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Is Alfresco a real Open Source?

edless

Certified Alfresco Partners only offer Level 1 Support, Consulting, Integration or Training on either the Alfresco Enterprise.

Open source was born to give people the possibility to share knowledge and expertise.

Why Alfresco is giving just to big company the possibility to be supported on the product? Why I can't pay a Alfresco Partner just to support me on a community version, without asking any guaranty?

ED

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spoogegibbon

Just download the community version and you get the source code which you can modify to your hearts content under gpl licensing…

If you want professional services and formal support then pony up for a support contract exactly as you would for MySQL, Red Hat and every other enterprise open source vendor.

heislord5

If you want someone to support you on community edition, hire an employee! lol

vladimirfx

No it's not OSS. "The Open Source Alternative…" - it's only effective marketing… not more.
Reasons:
1. Source code is CLOSED. We have only dirty HEAD code. Fixes from community as long as fixes from alfresco team is not in HEAD. Community assist to make ENTERPRISE version more stable but this stability inaccessible for community. It's stealing towards us (Community). We help make Alfresco better ECM but only for commecial users.
I have colorful example on statments above: in one of my projtcts I've use Alfresco CE 2.1. After clean install on my portal (liferay 4.2.2) I try to upload some content - exception. 100% reproducable. I search in JIRA and WOW - bug is fixed ONLY for ENTERPRISE (http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/AWC-1493).
After that case I've many similar troubls…

2. Developer documentation is inaccessible. See at Spring, Hibernate, Apache projects (all used in Alfresco) - developer documentation is open and absolutly free. In case of Alfresco we have some small wiki articles - not more. Many of them is out of date.

Alfresco it's plain company with beautiful marketing - not more/not less.
Alfresco CE is not intended for production usage! It's my bloody expirience.

P/S: as now my company make investment in Nuxeo EP but Alfresco have many unique futures that we need

. On our market (Russia) the cost of Alfresco it too high.

Sorry for bad eng.

jbarmash

To me, Open Source does not mean we have to give everything out for free. We give a lot of code, build by engineers with over 15 years of experience in Content Management, for free. We also spend months on QAing a version that we support and sell subscriptions for. That's the one that our partners support as well - it would make no sense for them to work with the community version, since we are already doing the work of stabilizing it.

To Valdimir's point, We do roll into all the fixes on the ENTERPRISE into the community, but we don't make guarantees as to when that will happen. Not to intentionally cripple - we are trying to build a business, and paying customers take priority, no matter how strong our commitment to improving community is. Related to the bug you referenced, the fix went into HEAD 3 DAYS after the fix was made on the ENTERPRISE.

Here is a great statement by Technical Director of Eclipse Foundation, Bjorn Freeman-Benson

Then thereâ€™s also the concept of free as in free choice and one of the things that Eclipse does, which I think is really remarkable is that it allows you to choose whether you want to pay for something or not pay for something. Let me give you the example of support. There are companies in the Eclipse ecosystem that you can pay them to support Eclipse for you or if you choose not to buy support, you could fix the bugs yourself because all of the source code is available or if you choose not to do that, you could submit bugs through Bugzilla to Eclipse and hope the people on the projects fix them. So, you can choose time waiting for people to fix them, you can choose doing it yourself, or you can choose money where you pay someone to do it. So, you have the opportunity to choose which way thatâ€™s going to be and I think thatâ€™s one of the real powers of open source is that it gives you that choice to how to spend your time and money. It doesnâ€™t force you into a particular vendorâ€™s model of you have to pay for support or you have to wait two years for the next version or whatever it is.â€
‍‍

A link to the podcast where he said this can be found on my blog - http://nywebguy.com/2008/02/21/insigntful-podcast-on-freedom-in-open-source/.

