Any experience Alfresco and/or other document management systems ...

[Syed.Hosain at aeris.net]

Thanks, Troy! I appreciate the information. I am kicking off this
project in the next few days to weeks. Yesterday, I went ahead and
signed up for the Community Network access to see how it works ...

Regards,

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: Troy Fey [mailto:troy.fey at opinicus.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 7:59 AM
To: Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain at aeris.net)
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Any experience Alfresco and/or other document management
systems ...

I've implemented Alfresco Community Network 2.1.0 as a "Customer Portal"
for this very purpose.  This version is no longer available for
download, however, I suspect the latest version of Alfresco will perform
just as well. If you want to stick with 2.1.0 I can email you the
tarball I used.  With respect to Alfresco Community 2.1.0.....

Once the Alfresco application is installed and running, you will need to
add user accounts for each internal employee and external customer. Then
you'll want to configure each user's "space" (aka directory, or folder)
with the appropriate access control rights.  At a minimum you'll
probably want to remove the group "EVERYONE" from having "consumer"
(read-only) access.

After that, you'll then need to create one or more content rules to
email the appropriate users.  The rule will execute based on one or more
conditions.  Based on the context of your email, I suspect you'll want
to use the "Inbound" condition as the trigger to email one ore more
users.  Once the rule is in place, it can be modified, disabled, or
deleted. 

So, in short, it's pretty simple to configure Alfresco to perform the
tasks you desire.   On the other hand, depending on your IT
infrastructure, there may be considerable effort to install and maintain
the Alfresco application.  Here are a few things you'll need to address
during your installation: access to your email SMTP server,  web-site
firewall rules, CPU and memory allocation for the Apache Tomcat Server
used by Alfresco,  port conflicts with existing website, database type,
and hard disk storage capacity for your content.

I hope this helps....

Cheers,

Troy
 
Syed.Hosain at aeris.net wrote:
> Sorry for the off-topic, but sorta-related question.
>
> Does anyone have experience with the Alfresco system
(www.alfresco.com) for use with distribution of documents? If so, can
you comment on that (or other competitive products, etc.)?
>
> Here is the the context:
>
> We do most of our Technical documentation in FrameMaker, our Marketing
collateral in Word and Publisher predominantly. All our distribution is
in Acrobat PDF format though, other than the printed collateral.
>
> Our technical documents are uploaded to our web site, in a system that
is password-protected for our customers to get access to the technical
docs. The problem I am attempting to address is: "automatic
notification" to internal company people as well as customers that a new
document is available. We had an experience recently that a Customer was
using an old document and was not aware that a more recent one was
available at our site.
>
> I have been told that Alfresco can solve this and other similar
"problems", but I'd like to get some insight before I spend a lot of
time on this particular product, since it seems overly complex for the
task.
>
> Thanks for any insight as to how people deal with this notification
issue.
>
> Z