I've seen this question but the answers are simply not good enough. I've searched the web and could find a clear listing of the main differences.
I am particularly surprised to see contradictions in the above link, that holds only 4 short answers.
So the question is, beyond support, what are (all) the differences between Alfresco Community and Enterprise editions (for the current versions of course)?
Are there functional or technical features that available in the Enterprise edition, that are not in the community edition?
I find it strange that it's so difficult to get a clear list. Looking at the forums to find this answer is not a serious option from a business perspective.
Until now, I found this link to be useful, but it's from 2009.
In particular, I find the platform support interesting, with the community edition supporting only lamp stuff:
Linux
MySQL
Tomcat
OpenLDAP
Firefox
And the enterprise edition supporting:
Windows
SQL Server
WebLogic, WebSphere
AD/Kerberos
IE and Safari
Apparently, these features are only available in the enterprise edition:
JMX monitoring
Runtime admininstration: What's that exactly? And what's in the community edition then?
Runtime indexing consistency check and update: What's in the community edition then?
High performance and availability: How is that implemented and what's in the community edition then?
Storage policies
Open source and proprietary technology stack support: which ones exaclty? Which ones are supported in the community edition?
If anyone could guide me towards serious documentation about these differences, that would be great.
I also went through the wiki but could not find an answer to my questions in there.
differences between Enterprise and Community vary in detail from version to version and are mainly visible for administrators. We see or maintain both flavors of Alfresco in midsize to very large environments and I would say it's more or less a question of taste and budget what the best decision / edition is for you. Excellent skills in infrastructure and java are highly advisable for both editions to run Alfresco in production.
The technical differences are not as dramatic as not being able to provide very similar functionality for the users - so if you're actually in a decision you should focus on a good technical partner, the support services and maybe the fact that you only get official patches in the Enterprise subscription, not on the Community. BTW Alfresco Enterprise is not Open Source but this is not a real point of interest for most end users. You can access the code as a subscription customer but it is not public available/accessible.
The main differences in features are already named more or less:
Administration
Enterprise has more views and setting in the admin web GUI. In Community you can access most configuration only from the command line. This may be a restriction but in real live Administrators prefer the command line and scripting automation.
Enterprise lets you change some Alfresco settings during runtime (most settings still require restart). Some can be change in the GUI and more in the jmx interface. Also you're able to stop and start subsystems like the CIFS protocol server. We use this feature to switch a system in read only mode. This point is meant with "runtime admininstration". Community requires restart of the service for most configuration changes. It is possible to work around this by advanced scripting like groovy or by implementing modules.
Indexing
Runtime indexing consistency check and update is not a self healing functionality as expected. You will have to learn (at least for now) that you have to recreate the Alfresco index from time to time even in Enterprise environments and that it is better to focus on good strategies how to speed recreation or how to setup standby indexes instead of hunting failed indexing transactions using the check and update methods. For major document model changes you need to recreate the index anyway.
High performance and availability
This is mainly the cluster and replication functionality which is no longer available in Community. It's similar to MS Clusters: It's a lot, lot work for very view more availability since some concepts are missing. The price is high in terms of complexity and can end up in loss of robustness. Even with enterprise support it's a hard job to keep a alfresco cluster running - so you need very good arguments why to go this way. But of course: its possible and available!
High performance: There shouldn't be any difference and if - I'm very curious about the explanation.
Technology stack
The main difference is the database support. In the Community you only can choose between MySQL and Postgres (No Oracle or MS SQL for Community). All other technologies are independent from Enterprise or Community (AD, Kerberos, OS, Browser, ...)
Java Container: I believe over 95% of all Alfresco installations run in tomcat. That's the configuration which is documented, tested and scales. Using WebLogic or WebSphere gives you no added value except new challenges - quite the contrary: You have to solve most issues for yourself and can't benefit from others experience.
Storage policies: I'm not pretty sure and should check in 4.2.x if the Content Store Selector / Storage policies is no longer available in the Community, but it was there in the 3.x versions.
[Edit]: storage policies have been removed in Community 4.2.x:
NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No bean named 'storeSelectorContentStoreBase' is defined
If there is a really need for this functionality someone may re-enable that feature by coding a module for Community.
Regards
This page explains the difference between the editions:
https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Enterprise_Edition
This page is the canonical, comprehensive list of the differences.