If you have ideas of how we could do a better job offering services in Russia, we'd love to hear them. However, we ARE a company, so making money would have to be part of the equation. The money goes back to enhance the product - both Community and Enterprise, in addition to things like QA, Product Management, etc - all that benefit the whole Alfresco ecosystem, IMO.

sdavis

I understand your frustration and see how some of these conclusions can be drawn. Hopefully, some extra info will help:

1. Source code is CLOSED. We have only dirty HEAD code. Fixes from community as long as fixes from alfresco team is not in HEAD. Community assist to make ENTERPRISE version more stable but this stability inaccessible for community. It's stealing towards us (Community). We help make Alfresco better ECM but only for commecial users. I have colorful example on statments above: in one of my projtcts I've use Alfresco CE 2.1. After clean install on my portal (liferay 4.2.2) I try to upload some content - exception. 100% reproducable. I search in JIRA and WOW - bug is fixed ONLY for ENTERPRISE

You are definitely crucial to improving the product! That's exactly why access to the source is provided (I'm unclear on how we seem closed here; can't get much more open). You are also correct in that fixes provided by Engineering are typically done on Enterprise first, but that doesn't mean that they are never supplied back to the Community. Perhaps we need to do a better job communicating when the same fixes are pushed to any / all branches, but don't let the lack of that imply anything else.

2. Developer documentation is inaccessible. See at Spring, Hibernate, Apache projects (all used in Alfresco) - developer documentation is open and absolutly free. In case of Alfresco we have some small wiki articles - not more. Many of them is out of date.

If we had documents hidden away somewhere, I would totally agree with you. However, that's not the case. All documentation is freely accessible. Now, is the existing documentation sufficient? Not always. Can it use improvement. Absolutely. Again, this is where the Community can assist us. Update Wikis, contribute great articles like Jeff Potts, etc. That doesn't mean we expect you guys to do it all – we're also working internally to overhaul some things and will share them when we can.

Alfresco CE is not intended for production usage! It's my bloody expirience.

On this point, I agree with you 100%. CE never was nor will be intended for Production use - it it intended for the Community as Jean notes above.

heislord5

There is still one point that remains and I'm not arguing against Alfresco's model, I'm just saying it is not open source in the normal sense of the word.

Yes, lets assume you merge all fixes to enterprise back into CE. Before that you merge them into Enterprise right? Why is Enterprise head not accessible? Does it cost you any more labor to make that available? No not at all. You choose to not make it accessible. That is what is not open source. It would require no effort on your part to give everyone read access to the functional head (Enterprise). You wouldn't have to do any extra support. All you have to do it make it available and let people pay for support when they want it. That is how open source works. This is psuedo open-source. Kinda open-source. Half-baked.

Please don't take what I am saying the wrong way. I am not criticizing your model. I'm just saying it is not open source. I would probably not have an open source model either if I were starting a business.

Take Red Hat for instance. They have fedora which is the equivalent of your CE edition. BUT they also have Centos which is their enterprise version completely open sourced….with the exception of removal of parts that have outside license restrictions.

alexander

I think Alfresco documentation is great - Wiki is best place to find up-2-date info. But sometimes this info relates to unavailable features 🙂 This happened with email integration - config section appeared 3 month before code appeared in the head.

Regarding this one:

CE never was nor will be intended for Production use - it it intended for the Community as Jean notes above.

Do I read it correctly Community = Evaluation. This does not sound too Open Source to me. I agree that paying customers should get priority support and be able to influence road map better, but negligence to community releases will result in serious business loss - loss of the community itself. Value of community sometimes much more then a product.

it is difficult to build successful Open Source business model. Will hope Alfresco with all Open Source bright heads it has will not do obvious mistakes.

jbarmash

To Alexander's point about the Wiki: We have recently gone through all the pages and put Wiki categories on them. It's still evolving, but the main idea is to tag pages with release numbers better, and to tag the articles that refer to discussions of future products.

I do want to point out that once we do a Community Release, that does get QA'ed. It represents a superset of features that will go into Enterprise, and when we stabilize Enterprise version, that gets even more QA and certifications on various platform stacks. We don't support Community other than through forums, which as you can see, we contribute to actively. However, our support subscription carries with it dedicated support staff and SLA.

So I guess I'd amend a previous statement that we don't recommend Community Edition for mission-critical production systems simply because we don't believe that you should run those systems without having support. That said, our ping logs tell us that there are tens of thousands of community installations out there (we don't have much visibility beyond knowing that they are out there), and we do in fact know of people using Community in production.

dozyarmadillo

@heislord5 - CentOS is NOT supported by RedHat. http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=5.

heislord5

I didn't say it was supported….I said it is available. Enterprise Alfresco is NOT available. Enterprise Red Hat is available as Centos.

alexander

Jean

I agree regarding releases.

