Review : Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation

When I started reading this book (Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation) I had the sentiment it will be a comparison between the JSF UI client and Share. However, the authors guide the reader through the complete deployment lifecycle, from the installation of Alfresco and MySql to the usage of the exposed interfaces or protocols like CIFS, CMIS and the new Sharepoint protocol.

If you are new to Alfresco you can learn how to customize Alfresco UI or how to configure a SMTP server to work with Alfresco. Users, groups, permissions, roles, authentication and security are well explained, and there are enterprise use cases that can help the reader to put his hands in practice. Integration with LDAP (OpenLDAP and AD, chaining), JAAS, Kerberos, NTLM is completely described and SSO with CAS will help you to round the picture.

This book is not only about explaining what Alfresco is and can do, but it will help the reader to chose the best solution for his installation. Users migration is a big thing for a lot of companies and you will not regret to read this book in order to learn how to do that.

There are also advanced parts like creating custom models, categories, workflows with jBPM. In the chapter 9, the authors show how to integrate external applications with Alfresco. Integrations through webscripts with Droopal, Joomla, FLEX, emails, iPhone, Google, Facebook are very attractive and could be easily extended to a high level enterprise application.

In the next chapter (10), it is clearly explained how one can benefit from the MS Office integration with Alfresco and how to use the Sharepoint protocol, in order to be able to use several repositories with one user interface.

What I did like, simply because I do not have much experience with yet, is the OCR integration the chapter 13. So, scanning and optically recognizing text in documents could be one of the last steps in your document management integration and if you need video or audio transcoding than I can only recommend this book.

In my opinion this book could be useful for system administrators, new and advanced users, as well as managers willing to use a open source content management system in their company.