ClearFoundation

Stuart, I would need to take a good look at the current Alfresco to decide if it was equal to legacy document management systems.

I'm sure it's gotten better than the last time I looked at it about 4-5 years ago.

I'm not a great fan of Java software and its JVM hell that you get into. Been down that road so many times. But that can be tolerated if the software package is good enough.

So what do you have Alfresco doing. Acting as a SharePoint replacement?

To be honest I didn't do that much with it.

I setup the Cif shares and the Zarafa plugin from what I can remember. It was well over a year ago.

I wasn't using clearOS at the time but a similar product.

It was a loading exercise so I had Zarafa, Alfresco, Vtiger and then I came to OpenBravo another java based application.

The Alfresco install was a doddle but wow it clashed like hell with OpenBravo and to be honest Tomcat had me scratching my head. That sort of killed the experiment.

I find DM to be very specific to industry even practice. My previous experience in the legal scene was very much indexing/search and case management with very little work flow / versioning, in fact non.
Alfresco seems to be very much of an all rounder and actually that might be its down fall.

Then again due to its OpenSource nature I don't have to bother about API's or lack of them as my key role was integration.
I did mean to run up a test using PDF text-over-image and have incoming mail drop straight into the CIF shares.

I do have plans to utilise a key selection of the best of open source and stay away from legacy software.

Alfresco, KnowledgeTree, Nuxeo (good Alfresco contender) doesn't have workflow in community edition.

Check your requirements: do you need versioning? workflow? email notification? impending document expiration? etc.
If a simple PHP/MySQL DMS meet your requirement and you're not really prepared for Java madness, then don't use Alfresco.

Hi, and thank you all for your replies.

My main requirements are, as I said before, mainly for home need.
Categorization, indexing document content, in site preview for as many document type as possible, access rights
So, I think Alfresco is a bit too much for my needs.

Best regards,
Antonio Henriques

You might want to check LetoDMS (open source).
Installation should be as easy to extract the content to /htdocs/somefolder (assuming you install PHP & MySQL with COS). And don't forget to check their forum for questions.

Edit: I believe LetoDMS doesn't have in site preview yet (you need to download the file to view it). But I think they have other requirements that you need.