Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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...

This book provides detail that is difficult to find from the online documentation. The only thing I would like to see more on is customizing Alfresco from a developer prospective. Overall the book is a great help in getting up to speed quickly on the features found in Alfresco.

This book is for final users of Alfresco, in that it does not contain any code/examples of code.

It is probably useful for content creators and administrators.

Having said that, the book really is Alfresco's user's guide, and a slim one at that.

The layout is very well done and task specific instructions are clear and carefully described, albeit in a succinct way.

For $59.99, the book could have been much more extensive.

The book clarifies a lot of things but need an extension considering web content management and workflow aspects