If you are considering an Enterprise Subscription and you have a question that isn't answered by what you can find on that page, you should talk to your account rep.
Well, regarding JMX monitoring:
Runtime administration: Alfresco enterprise allows to perform certain actions on Alfresco subsystems without restarting the server. This allows you to be very fast during debugging/developing and also making changes in production environment. Also you can access the JMX interface that supports JMX Remoting.
There is no consistency check or update, until you restart the server (during the startup you have to validate/check/rebuild your indexes). There is an option in alfresco.global.properties (or the original repository.properties config file) for that. If you have some inconsistencies in the Alfresco Community index, you're gonna have a bad time xD.
Alfresco Enterprise has specific license for clustering your architecture, the Community edition doesn't support those systems. Replicate and cluster Alfresco is one of the main improvements in performance/scalability/availability you could achieve.
The storage policies allow you to use Content Store selectors in Alfresco Enterprise. You can manage a primary and a secondary file store, and map/connect these stores in your architecture. The Community Edition allows you only to use one content store at a time.
These include everything inside Alfresco (Spring Framework, Apache-Lucene/Solr, Tomcat, and so on), because with the Enterprise license you have also the full support with everything inside the Alfresco package. The difference is that the Community is based on daily builds, supported by community, and therefor not guaranteed. The Enterprise support helps you resolve many problems that you might encounter during developing and in production environment, not only Alfresco related, but also on some configurations on supported platforms (Windows/Linux), your web application servers, and so on.
Hope it helps.
Related
I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information on the internet about Alfresco Share clustering. From what I can find, it looks like clustering was removed completely from Alfresco Community in versions 4.2 and above.
I did find some documentation showing that Alfresco One 5 has Share clustering and I noticed that I can enable hazelcast in Alfresco Community 5 but the clustering doesn't work at all.
Is there a way to have more than 1 instance of Alfresco Community 5 behind a load balancer and have proper synchronization/replication/clustering occur between the share instances?
Short answer
There is no cluster and no load balancer support for the Alfresco Community version (I know of). Alfresco removed that feature from the community version starting with 4.2 when they refactored the whole cluster thing.
Long answer
What are you trying to archive?
If scalability is your goal you should focus on the bottlenecks in the Alfresco architecture which will not be solved by clustering / load balancing. I haven't seen a system where Share tier was the bottleneck.
quite the contrary: If load from share against the repository tier is too high you will fall into a timeout and thread escalation since Alfresco follows the "retrying transaction" principle: If errors occur, share will retry - which means: if repositry is answering too slow share will create new requests/threads until the OS reaches kernel or process limits without any result.
So instead you should focus on optimizing the repository tier to become as fast as possible to avoid thread escalations in share (This also can't be achived by clustering):
transformation --> understand, replace or disable sync transfomation stuff running on repository tier
search --> understand, optimize tracking and run SOLR on separate host(s), but tracking will rely on the transformation performance of the repository tier
caching --> use smart reverse proxys to cache Share stuff on client and proxy side to minimize traffic
very fast/smart storage concepts on db and index tier
If availability is your concern you may get better results by using HA features from virtualisation platforms like VMWare ESX and your support efforts will be a fraction compared to clustered Alfresco.
I hope this question isn't too obtuse; however, I couldn't find anything specific. I'm a web-developer and I have an MSDN Subscription that gives me access to any SQL server edition I want. As a developer, I would like to know what I should choose to install on a dev machine based on this criteria (which other developers may relate to):
I need access to all the tools for SQL and T-SQL programming (I think all editions come with this?)
I want it to be efficient--I don't want it to take up too much ram\cpu processing time. My queries will not be very heavy so I'd rather trade off longer queries than to have the server taking up valuable resources.
I am programming for an enterprise sql version hosted somwhere else, but I don't need more than 1 Gigs of space, 1 CPU core support,
I never really worked with reporting tools, but would as a developer (Aka, non-DBA) would I ever need them on a dev machine?
Best integration with VS2013
I know that the SQL Server Developer edition is basically Enterprise, but without the liscence to use it for non-dev purposes. Based on the above criteria is there any sense for me to install it? Or should I choose SQL Express with Advanced Services? Perhaps Web?
Thanks for all your help,
All editions come with all the tools (unless you get into the BI side of things, then I think Express won't come with all of those tools).
