Alfresco Content Services Reviews & Product Details

This software is a solution to going paperless (if you have not already). It allows multiple users to access documents, and folders to be created to easily organize documents according to your needs. You can also send hyperlinks to others that will take them straight to the document in question. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's slow to load documents, and requires files to be renamed if you wish to search by file name. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's very extensible and capable, but it's a mighty ship. It requires a knowledgeable team to maintain and build upon. It's very powerful and robust, especially it's permission schemes and flexibility. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Our version is not mobile friendly, and it would be good if it had the ability to embed some content on a website. In a time when many apps are turning to a simpler, self-serve model for IT, Alfresco still has UX quirks that require training and maintenance to wrangle. For instance, it's possible to replace a PDF with a PowerPoint and effectively break the link to the document, without warning the used they are replacing one file type with another. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Solid back-end, useful for enterprise content management Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pretty slow installation and startup; patience required. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alfresco organizes your documents in a systematic way. It also allows you to keep track of all documents' versions and know the movement of documents. As long as you have internet access, you can access documents saved in your Alfresco system. You can also collaborate on them remotely. Since its also based on Open Source, you can easily integrate Alfresco with other systems and extend its capabilities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Interface could be more user friendly. They've already revamped it some months or almost a year back, but the interface can still feel a bit intimidating. Perhaps they could also improve the collaboration functionalities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I personally like how "sites" are setup not to be just a document repository but in my case as a project dashboard. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is not intuitive, showing a new person around is a challenge. It is also buggy in some ways like with rolling log files that build up on the HD. In one instance I have to manually remove them or the server locks up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the concept of everyone being in one cookie jar to work at once. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't like that only one document can be picked at once, and the more users in the biggest cookie jar makes it slow to load. I don't think that if someone takes your document, there's no way to take it back until they kick it out of their queue: Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is having Good Permission system and we can able to create user and groups for assigning permissions to the Document and content repositories and also supports 160 different extension's to upload and download the documents

The Best thing about the Alfresco is maintaining version of each change in documents . We can get the any revision when ever user wants.

We are using Alfresco Community Edition 5 in our office for managing and organizing all types of documents.

We can able to create sites w.r.t to the department specific in an organization.

We have integrated alfresco with Liferay for managing all types of documents.

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Some times facing problems while uploading files and documents

Facing Browser compatibility issues.

Lack of support for Community edition

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Easy access and communication to needed material. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes excessive notifications, but I believe this is part of the project not Alfresco. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It has very good document management system.

It provides customization.

It has both community and enterprise editions.

It provides integration with Liferay portal.

Easy to setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes document preview won't show up properly.

Sometimes we were unable to upload documents due to some browser compatibility.

Getting help for Community edition is difficult. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If you need a commercial ECM/Document Management system backed by a reasonably stable company, Alfresco is inexpensive compared to its competition, and somewhat more customizable, if you have enough budget to get a team of java developers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The APIs are incoherent. There's the RESTful API, the Surf API, and probably some others. You can't do everything with any of them, and it feels like some parts of the API were built by different people at different times, so when you have to try to cobble together a working application, you have to navigate this byzantine history. Worse, it's buggy, and we spent a lot of effort assuming we were doing something wrong, only to find out it was a known issue.

Ultimately, if you really want to customize the product, you need java skills and full time developers, which was out of budget for us.

I've followed the company since 2006, and watched them follow buzzword after buzzword (open source, cloud, social, etc), rather than listen to their customers' needs/pan points, or to solve real problems.

Their cloud offering is a sort of platypus: not really usable, but it lets them tick off the "cloud" buzzword in their marketing material.

Ultimately, the complexity Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My comments are restricted to the commercially supported version of this java based open source enterprise content management ECM platform.

Alfresco stands alone as the most versatile and powerful ECM solution available, running circles around dinosaurs Filenet (IBM) and Documentum (where most of the initial brain-trust came from) and exceeding relative newcomer Sharepoint (Microsoft) on most measures other than the "free" part. Sharepoint is free to get started with and very expensive to use and replace once you discover its shortcomings and eventually discover how Microsoft monetizes it...free from MicroSoft? You knew better.

On the easy low hanging fruit end, Alfresco can easily integrate with Exchange and replace you P drive, and in so doing instantly enable a full range of document disposition capabilities across a spectrum of content types. You may also choose to leverage Alfresco's UI or build your own, and you may build a solid enterprise search solution (Solr based) for use by employees, partners and customers, while leveraging roles based permission to fine tune access and privileges. Alfresco enables selective use of private and public cloud and offers their own Amazon based cloud solution with impressive security capabilities.

While it falls short of a full eDiscovery solution or records management solution, most business cases do not justify the initial or ongoing investment in Autonomy (HP), perhaps the only surviving albeit beleaguered player in that arena?