2.1 CE release was great. But my experience with 2.9 is not positive at all.

I cant tell if opening Enterprise code (without licensing module) is good idea. I am working for a Partner and this is our bread too.

But my experience is that companies that run mission-critical will anyway buy support, no matter what quality of code is, and those who can only use free Open Source will never pay (just because they never do that). But they will definitely put demerits on Alfresco for broken releases.

It is painful to see when Alfresco quality is marked less then MOSS, no matter if we understand that evaluators used wrong "wrong edition".

Thanks
Alexander

sdavis

Excellent feedback! Candor is always appreciated - if for no other reason than it shows we all want Alfresco to succeed. Thanks for the input. It's been shared internally.

whoami

Thanks for the input.

I am totally new to Alfresco, just saw it yesterday for the very first time, so forgive my ignorance. Looks like a good thing at first sight. but…….

Well, I used to use Fedora and I dumped it, I am not Linus Torvald and don't need to twinker around with operating systems or anything else. Then I used RedHat Enterprise Linux and I dumped it because I found out that I could get CentOS for free. I don't need any support, so what do I need RedHad Enterprise Linux for. Then I found Ubuntu and dumped even CentOS. I don't need a copy of something if I can have an original. I think that Ubuntu has the right Open Source model. Take the whole thing for free and if you need support then buy it, if not, then no need to. The Ubuntu model will succeed, the other I am not so sure about.

What do you say, my friends?

whoami

What do you say, my friends?

No answer is always a good answer.
Thank you my friends, I won't be coming back, wish you good luck with your "Open Source" model.

dmatejka

Hello Alfresco engeneers,
just want to ask.. did you ever consider small companies, that do not have enough money to pay for Eterprise Edition, but could grow on your Alfresco CE as a potential market?

It it also our case when we have a plenty of ideas where alfresco could be a great oportunity for us to grow, but without a stable edition we cannot provide services to our customers based on alfresco.

We would be pretty happy to pay for to support and buy an enterprise edition when the business starts to grow and earn some money, but we will not get there if our products (based on alfresco CE) will not be stable.

I do not want to criticize your work or your way of doing busiess.. just want to add one more thing to consider….

jerico_dev

Hi!

Full community commitment IS about earning money. Network economics simply doesn't allow for a halfway model in the long run. It seems that there are some people at Alfresco who really believe that an open source software business gains its most valuable resources from customers rather than from the network… Funny. There is nothing more short-lived than customer and investor cash once the network breaks away. Customers follow the network and not the other way round! 😞

There has been a discussion on slashdot some time ago that reaches very similar conclusions about Alfresco's business model as those drawn by others in this thread:

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=597833&cid=23991861

This discussion raised some interesting questions. They are not meant to be rethorical… I'd love to get a statement from Alfresco about them:

It's just very rational to close the source "a little" as long as you have a first-mover advantage. You'd be crazy to not reap that value from your customers as long as you can. But if you deeply believed that community value will always remain second to customer value then we all have to fear that you'll go out of business within the next couple of years.

Like some of the slashdot people I think there is a real risk that some well-funded Ubuntu-like sponsor steps in and forges a stable version of Alfresco. That would be nice for the community but disastrous for Alfresco. Within no time you might find yourself to the "relatively closed" side of the ECM market and loose your "valuable" customers and control over your software even more quickly than you gained them. That's what happened to Alfresco's competitors. That's what's happening to non-free "Enterprise Release" models in the Linux market.

IMO you are too open to keep others from "eating your cake" - you are however not open enough to frighten others away. Now that you have prepared the open source ECM market, it could be the right time for somebody else to take over a good part of it.

Well, whatever you do, I think thanks to Alfresco the community is on the winning side anyway. We might all whine about how much more open Alfresco could be. But if we look at how closed this market was just three years ago then we have to be really grateful!! 🙂

Florian

dave_whyte

I am working on an idea that is in the embryonic stage - that is there is no income, no funding - just an idea.