In general, the edition won't make your local development environment any different in terms of resource usage. There are a few things that Enterprise / Developer have (like online index rebuild, certain optimizations etc.) that can make some operations more efficient, but these are highly unlikely to impact your day-to-day work or really change the number of resources SQL Server uses (these are very easy to cap through configuration anyway, e.g. if you don't want SQL Server to use more than x GB of memory, you can set that).
If you don't need more than 1 GB / 1 CPU in the ultimate deployment, you should probably develop on Express. This will prevent you from using Enterprise features inadvertently (which can happen if you use Developer). The down-side is that if you later do need features that aren't in Express (say you have another project where you will be deploying to Enterprise), you'll need to add an instance (with or without removing the old one). Given that you have access to MSDN, maybe the best solution is to install two instances - one Express, and one Developer, and then you can target the edition you want by using the appropriate instance locally.
I think that Express with Advanced Services come with these things, but I'm not an SSRS guy, so I'm not sure.
No single aspect of integration with Visual Studio should be edition-dependent.
Also, Web is not an edition that is suitable for your workstation - try to find a license somewhere. This edition is exclusively for web hosts and resellers who offer SQL Server as part of their hosted offerings.
Judging from the described features, the Alfresco Team and Alfresco Share products look very similar.
What are the technical differences?
Here are a few differences I have heard about, but a better list would be welcome:
Video preview
Preview for more Adobe products (Illustrator etc?)
Some kind of link with Google Apps maybe?
There is need for clarification to #Heiko Robert. His answer is not valid anymore. Team has been discontinued, and it didn't replace Alfresco Enterprise.
Team was not the latest Enterprise Edition, but a cheaper license with the restrictions that #Heiko has mentioned (and some more. For example, the number of users is also limited).
Team is being replaced by the Alfresco Cloud, as you can see if you click on the "Team Customizations" link posted by #Tahir Malik.
Alfresco Enterprise is well and very alive, and a new version 4 is available.
Regarding Share: Alfresco has two web user interfaces: one is the original, known as Alfresco Explorer, and the newest one is Alfresco Share. Alfresco Explorer is a faster UI, based on JSF, but it is more difficult to customize, and it is not being developed anymore. On the other hand, Share is the "second generation" UI, which is based on Surf, which is much easier to customize. At this point, Share is actively being developed, but, as far as I know, it is close to provide 100% of the functionality provided by Alfresco Explorer.
Alfresco Explorer will probably be around for several years to come, because a lot of people already developed applications on it, so that should give them time to migrate to share.
It's more or less a question of licensing. Team seems to be the latest Enterprise Edition but with major limitations in
Number of Documents
Customization: No Customizations in any way (no custom doc models, workflows, automation, actions)
Usage: restricted to the Share-Interface only (no Explorer, no webscripts, not integration with other systems)
I found this Blog helpful: Alfresco Team: First Thoughts and Limitations to Consider
Anyway - if you're looking for a out of the box tool to share documents in workgroups/teams this may the tool you should look into.
I don't think there are much technical differences, because both are build on the Surf Platform and are quite equal in functionality.
I think you should see this page of the Team Site: Team Customizations
The main difference is that you can't do whatever you like with Team and you can with Share (Enterprise/Community).
There are a few features in Alfresco Team that are new, and which aren't in Alfresco 3.4 (Enterprise or Community). Video Preview and a few more transformers are in that list. Those new features are available on HEAD though, so if you take a nightly build you'll get them. They'll all be in Swift (likely 4.0), which is due out later this year. See Jeff Pott's blog for some more info on Swift.
The Alfresco Team website has a lot of info on Team on it, which should help you decide if it's a good fit for you, or if you need the full Community/Enterprise version.
I'm getting close to finishing a public-facing ASP.Net app and I'm starting to weigh deployment options. I'm an ASP.Net/SQLServer veteran but noob when it comes to Azure. I'm wondering how others have felt about the learning curve to effectively migrate a local dev ASP.Net/SQLServer apps into Azure cloud.
More specifically:
How steep is the learning curve towards understanding administration and programming concepts, and do you think it's worth the investment?
What is Microsoft's support like if I have catastrophic problems from my cloud infrastructure and my live site is down? My expectation is a large price tag for a not-so-urgent SLA.
Will my non-Azure ASP.Net app require significant modification and/or coupling to run in the Azure environment?
