Alfresco Newbie implementation Questions

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seaton

G'day one and all,

Very New to Alfresco and I have a couple of questions relating to implementation.

I'm looking at implementing an intranet CMS system at work for approx 30 staff.  I've evaluated a number of OS products out there and always come back to Alfresco, would love to go Enterprise version but being a non profit local government organisation it's definitely out of our price range, I've also spoken to an Alfresco partner regarding training and consultation, but they didn't seem to be interested once I mentioned that we couldn't afford enterprise version, so community version it is.  (I would love to see tiered license pricing for us smaller customers)

We have an existing Record management system, so will not be using Alfresco for Records management, just document management.  But also looking at using alfresco as a central photo repository, we have many photos scattered throughout many departments, that need to be accessible by everyone, I would like to get ideas about this from anyone who has implemented something similar.

Currently all users work from a shared network drive that is arranged in departmental directories other than that we have no Intranet system, another reason for moving to Alfresco is the CIFS share.

What is best practise in setting up spaces for a corporate Intranet, is it better to create spaces under company home e.g. company home | Intranet | departments or is it better to use Alfresco share and create departmental sites?  or a combination of them both.

What is a good implementation strategy once I've finished my discovery process i.e. security groupings/categories/document types/work flows etc.  i.e. should I first migrate all documents from existing file server to Alfresco, then still allowing access via CIFS, and then start implementing functionality within Alfresco and migrate users/departments over to the repository interface as functionality is added?  Would like to hear what others do.

And lastly (for now anyway What do others do for managing change control of alfresco and tomcat configuration changes, see that alfresco is a war and may be re-deployed thus the possibility of loosing customisations/extensions?

Regards,

Stephen…

brian_robinson

Regarding deployment of customizations, you have two choices for best practices:
1. Use AMP files.  See http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/AMP_Files
2. Use the extension directory (alfresco/tomcat/shared/classes)

Either of these options will allow you to upgrade the war files independently of your customizations.