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.
Related
We are building an m-learning solution[IOS and Android compatible] at our company. The product needs to be SCORM compliant. I would like to know whether it should be developed in-house by the developers or other paid options should be pursued? What are other ways of making our product SCORM compliant? We are not rally positive about using SCORM Engine for this due to its high cost solution to our problem here.Any suggestion/help is appreciated.
You can include SCORM within content using a number of open source options available on GitHub.
Getting SCORM in the content (free) is step 1.
Packaging, bundling and deploying is really step 2.
This typically has a close relationship to how Curriculum defines a structure of lessons, modules, units etc. Not knowing exactly how they want to organize this, I can speculate that you may just have a simple "I want to know that the student viewed the content" approach. If you get into a more rich dependency on how the student performs dictating what they see or do next, that requires a much for up front design so you can bridge the design, development, and deployment of your content.
Including SCORM Support in content -
Like mentioned if you search google for my SCOBot project or Pipwerks you'll hit the ground running.
Requires JavaScript friendly developer and some base SCORM knowledge attained thru reading. This could be outsourced.
Knowing the version of SCORM you wish to support can help. Consult the LMS to find out that info.
Far as presenting / creating content; if you are doing this from scratch you'd need a HTML/JS developer or if its more interactive your dipping into WebGL, Canvas or beyond. There are other paid services like iSpring, Captivate and others that offer content creation with SCORM Standards support. They may even take care of the packaging for you (covered below).
Packaging -
This requires a zip (CAM content aggregated model) which includes a imsmanifest.xml file to describe a one to many relationship of a TOC. Again simple is 1, many begins to allow you to group tiers and add objectives and other things increasing complexity but doable.
You can perform creating this package with XML, Zip and specification knowledge. I have a Packaging app on my site and a Mac (free) applescript which can also perform very basic packaging. I am not away of any other free options.
Deployment
Commonly performed thru FTP/FileShare by uploading these CAM (zip) packages. LMS decompresses and reads the manifest. Sometimes you can just copy the raw files up to the LMS thru a media / content server but this greatly depends on the options.
I am a developer who has no experience working with CRM systems. I want to build a simple system using SuiteCRM. But I can't find a single tutorial for SuiteCRM in the internet. Believe me I spent several days searching for tutorials but I couldn't find. The official Userguides documentation is absolutely useless for development purposes. I found this book SuiteCRM For Developers but it is not suitable for a beginner. And it doesn't cover most of the basic stuff. Please suggest me a good tutorial(document/video) which covers topics such as creating custom entities(operations with custom entities), workflows and REST api.
If you're new to CRM world, as I was a couple of years ago, Id suggest doing the following:
Get a copy of SugarCRM for Dummies. It gives you an overview of the built in modules and functions of SugarCRM.
Watch how-to videos on SugarCRM for more in-depth details on particular modules.
Get a copy of SuiteCRM for Developers by Jim Mackin. This was a game changer for me. it's straight forward but breaks down the essentials of SuiteCRM.
From there, it's all about googling and practice. The more you play with the code, the more it starts making sense.
Welcome to world of CRM !!
First learn the flow of modules which are available in CRM and then go ahead with the development part. So I will suggest you to learn SugarCRM first. As coding standards and execution flow of SuiteCRM and SugarCRM is same.
Download SugarCRM CE
Install the CRM in your machine as described here
Once installed play with modules. Getting_Started SugarCRM
Take an overview on admin features of SugarCRM as described in detail here
Try to create new modules as per described here
I've been digging into some SUiteCRM work also lately, and the SugarCRM info is very helpful. The SuiteCRM forums have been getting some more traction lately.
https://suitecrm.com/forum/developer-help/10338-how-to-create-a-custom-module-from-scratch
I am also going to buy this book, looks like a great resource! https://leanpub.com/suitecrmfordevelopers
This book you mention (https://leanpub.com/suitecrmfordevelopers) is worth investing in. It's the right stuff in one place.
SugarCRM resources and references are ok, however, SuiteCRM and SugarCRM are gradually going in different directions. If you rely on forums and generic blogs, even SOF, the 'Sugar' solution not always maps to a suite-solution. It can be close, but that last 5% of difference can be a headache to work through.