Alfresco looked like it would be the ideal product to make something real out of the idea - but the instability of 2.1 community, 2.9 B and 3labs is proving a real road block and time waster. We strike a bug in 2.1 CE, it is fixed in later versions and in 2.1 Enterprise. We strike different bugs in 2.9B.
:evil:
I see Alfresco compared to Red Hat quite often - but I think that they do not compare well.

Fedora does not have anything like the stability problems that I have struck with Alfresco. Bugs in Fedora are often fixed after a version is released. When looking for stability, all a user of Fedora needs to do is use an older version where all the main bugs have been ironed out. From what I can tell, Alfresco never irons out the bugs of a released version, but builds the fixes into the next version. So the bugs may get fixed, but always in a new version that introduces new bugs. From what I can tell, if someone wants patches for a released version, they need to get the Enterprise Version. Fedora is much much better.

Another Red Hat product is JBoss. The Community version of JBoss is absolutely stable - it is really very good - and it gets patched! Some things require a proprietary license , such as X509 support on AIX, but for the other scenarios, the community version is very good. I can assure you that if the community version of JBoss were unstable, they would sell less Enterprise versions. Developers like to try things out, and then they go on to influence enterprise/commercial decisions. Evaluation periods are just not good enough! Check out their downloads page, I see the word stable mentioned a lot! http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/downloads/

It takes time to build any idea into something makes enough money to afford an enterprise license!

Often Open Source companies patch the enterprise version weeks ahead of the community version, and that is OK - but forgive me if I think that the community versions still need to get patched.

dmatejka

Thank you for clarifing it Luis.. I was really waiting for this..
"Marking" experimental/new/unstable is really an excellent idea!

dave_whyte

Luis

I really appreciate that you took the time to respond to my post - but I hope that you understand that I am feeling less than happy at the moment.

Right now I am in the frustrating situation where I cannot even get Alfresco working long enough to start learning how to use the WCM features. Which version should I be using for this purpose? Is there any version of Alfresco WCM out there where I can assume that if it does not work, it is likely my fault?

You are saying that 3c should be relatively stable - it will be similar to a release candidate for 3 enterprise. And 3d will be a stability release, which is fantastic. All this means for me is that I will need to wait for 3d before I have a release of Alfresco that in the normal course of events would be called stable. I may be mistaken, but i understand that it will be months before 3d is released.

I have a few issues with this scenario
-   There is still no currently "Stable" release of Alfresco for the community - 2.1 Community is not stable as it has significant known bugs which are only fixed in the Enterprise Version. As mentioned above - it is my understanding that it will be months more before there is a stable release.
-   It has been more than a year since 2.1 community was released.
-   Your own post refers another big concern I have - while every new release of community in the past has had stability and bug fixes, each release has also had new code introduced creating more problems. In your own words "The 2.9 branch was a throwaway of sorts and wasn't stabilized enough to justify a final release so it should be ignored." When release 3d is released - will there only be stability and bug fixes? Will a stable and maintained community release be made available on an ongoing basis?
-   One of the things any potential user of Alfresco will want to be able to do is to try out this great new Application - and many may have been put off by the quality of the community versions. Shall I point out all the forum posts that say something like "don't worry - that bug in 2.1 is fixed in 2.9"?

As a hypothetical person wishing to try out Alfresco - without having to put up with a bleeding edge release - I would naturally avoid the "beta" 3 labs and go for the previous release - which would be 2.9!

stevewickii

Alfresco is not Open Source.

