Enterprise without ECM

1. A search results in finding three or four documents with the same name, making it impossible to tell which is the correct version. This premise leads to the alarming statistic that 42% of employees accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week. Such mistakes can have a significant impact on a business.
2. Document has no version control. User cannot return to previous document versions even after a document has been modified and saved. Furthermore, more than one user may edit the same shared document at the same time causing data lost issue that can be resolved via locking facility.
3. Weak search capability. User is not able to find the document they are looking for in ease.
4. Weak protection. User may access the document they are not supposed to see as the access control is not sophisticated.
5. No workflow associated to the documents. Normally, you will create several folders like draft, review, authorized to simulate it.
6. No audit info like capturing who a document was authored by and when, who reviewed it and what comments were made and when, when was it approved and when was it made public.
7. Hard to access

The heart of ECM is the Document Model

1. Every document lives in a folder
2. Every document has different properties (meta-data).
3. Every document can be accessed by different users, groups or roles.
4. Every document may have comments about it or be in a different format for example PDF.
5. Every document has security.
6. Every document has a version control and audit around it
7. Every document can be logged.

That’s a basic document model and is what has to be managed in a document management system.

Alfresco - open source ECM

Now we all notice the benefit of ECM. Why hasn’t much companies adopted it? It is because traditional ECM is too complicated to use. That is the reason why Alfresco gets into the picture. To address this, Alfresco has the following features:

1. It makes its repository look like a share file drive. The Alfresco repository has a native CIFS (Common Internet File System) shared drive interface. This has been achieved using pure Java. This allows a user to literally go to their C: drive or desktop and drag-and-drop
   content into Alfresco, or they can simply select File/Save As. This is exactly like using a shared drive. Because of this a user can reuse their desktop and Microsoft Briefcase. They can even drag content out of Alfresco straight into the briefcase and it works because the Briefcase thinks it is accessing a Microsoft shared file drive.
2. It makes workflow easy to use on document.
3. It enables automatic meta-data extraction. If a user drags a Word document from their desktop into Alfresco, they can automatically extract the meta-data or properties. There may be content owner’s name and keywords or document titles and it can all be extracted without being retyped into Alfresco, enabling the user can search upon them at a future date.
4. Associate rule to trigger workflow. For example, when a document is dropped into a particular folder a workflow will be started to review it. This is all possible because the rules are stored and maintained at the server level.

Deployment Diagram

Architecture Overview

Alfresco is built on top of lots of open source solutions like spring, lucene, hibernate…