Anyhow, that's my plug/recommendation for that book.
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.
I work in a shop that is mostly .NET based, and we're trying to pick out a content management system to use. This means we mostly likely won't be able to use any of the common open source CMS projects (Plone, phpNuke, anthing not based on .NET, etc.).
Since I'm a huge usability nerd (just finished reading The Design of Everyday Things by Norman), I've been looking at them from that point of view. Frankly, I haven't been too impressed. This quote sums it up:
Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. - Jeffrey Veen
Here's a short list of our requirements:
Has to be .NET based
Prefer open source or on the inexpensive side
Limited feature set (we don't need too many features and they make things harder to use)
Does need Active Directory integration and robust permissions
Should be focused on web standards and usability
I know it's probably an impossible feature list, but are there any content management systems that kinda sorta look like they might not suck more than a Dyson?
Edit:
Here's the current situation:
I'm going to push for N2. I've got Active Directory integration working well (I even wrote a custom role provider). The only thing missing is workflow functionality. Hopefully I can get something going with that since it's the last sticking point. The N2Contrib project might provide a starting point if I can figure it out.
I would still love to check out Stencil CMS if/when it gets off the ground.
One of my co-workers was trying to get Umbraco going but wasn't having much luck.
Thanks for the help!
Self-plug is lame, but what you're describing is pretty much exactly what I am getting ready to release for $79 a pop. If you're still looking in a few weeks, take a peek. If you'd like, shoot me an email (rex#stencilcms.com).
I've heard both positive and negative feedback about Umbraco. A lot of people like Graffiti, but it's more blog-oriented than a full-blown CMS.
Check out N2 (http://n2cms.com/). I think that it covers most, if not all, of your requirements (I don't think it has Active Directory capability at this time). We are using N2 and I have really enjoyed how flexible it has been.
My company just completed a review of several commercial .NET-based CMS/portal platforms and, while I can't reveal who was in them (thanks, NDAs!), I can tell you that IMO they all sucked very, very badly.
Good luck on your search. I'll keep an eye on this thread in the hopes that there's something we missed.
We had a similar set of requirements and chose Telerik Sitefinity. It's got it's faults but overall I've been happy with it so far.
Unfortunately Jeffery speaks the truth. Which is probably why I build a new custom cms from the ground up every few years. Basically, the motivation for "boxed" CMS packages is to have every feature on earth and be everything to everyone and therefore do nothing particularly well for anyone. With the feature bloat comes the usability nightmares. Unless you start customizing and then you usually end up forking the project and losing the advantage of community updates.
Kentico CMS according your list:
Has to be .NET based
It's .net based, .NET Framework 2.0 or later
Prefer open source or on the inexpensive side
Free edition which can be used for commercial purposes is available, paid license starts at $750, source code is an option
Limited feature set (we don't need too many features and they make things harder to use)
Many built-in modules/features, anyway they can be easily disabled to keep the UI simple to use
Does need Active Directory integration and robust permissions
AD, Forms and Live Id! Integration
Should be focused on web standards and usability
UTF-8 Support including RTL languages, WAI Compliant, XHTML Compliant, XML, XHTML, HTML, XSLT, CSS.
Instant on-line demo or download available at:
http://www.kentico.com/Download.aspx
I'm talking about some web thing like http://uservoice.com/
Can you suggest any other similar service, web-site or may be (even better) a ready engine for deployment on own server?
Actually, the question more about systems, which can be installed on your own server.
UseResponse, commercial (full sourcecode available on purchase), launching December 2011, with live demo available on USWebStyle website. Fully customizable (design, functionality).
Types of feedback (idea, problem, question, thanks), vote types (positive and/or negative) are adjustable.
Installable on any PHP 5.2/5.3 hosting environment.
TenderApp seems to have a lot of the same features, but it's also SaaS.
KBPublisher can be installed on your server.
By the way, most of these SaaS systems like UserVoice will let you forward your own domain/subdomain to their service and apply custom branding, so the experience to your end user is very similar to being on your actual site.