Alfresco 4 Enterprise Content Management Implementation

Great book for beginners, good examples and they are easy to adapt for your personal case...

First time I have gained more from reading postings in the forum than from reading a book about an open source product.The authors have simply skimmed the surface on every topic.The online documentation on Alfresco's website is superior in every way to this "book".

The back cover suggests that the book is for 'experienced users, business owners or system administrators who want to install and use Alresco in their teams or businesses'. After a reading of it, I opine that it is not well suited for the typical business owner, who cannot be expected to have much computing experience at the programming level. Rather, it is meant for a combination of an experienced user and a sysadmin.For this version 4, if you have indeed used earlier versions, then much of the text content and numerous screen captures should easily make sense. There is a lot of pages where you can customise the many attributes for your content of documents. Like being able to transform content from Microsoft Doc to Adobe PDF, or to convert from JPG or GIF to PNG. And for documents, there are nifty abilities like adding a summary property or to turn on versioning.But there is only so much you can do from the GUI. Further extensions are possible by you writing javascript. As you should appreciate, this lets you introduce arbitrarily complex rules, limited only by your ability to code and debug them.Another source of complexity in Alfresco is the use of XML configuration files. As with other packages, these files are getting larger. The text has several cases of XML snippets where this is readily apparent.Perhaps the broadest use of Alfesco is in the mapping from a business workflow to a content oriented instantiation. Here is where a business owner might look. But she will likely need the assistance of a more computer technical employee to walk through the later sections of the book that deal with this.

If you are new comer to Alfresco, then this book is for you. It covers all the basics for Alfresco 4.1.2 Enterprise Edition. If you are familiar with Alfresco 3 or you have purchased the previous version Alfresco 3 book, there is not really much of a change. In fact, the table of contents of Alfresco 4 is pretty much the same as Alfresco 3.I got the most value out of this book from workflow and scanning solution integration.Support for advanced workflows is now provided by Activiti workflow engine. The author does an excellent job introducing BPMN and workflow basics of Activiti workflow. There are step by step instructions on how to use Activiti Process Designer to define custom workflow as well as potential extensions to the individual tasks in the workflow.There is a new chapter in this book that talks about the integration between Ephesoft and Alfresco. If you are not familiar with various scanning products like Captiva and Kofax, Ephesoft is open source product that integrates directly with Alfresco. Not only does it have basic features OCR and indexing, it also has ability to classify and automatically extract data from forms.All of major ECM vendors have advanced workflow engine and integration with advanced scanning solution. With the introduction of the Activiti and tight integration with Ephesoft, Alfresco 4 is quickly catching up to EMC, IBM, and Microsoft. I am glad that the author covered these two topics; my only wish is that he would have covered them in more detail.

I am an enterprise architect and I have a few Alfresco projects going on, as Alfresco is rapidly replacing Documentum, FileNet and other EDMS in many enterprises (and government agencies). So I went and bought all the Alfresco books available on Amazon, as a EA and PM, I do not have much time to learn all the new technology so I read ebooks when I have 10 minutes here and there between meetings. My surprise was that majority of the Alfresco books out there are for a older version of Alfresco (version 3), and many of the code example, deployment procedures simply would not work.So after 10+ Alfresco books, I can only recommend 'Alfresco 4 Enterprise Content Management Implementation' book, and there is another Alfresco 4 book, I personally like this book because it is written in such a way that is very clear, practical and easy to follow. If I would like to design the Alfresco to a backend system, I can just read the CMIS section and there is working examples that I can follow.And also I love Packt Publishing for their super easy to use eBooks app and management system and their pricing for eBooks.Thank you Amazon, Packt and Munwar Shariff for your great work and great help on Alfresco projects !!!Sam WuEnterprise ArchitectReston, VA