Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation: How to Install, use, and customize this powerful, free, Open Source Java-based Enterprise CMS [Paperback]

Munwar Shariff (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1904811116 | ISBN-13: 978-1904811114 | Publication Date: January 30, 2007

This well-crafted and easy-to-use book is a complete guide to implementing enterprise content management in your business using Alfresco. It guides you through creating smart, collaborative content repositories, and shows how to use Alfresco to create more elegant document sharing, better collaborative working, and reliable automated workflow processes. This book is designed for system administrators, experienced users or developers who want to install and use Alfresco in their teams or businesses. Because Alfresco is free many teams can install and experiment with its ECM features without any upfront cost, often without management approval. The book assumes a degree of technical confidence but does not require specialist sysadmin or developer skills to get a basic system up and running. Alfresco is particularly suitable for IT consultants who want or need to set up a flexible enterprise content management system for their clients, be that for demonstration, development, or as a mission-critical platform. This book gets you to that result quickly and effectively.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Alfresco offers true Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and aspires to be "Documentum fast and free", and was founded by a former Documentum executive. Alfresco can store a wide range of digital content in flexible, smart "spaces". Content is accessible through a web interface, shared network folders, FTP, WebDav, and other methods.

Users can set up Alfresco to process content in certain ways, according to business rules and workflow requirements. It can also apply version control to documents automatically, making it easy and safe to collaborate and update documents.

Alfresco is regarded as the most powerful open-source enterprise content management system. Using Alfresco, administrators can easily create rich, shared content repositories. This book shows you how to unleash this power to create collaborative working systems in your enterprise.

From the Back Cover

This book will take you through the complete cycle of planning, implementing and customizing your ECM installation. Among the many topics covered are:

- Working with users and membership accounts, including LDAP integration
- Using Alfresco as a Smart document repository; working with automatic version tracking and control, and accessing the repository from the Web, shared network folders, or FTP
- Making content easy to find using search, content categorization, and metadata
- Automating document management tasks with business rules and complete workflows
- Working together using Alfresco's collaboration and syndication features to create effective working groups
- Customizing the user interface, creating your own dashboard layouts; presenting content in custom ways relevant to your business

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 356 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (January 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811116
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811114
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,309,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Alfresco Evaluation Guide, February 25, 2007

By 

Seth Gottlieb "Seth Gottlieb" (Florence, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation: How to Install, use, and customize this powerful, free, Open Source Java-based Enterprise CMS (Paperback)

The target audience of the book appears to be a technical person who is evaluating and getting started with Alfresco. The core strength of this book is as an aid to explore the functionality of the Alfresco web client and to learn how to configure and extend it. As with most Java applications, most of Alfresco's behavior is managed through a series of XML files. The examples of how to manipulate these files in the book and as part of an accompanying download are very good. And when you go through these exercises and open up the files you can't help but notice other settings that might be useful to modify as well. I think it would be helpful to discuss the underlying technologies that support the Alfresco platform and also tips for tuning the software to meet the performance and availability demands of an actively used implementation. But those topics might be more appropriate for an advanced book. For an Alfresco beginner (and there are a lot of people who fit that description out there), this book is a great introduction.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good deal, March 22, 2007

By 

M. H. Jaeger "Helena Jaeger" (Florianopolis, SC, Brazil) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation: How to Install, use, and customize this powerful, free, Open Source Java-based Enterprise CMS (Paperback)

As an early adopter of a new open software product as Alfresco, it's very important to have the kind of structured and organized information this book gives us, that we couldn't find consolidated at Alfresco sites. The book also brings us some scenarios and good practices that are very useful and applicable to real situations.

I just hope that upgrades and new versions of the book continue to be published, and even more specialized books on this subject.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Concise assembly of information with examples, March 8, 2007

By 

Raymond Belisle (Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation: How to Install, use, and customize this powerful, free, Open Source Java-based Enterprise CMS (Paperback)

This book, being the first one written on Alfresco has no competition and really competes only with the public information that is available on the web. The information in this book is all available in different sources (wikis, forums, official documentation and the source code), but this book does a great job of bringing it all together in one reference that is easy to digest.

In addition to the information, it does a great job of providing examples and a walkthrough of the steps to be taken to see the examples work in any Alfresco environment, another plus.

One of the few things I was disappointed in was the section on implementing workflows. This chapter does a good job of describing the differences between the two workflow models that are available in Alfresco, but lacks alot in the approach to explaining the differences between the two. Unlike other sections of the book, there is a real lack of examples that provide a little more 'meat' on the workflow capabilities. That said, you probably need a whole book on workflow and advanced workflow capabilities of Alfresco to really do it justice anyway.

If you are just starting out with Alfresco, this is a great foundation-type book. With software changing regularly, this book was written with version 1.4 and version 2.0 is now out and this book does not cover Records Management/Web Content Management or any of the other new features, so if you are a seasoned user/developer and want to know more about the new features, you'll probably have to wait until the next book...