I also agree with the comments in this thread, Alfresco is not Open Source. Alfresco took the term, and cleverly used it for three obvious reasons, if not more:

1) To net open source solutions providers into investing time and money into the Alfresco product.
2) To supplement their Business, QA Testing and Development resources with FREE LABOR, from an ever growing community of open source contributors.
3) To compete with more stable commercial offerings in the same space from Microsoft, Ektron, etc…

Alfresco uses the term Open Source to separate itself from the current commercial offerings like Microsoft .NET and Microsoft’s new CMS. It is a great distraction, but the Open Source community will not be fooled. I have to say in my opinion Alfresco is doing more to frustrate potential buyers than to build a strong community of supporters. I cannot stand developing and troubleshooting a company’s product, and in return I cannot have the latest “stable” version of their product. If it was so stable, why am I spending so much time troubleshooting it and digging for documentation, and fixing your documentation (wiki), and still I am not able to have the latest most stable version of the product I am working to stabilize. No, thousands of companies who use Alfresco, Alfresco itself, benefits from the communities work, and the community doesn’t benefit from the communities own work. How messed up is that. Thanks a lot Alfresco, you really know how to make the community feel like part of the team.

I think Alfresco would benefit in several ways by getting rid of the community edition, and making the enterprise edition truly open source:
1) It will eliminate confusion on the whole open-source issue, and reduce the backlash it is receiving from the community.
2) It will decrease the frustration of those using the unsupported product to implement functional Proof of Concepts and live deployments. I am trying to get Alfresco into the door of the Advertising agency I work for, but the community edition has so many bugs and poor-to-inconsistent documentation that the agency has no confidence in the enterprise edition.
3) It will decrease the frustration of those trying to support the Alfresco project with their development and testing efforts. You say Alfresco is a business, and shouldn’t be doing it for free, I say a testing and development services should not be offered for free. That’s the whole reason OPEN SOURCE works. Developers invest their time and skills in exchange for the Product they are working on. But in your business model, you don’t give the developers what they are working on, you give them an unstable subset of the product.
4) Alfresco the company will really benefit from the free Development and Testing labor they get from the community on the latest and most stable incarnation of the product.

I can tell you this, I sure don't enjoy spending my time and money working on an unstable piece of software, when the company's own Engineers tell me that the version I am working on “will never be stable”, because “it’s the company’s model to provide paying customers with the stable version, and leave the contributing community with an unstable version.” I'll spare you the citations - they are right here in this thread. I will throw my support to a truly open source software, like Drupal, and wait for a client to come to my Agency offering to pony up for Alfresco. With Microsoft in this same market, I can tell you how many times that has happened.

I hope to see Alfresco change its marketing strategy soon, but it’s been 3 years now, and I can only hold my breath so long. Don’t get me wrong, I like the product Alfresco is producing. This is a call to action. Alfresco, stop lying to the public about being open source CMS. You are hurting yourself and others by doing so. I really got excited about the Alfresco CMS. The marketing was great, the product was aesthetically appealing, and the high level documentation was compelling. I pitched it to my management as the best alternative to the current commercial product offerings in the same space. But when it came to delivering a product to our client, we blew the budget trying to find documentation on implementing a content model and integrating the content into a personalized website, utterly frustrated and stressed out our developers, management and client, and I looked like a Giant A-Hole.

If you’re looking for an open source content management system, I would suggest you continue looking, and avoid the pain my development team has gone through, at least until Alfresco makes a decision to be a commercial or open source company.

BTW: To the point that “Eclipse does the hybrid model”. Don’t use it to support your argument for the hybrid model. I paid for the MyEclipse, and it is slower and just as buggy as the community offering. The community built it, and the community paid for it with their time and effort. There’s no reason to charge for it. The hybrid model is a bi-polar model, and it will only hurt the open source community. Consider this. Apache Web Server, Tomcat application server, and every framework you built Alfresco on is 100% open source, Production Quality, running in hundreds of thousands of Production environments, and they don't give their community the "buggy", "undocumented" version.

God Bless,

Stephen

mjasay

We have over 50,000 active deployments on Labs. Did someone to forget to tell those people that it's not stable? 🙂

xerox

You argue that Alfresco is not open source, but your argument has nothing to do with open source. The Alfresco software is 100% open source, one can't argue otherwise.

