Does anyone here use Alfresco Community?

[sairane67]

Does anyone here use Alfresco Community addition for document management? I ask because we have had an installation in our environment for a few months and it has been nothing but a hassle since the beginning.

-Installation guide leaves out critical steps.

-Documentation is convoluted and assumes a lot of pre-knowledge.

-Basic functionality out of the box such as search doesn't work.

-Error logs serve very little useful feedback.

-Community is very slow to respond to requests for help.

-Alfresco service takes up to 15 minutes to restart each time I make a configuration change.

I'm not sure if this software is really bad, or if it's just my lack of experience with it. It seems like a pretty powerful and flexible solution, but I am barely able to get basic functionality working with it.

[EddieMay]

Hi @sairane67 & welcome to Alfresco.

Well, loads of people use Alfresco Community Edition - I can't tell you how many, but it's "A LOT" ! 

Alfresco is complex software and depending on your background, installation can prove difficult & that's something we are addressing at the moment - we're discussing progress towards making it easier at the next Tech Talk Live - pop along. 

If you could point out the missing steps in the installation guide that will help us to help you, & to fix documentation going forward.

In my experience, search works out of the box. I've not had to do any configuration to make search work in Share or accessing it via the API. If you could outline the issues you're having that would be good. 

The log output is the first thing that an experienced Alfresco developer will ask for when troubleshooting - so they must have some value.

The community is largely composed of volunteers who make tremendous efforts to help other users - like most other open source communities, the responsiveness of the community varies. Their ability to help is in part determined by the quality of the questions - generic "It's not working" questions are hard to address and are less likely to get quick responses. Having been active in other open source communities, I'd say the responsiveness of the Alfresco community is about average to good. Could it be better - sure, and perhaps you could help when you're more experienced with Alfresco.

Alfresco is powerful & flexible - these are some of the reasons why Alfresco is recognised as a "Leader" in the latest (2020) Gartner Magic Quadrant report. But like all other enterprise level software it takes time to master.

Ps - If you're really using ACS 3.2 then you're running an incredibly old version.

Kind regards,