Thanks
I answered a similar question a while back, here. Azure has evolved since then:
Azure's AppFabric Cache is currently in CTP (community technology preview) and will go live some time later this year (sorry, I can't quote a date). With a single configuration change, you'll be able to enable the asp.net session state provider without changing any code, and have your session state available to all of your web role instances.
With Azure v1.3 which rolled out in November, you have have the ability to run tasks at startup with elevated privileges (e.g. to run an MSI to install some prerequisite control suite).
For monitoring, you can take advantage of Microsoft System Center, which now supports Azure directly. Alternatively, you can look into 3rd-party options such as AzureWatch.
With Azure's extra-small instance, you can run a site for approx. $44 monthly. You mentioned catastrophic failures and SLA. With Azure, you need a minimum of two instances for SLA to take effect (this is because your virtual machines are located in physically different areas of the data center, in separate fault domains). So you're looking at approx. $90 / month to run a site with 99.95% uptime. Only you can determine whether this is worth it to you. Yes, you can host with a simple hosting provider for significantly less (such as GoDaddy). However, if your site fails there, you have to wait for it to be detected and then installed on a separate box. Also, you share each server with potentially dozens of other tenants, which will impact your site's performance. With Azure, at most 8 tenants will occupy a box, depending on how many cores you configure your virtual machines to use. And it's incredibly simple to scale up or down to handle traffic increases and decreases.
My personal experience is that there isn't much documentation and you have to search through blogs / forums to find answers for more advanced questions. If you have a nicely design app then there shouldn't be much problem with porting - you can google for Azure version of ASP.NET providers, ie. membership.
The biggest disadvantage may be cost: you have to do your maths but for me it turned out that a VPS hosting is much cheaper than Azure.
I would say that unless you get considerable savings on infrastructure don't move to Azure for just the sake of doing it. A hosted server with SQL and IIS will give you less problems and a bit more freedom.
I see an excellent answer by David Makogon already. The following might be helpful for you as well. The last episode of the Connected Show podcast was about migrating Wold Maps to Azure. If you are considering moving to Azure it is certainly worth listening to, as they explain the challenges they faced during the migration.
You could give a look at Moving Applications to the Cloud on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform in MSDN.
Cheers.
I've been searching (with little success) for a free/opensource session clustering and replication solution for asp.net. I've run across the usual suspects (indexus sharedcache, memcached), however, each has some limitations.
Indexus - Very immature, stubbed session interface implementation. Its otherwise a great caching solution, though.
Memcached - Little replication/failover support without going to a db backend.
Several SF.Net projects - All aborted in the early stages... nothing that appears to have any traction, and one which seems to have gone all commercial.
Microsoft Velocity - Not OSS, but seems nice. Unfortunately, I didn't see where CTP1 supported failover, and there is no clear roadmap for this one. I fear that this one could fall off into the ether like many other MS dev projects.
I am fairly used to the Java world where it is kind of taken for granted that many solutions to problems such as this will be available from the FOSS world.
Are there any suitable alternatives available on the .Net world?
As far as Velocity is concerned I have heard some great things about that project lately. It's still in the developing stages and probably not primetime ready yet. But I think the project has a solid footing and will become a strong mature product from Microsoft and not fall off into the ether like you predict.
Recently I've heard podcasts from Scott Hanselman and Polymorphic Podcast regarding Velocity.
BTW Windows Server AppFabric is out of beta. That's what i mentioned in my previous post.
here is the link on general availability;- http://blogs.technet.com/b/appfabric/archive/2010/06/07/windows-server-appfabric-now-generally-available.aspx
which specific features do you think one can get on NCache and not on AppFabric?
Just a quick update on this thread for the sake of completion.
Velocity (now known as Windows Server AppFabric) is already out in the production and offers a great distributed caching platform. More details are available on the msdn site
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/ee695849.aspx
Although Velocity has made progress from CTP1 to CTP2, it still leaves much to be desired. It will be some time before they provide all the important features in a distributed cache and even longer before it is tested in the market. I wish them good luck.
In the meantime, NCache already provides all CTP2 & V1, and many more features. NCache is the first, the most mature, and the most feature-rich distributed cache in the .NET space. NCache is an enterprise level in-memory distributed cache for .NET and also provides a distributed ASP.NET Session State. Check it out at Distributed Cache.
NCache Express is a totally free version of NCache. Check it out at Free Distributed Cache.