In my opinion Alfresco's code is open source, Alfresco as a product isn't. All the code from the enterprise release is also(maybe a bit later or even earlier) available in the community/labs version. But the exact code of a stable,deployed version, a enterprise release isn't. Why not opening the enterprise branch? It's a question where everyone have their own opinion on. Alfresco probably have their reasons too. Time will show if they're making the right choice.

p.s. see this blog post for some other opinions:
http://nheylen.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/alfresco-open-source-or-not/

Friendly regards,

Nick

stevewickii

The issue here is not really whether or not the product is open source. What this thread is really addressing is, whether or not the Alfresco project is worth investing time and effort in from the community's perspective. The enterprise users are getting exactly what they expect, there's no question about that, but is the community getting what they expect and deserve from their investment? That's the question here, and right now I think not, because when the community invests its time and effort to stabalize and improve other open source projects like Apache Web Server, Tomcat, the Jakarta projects, Spring Framework, Hibernate, etc.. we benefit individually and as a group from a more stable product, but in the hybrid model Alfresco has used to date, stability is focused on the enterprise edition, and the community edition is left unstable, and more importantly, Alfresco uses the community edition to develop and test enhancements that further destabilizes the product. Apache and Spring don't do this! Apache, Spring and Hibernate have branches for enhancements while they are unstable, and they have alpha, beta and release candidates for testing and troubleshooting enhancements before they reach the public distribution of the project, and they don't force the community to suffer from the instability of an enhancement as we have been forced to wait on the 3.0 release to be developed and stabalize while our 2.1 and 2.9 installations suffer from bugs.

I want to include some correspondence I have had with Matt Asay at Alfresco, after my last post. Matt has a good response, and I appreciate that he is engaging in this conversation. I have included Matt's response to the post on the forum, and my response to Matt's reply.

Here's matt's response to my previous post:

From: Matt Asay [mailto:m***.a***@alfresco.com]
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 8:04 PM
To: Stephen Wick
Cc: info@alfresco.com
Subject: Re: Community View on Alfresco

Thanks, Stephen. We firmly believe in open source, which is why Alfresco has released hundreds of thousands of lines of code under an open-source license that no one - including us - can take away from you. It's GPL. I'm not sure how we can make it more open source?

Indeed, I believe you and your company have happily used it for a long time. I seem to remember exchanging emails with you as long as two years ago?

We have a range of exceptional customers, and we'd love to have Nicholson Kovac as one of them, joining other great advertising companies that work with us. Those companies generally buy support contracts for their clients, and so we've had organizations as diverse as OnStar, Activision, and the National Rifle Association use Alfresco and find great value in it.

There are 50,000+ active deployments of Alfresco Labs worldwide, of which roughly 1% actually pay us money. It sounds like we're the ones getting screwed here. 🙂

It may be that the product doesn't work well for you, but customers like Apple, Morgan Stanley, Activision, and others seem to be finding great value in it. Again, we'd love to find a way for it to work for you, and have a dedicated support team for that purpose. We'd love to put them to work for you.

Matt

____________________
Matt Asay
General Manager and Vice President, Americas
Alfresco
mnasay (aim), mjasay (skype, yim) |
http://cnet.com/openroad

And here's my response to Matt's e-mail:

Matt,

If you feel you are getting screwed, because people are using your product for free, then stop trying to use an open source model. The open source model is not for Companies that have implicit or explicit expectations of drawing a substantial income from the development and distribution of the open source product. Open Source is for a community of people, working together to develop a product. They "pay" for the product by spending their time and effort troubleshooting, fixing and enhancing a product for themselves and the benefit of the group. The "hybrid" commercial-open source approach creates the frustration on both sides, because the Company is trying to make money and it doesn't, and the community is investing in the product and they are not getting what they pay for.

Thank you for your time and for engaging in this conversation,

Stephen

stevewickii

Just so you all know where I'm coming from… My intention is not to bash Alfresco. I have used the community version for a couple of years now. At this point I have decided to pay for Alfresco Training, and we will probably pay for the Enterprise Edition of the Alfresco product very soon. Not because my experience with the community edition has been great, but because our client needs a stable version of the product and so that we don't waste our time working on an unstable version of the product.

