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Virtual hosted Alfresco over the Internet

chrisrobbo

Hi
I was involved with ECM for some time (on the proprietory software side of the fence) and have watched Alfresco (among other open source ECM products) with some interest. I believe that Alfresco is now at a stage in its lifecycle where it would be possible to run a hosted version of it over the internet. I am aware of security issues with such things as CIFS, ftp and Webdav, however I would love to hear from anyone using Alfresco in a hosted environment over the internet to see whether it could provide a practical solution. If possible I would like no VPN .

Any tips, advice or warnings gratefully received.

thanks
chris

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Comments

oilg

Hi Chris,
We are going live the next days with our Alfresco Community v2.1.0 (r1).
Login for our employees will solely be possible with HTTPS either from the Internet, the VPN or the LAN.

What do you mean with "…run a HOSTED version of it…"?

regards
Oliver

chrisrobbo

Provide a hosted version as a SAAS. Are you providing it to your users as pure DM,RM or the entire gamut ie. to what extent have you focussed it to a particular user group ?

Chris

oilg

The whole ECM system is solely intended to our employees. The groups reflect the primary knowledge structure as well as the organisational structure.

On which level would you like to discuss? Do you have general (SAAS for company A, B, C) or specific (SAAS for department A, B, C) interest in the possibilities of running Alresco as a SAAS. Which industrie(s) are you interested in?

chrisrobbo

My focus areas are medical and legal, predominantly imaging. All individual companies.

oilg

Hi Chris,
we are a consulting company having +1000 consultants in the holding company. The DMS is currently in place as prototype on company level. There, we have round about 100 consultants working in different industries such as pharmaceutical, finance, industrie. We use it to share our knowledge on the business themes of our customers. I worked for a medical company before.

Are you thinking about possibilities to be DMS-ASP for different medical, legal and imaging companies?

regards
Oliver

peterh_nl

Maybe this helps: not talking about scalability to 1000 users or so but maybe a nice example of Alfresco in 'practice':

We have 6 small companies, each with their own hierarchy and connected to a central datacenter over IP-VPN and Lan. They are running in one instance of Alfresco. AD-authorisation tested and working but not necessary yet.
What do we use Alfresco for?
Simple filestorage over webdav/cifs en webclient.
Centalized mail distribution for all the companies (departments and personal) via imaging (canon/hp scanners) and Kofax Ascent for capturing imaging and distribution to Alfresco where some rules and scripts distribute the documents and meta-data from Kofax.
Next to this we distribute incoming faxtraffic for these companies in a comparable way for the end-user: faxnr coupled to company, faxservice drops files om Alfresco share and rules on share notify faxmanager (per company) to address fax-enduser.
All users have personal inboxes (spaces within Alfresco) in which rules report via notifications to the respective users.

This part, setup in practice as a proof of concept, preliminary to offering such a solution/setup to our customers works flawlessly for about 4 months now.

Depending of specific needs in usage cases you could consider setting up multiple companies within one instance of Alfresco, downside is more complicated user-management, or setup multiple instances of Alfresco, using authorization via ldap/ad etc.

Maybe this adresses part of your questions by example.

regards,
Peter

nancyg

don't know if this would be of interest but in 2.9 there is a new multi-tenancy feature which "enables Alfresco ECM to be configured as a true single-instance multi-tenant environment. This enables multiple independent tenants to be hosted on a single instance, which can be installed either on a single server or across a cluster of servers."

you can read more here, http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/MT