Regarding workflow, Alfresco literally hired the JBoss JBPM business process modeling team to rewrite it as “Activiti”, now in a more suitable license for OEM (LGPLv3). Activiti leverages the BPMN 2.0 standard, and while this all makes sense, I am not sure how much market uptake there has been...I really just don't know. Perhaps another reviewer can shed some light here? We successfully used Activiti to model and implement a multi-department workflow in support of a heavily regulated manufacturing materials change request process.

You can do a lot with Alfresco, some of it very easily, and some of it with much effort. The ECM space is a mess, and in general Alfresco has brought more sanity, but this is hard stuff so good luck. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alfresco's licensing discourages use of small "pieces" of its capability (see some of the above examples of projects). I much prefer to use the commercially supported versions of software like this, but the entry point is too high to justify the cost for anything but the more traditional ECM projects.

The cloud version is appealing but does not often fit either my client's technical model, or the arcane security governance policies of many large "old school" enterprises we serve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alfresco Community Edition makes it easy to prototype and evaluate the viability of implementing it within an existing business. Being heavily-based on FOSS/frameworks makes it easy to use existing knowledge, which speeds up the time-to-market and makes it easier to attract developers than a closed, proprietary platform.

Official support is quick to respond, but the community around Alfresco has created a nice network to leverage if you ever get stuck. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There's not a lot I dislike about Alfresco, especially when compared to some of the other offerings out there. It may be a little overly complicated for smaller businesses, but great for mid- to larger-sized businesses. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to use interface that makes new learning really quick and easy. Some customization such as workflows can be easily integrated depending on customization level. The customer support is awesome, and my current company also goes through a third party company that called Formtek that supports and helps us with our software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike how it is so hard to find various information on the internet about Alfresco. If it is a bug that occurs more than likely it will take a lot of digging, searching around, and trial and error to resolve the issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For the most part if you want to do CMS and are willing to let Alfresco handle everything it's a lot like integrating with SalesForce. You can easily use the tools to build the profiles and stores with access rights quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The CMIS specification was only partially implemented with the version of Alfresco we used, the available library was so minimal as to be useless. If you don't pay for the "pro" version getting help with actual bugs in the software was near impossible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alfresco is open source based on Java is a best thing about it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alfresco is still maturing in its base API stability. It has bugs in it and I hope its catching-up with every new software release. Its integration with Eclipse IDE and other freemarker technologies that it uses internally should be improved.

Activity workflow integration with Eclipse IDE or Spring STS has lot of scope for improvement that can cut down developement efforts time-lines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I used Alfresco while working for an IT consulting company. Our cluster was responsible for commercial account and we used Alfresco to manage documents and presentation. As a Business Intelligence intern I was responsible for gathering research documents and analysis and seeding it via Alfresco. The system is very user-friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

At the time it was not able to integrate with other software such as ERPs or CRMs. Not sure if this is still the case. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If you are running enterprise software or running a website catering to several millions of users daily, then Alfresco is a capable and flexible enough to handle the heavy load. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's a bit of a big learning curve for new users. Not the easiest system to perform software testing from my experiences though a barebones open-source platform was being used. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the ease of use with Alfresco. I was an Alfresco administrator in the IT department where I work. Getting people provisioned for use with Alfresco is quick and easy from the IT side. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the things that I was not too crazy about was moving data around. On rare occasion we had experienced issues with the unc paths and some strange connectivity issues that in fairness may not have even been related to Alfresco. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the open nature of the Alfresco product. Organizations can expand the product in almost unimaginable ways. It was a great fit for for my team since Alfresco is built on the top J2EE platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Definite high steep learning curve due to product complexity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Open source and open standards approach provides for a great way to get value from the platform. Very competitive with Enterprise Edition to the legacy vendors you may have worked with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The product is slow to mature, even the open source nature. The use of Open Source is merely marketing and lead generation tactic rather than a true open source development model for community driven core contributions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Open source.

Ability to build custom solutions/applications that work with Alfresco.

Strong support in the Alfresco community.

Flexible enterprise content management.

Ability to define meta data.

Integration with other tools like enterprise search. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I worked with Alfresco nearly 2 years ago and I would have liked it to be more business friendly out of the box. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

its platform independent, fast to integrate, SOAP service option also comes in handy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Does not support workflow well, missing taxonomies and tags Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We had a custom user interface built on top of alfresco CMS. Alfresco as such is good for content management, but not used OOB interface. User access management is super easy and the best part. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Mobile content management is missing. May be newer versions have it, but not the version I used since 3 years. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is not much that I liked about this product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The code is very complicated. There are no easy ways to "upgrade". You have to basically start over so any custom code you have has to be deployed after the upgrade. Any small errors take the whole system down. I worked for a very high profile broker dealer that depended largely on Alfresco for content. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The completeness of the offering. The rich versioning and the vast ecosystem. The Java APIs are quite good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ramp up is not small, but it's not too bad and it approachable in pieces. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.