I am writing, to support the arguments and frustrations from the open source community's perspective. I am writing, because I am invested in seeing Alfresco succeed, and I want to see this frustration go away. I really love what this product does and how it does it. It has a great architecture and, the developers have done a great job creating an enterprise content management system.

stevewickii

We have over 50,000 active deployments on Labs. Did someone to forget to tell those people that it's not stable? 🙂

To what extent are these 50,000 Production deployments being used? We are using the Alfresco CMS for 4 very dynamic and personalizable websites via the Web Service client API and WebScripts interface, and we have several documented bugs with respect to authentication and authorization, functionality, and performance. We have had to investigate and write several work arounds to get our sites to work. Aside from the enterprise branches of code, where is the 2.9 (b) branch? There is a 2.9B Version in the Alfresco JIRA, but there's no way to get the 2.9 source code, fix it, and submit the fix to a 2.9 branch. Those of us who have production deployments of community need a branch for each major version of Alfresco, so that we are not required to invest more time and money into upgrading to another major release every time we need one bug fixed.

dmatejka

Hi everybody,
I have to add few words to this discussion.
I remember time (and it was not more than few years ago) when even thinking of Document Management cost you money and pain. I'm an entrepreneur really eager for new technologies and possibilities in a field of publishing. I have always wanted to put some logic and structure in a world of DTP, but the possibilities were limited and available only for big enterprises.

Documentum was a project I would be happy to implement (but no way to have such a resources available). After a lot of research I have found several open source projects that were trying to achieve something similar.

First we have started with NUXEO project (which may be closer to Stephen's view of Open Source project), but after few months of exploration I have run into Alfresco and I liked it so much that I have dropped the NUXEO project and started to learn about Alfresco.

Unfortunately we are really small company (4 people still struggling to make some money for living) and have no developer inside the company so the implementation is going pretty slow. Actually also I was kind of frustrated last year because of waiting for some "stable" release.

Right now we are at the start of in-house production testing and I believe we will be able to deliver more and faster to our customers as soon as we will manage to work Alfresco as we want to.

Although I have no idea when this is going to happened I'm sure i will continue to try, because the ideas and the way alfresco is working with the information is exactly as I have always dreamed of.

Anyway, the possibility to implement such a solution even for such a small company as we are is something Alfresco (and people behind) deserves respect for. The amount of work they have done till today is amazing. Even the fact they find the time to answer questions here in the forum is something that I can not understand.

I have paid for a lot of things that (at the end) did not bring that much value back. Here is the opportunity to start… work.. use.. and possibly to earn money on the project without paying a dollar. I think the possibility to have support of the people behind all of this is more than worth the money.

There will be nothing anybody can complain of if they manage to "mark" unstable parts of LAB edition.

Keep going Alfresco!

dmatejka

Hi Luis,
thank you for your words and your time.
You are doing a lot in helping the community,, wiki is getting better every day, but sometimes it is really hard to realize to which version it is applied (new categories are a good idea.. but the implementation is kind of stuck - which I believe will be solved with a new community portal (soon?

) Looking forward for new social features at your site.
Also your Tech Talk Live was always interesting to see and hear (did you stop?.. or just a pause in a busy days?).

For me personally it would be really helpful if you can point me to what kind of skill set we have to look for when we consider to hire somebody as an in-house developer to help us with implementing alfresco and making it work smoothly (I know one developer is nothing.. but we have to start somewhere). Is javascript/webscript enough for the start or do we need somebody with java background?

It is so great that really a big portion of a customization can be done by me as a business user! This and the support of the CIFS protocol is just what made my decision.
The biggest need for our customization is in advanced workflow (which is little bit over my current time resources to learn).. is there the way that you would recommend to start with? or some more examples/ tutorials that could be explored?

In general… examples, use cases, tutorials, how-to… with detailed comments are really appreciated.

fselendic

Steve,

Thanks for the compliments to our team of engineers.

You note:
because our client needs a stable version of the product and so that we don't waste our time working on an unstable version of the product.

I have to ask…

Presumably your clients pay you to implement a solution for them have they not?

Are you arguing that you're entitled to a free ($0) Enterprise build to help ensure the success of your customer projects and maintain your reputation but are unwilling to share the wealth in order to get a support contract that helps guarantee your success?

That's like having your cake and eating it too!

I've already stated that an Enterprise subscription is affordable, in your case I'm willing to bet that a $16K a year Alfresco License would easily service 3-4 of your customers if you chose to host a shared server on their behalf. How much do you stand to make from those 3-4 customers?

