Alfresco Community addition for document management?

[reene11]

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.

[Mark_Davidson]

I use the Enterprise version which is basically the same thing but with support & more bugfixes. Installation can be a bit painful esepcially if you've installating from ZIP. The other installation methods do work though & are a bit easier (i.e. Docker & Ansible). The documentation & installation process is geared towards those with a technical background & could definitely be improved.

Search works fine but you need to set up search services (i.e. Solr).

Error logs are pretty much standard fare for an enterprise Java based application. The error messages will make sense to developers but not business users.

Re community feedback - I agree 100%. Business will tend to gravitate towards an Enterprise license as you get vendor support.

The software isn't bad. In fact it's very, very good but it can prove to be a steep learning curve. If you're struggling it might be worth your while to get a freelancer to help out.