMActivitiIntalioBonitaSoftSome open source libraries that may be helpful in extraction/conversion: - Tikka - FOP - POI - ImageMagick - JAI
You’ve built a system that’s pretty bad-ass, and it is customized to your specific needs, but at what cost?
Is it easy to extend?Does it get out of the way?
CMIS Alfresco extensions support CMIS 1.0 out-of-scopefeaturessuch as aspects and datalists.
Founded in 2005John NewtonFounding developer of IngresCo-founded DocumentumJohn PowellCOO of Business ObjectsPresident of Oracle UKLots of Engineers from Documentum, Interwoven, VignetteAssembled from Open Source components
Pick your stack:Linux / Windows OS servers : RHEL, Solaris, Ubuntu, Windows Server, …DBMS : MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2, …Application servers : Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, …Web browsers : Firefox, MSIE, SafariIdentity Management systems : LDAP, AD, Kerberos, …
Activiti first appeared in theAlfresco 3.4 E preview release and willbe production readywith 4.0