Isn't $16K a worthwhile investment for peace of mind and a dedicated backup crew of experts standing ready to help?

I don't understand…

Well, $16k is not a small amount, actually. That kind of yearly fee renders Alfresco unusable in lots of smaller projects.

Main problem is that there's nothing between $0 and $16k. I'm not an expert in MS pricing, but I'm almost 100% sure that they have Sharepoint version that fits nicely in that space not covered by Alfresco. Sure, it probably doesn't bring all bells and whistles, but it does collaboration and DM fairly good. If memory serves me right, it was around $8k for a server that will satisfy most small and medium businesses.

With Alfresco going "Sharepoint replacement" route, that 0-16k hole has to be filled somehow, because, well, in open source volume is everything, and volume won't come from enterprises only, Alfresco has to be able to fight in SMB space too.

Note that I don't offer a solution, because I don't see an easy one

Just am a little concerned how will lab/experimental/unstable (either as a "stamp" or actual quality of software) impact distribution of Alfresco. Also, there IS a problem with people trying to go head to head against Sharepoint in SMB market.

fselendic

First of all I suggested a shared deployment among Steves' customers which means the support costs can be distributed among them.

Second, SharePoint pricing is terribly complex and subject to per-user costs (CALs), interdependencies with other MSFT products and different components depending on whether you're building an intranet or Internet site.

You can try to make sense of it here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX101865111033.aspx#3
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mla/default.aspx?sitecontextid=default

I ran the quote wizard for a deployment with 20 internal users, Windows 2008 Server, MSSQL Server and unlimited internet users and got a grand total of $79,657.00

The most expensive bit was Microsoft SharePoint for Internet Sites which was priced at: $60,186.00 for a single server. So an internal deployment would cost about $19,000.00. Remember that upgrading to newer versions incur an additional cost whereas all subscribers to Alfresco Enterprise are entitled to free upgrades.

Alfresco can be readily applied to any number of users and internal as well as external sites at no additional cost.

Naturally there is a cutoff… A small deployment of SharePoint for 5 users costs about $5,000 EXCLUDING the cost of Windows 2008 Server and MSSQL Server. Alfresco is looking to come up with an offering for "micro installations" that's priced attractively.

So, if Steve's using Alfresco WCM for his advertising clients, a single Alfresco server without user limits is still quite affordable or at worst is comparable in price to the alternative from Microsoft even when amortized over the course of 2.5 years which is the average MSFT release cycle.

Yep, sorry, I noticed that you were referring to hosted and shared solution when I was near the end of my comment….but, nevertheless, the pricing of Alfresco you mentioned is real, so it does help discussion.

I'm not saying Alfresco is expensive for what it offers (and I do hate MS complex pricing

). Just, implementing it is a bit problematic in some scenarios in current situation.

There is A LOT companies out there that could use DM, CMS/WCM, workflow, collaboration….I don't want everything for free, I just wanted to point out that you guys do have a nasty hole ($0-$15k) in your pricing/distribution strategy, and that some of us were bitten by it. Which sounds like whining, I know, but I'm posting here because I'm 100% sure that Alfresco will too be bitten by it in the end; that hole cripples your installation base, your volume, and in the end, with OS, volume is The King.

A stable community version would fill that hole nicely. You don't have to call it stable, though, just make sure it works

If you want to make some money from low end, maybe also some kind of special partnership agreements for subcontractors spreading community version. Or, maybe "micro installations" you mentioned. I really don't know solution that would fit you guys the best. I know you are doing great in high end now, but would hate to see you neglecting low end because of that.

joel_moore

Forgive a naive question but how can the source code the the EE be closed if the LE is open? It sounds like the EE is based on the GPL'd LE so doesn't that mean the source code has to be made available?

In any case my initial excitement over this product has been dampened by the $16k/year price hinted at in this thread (I wish you'd just list the price on your website rather than forcing me to ask you for it…I could have saved a lot of time). There's absolutely no way our little company is going to be able to justify such a cost for something like this, no matter how compelling the features are.

I guess document management systems just aren't meant for the small guy.