JDPFu.com 2025

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, there were a few Alfresco Meetups in Atlanta that I attended.

Tuesday was just a few hours to begin the organization of the informal group. Wednesday was an all day event with sponsors, presentations, and vendors. For what each of these were, they were well organized and cut to the core for experienced Alfresco users and developers.

My main takeaways were:

1. There is no upgrade path from v2.9b —> v3.×. v2.9x was a dead development tree.
2. If you aren’t a paid, enterprise customer and elect to use the 1 or 2 suggested community edition releases, you are on your own. Sometimes the company chooses to drop community releases. When I asked for suggestions to ensure we weren’t caught again with no upgrade path, there was no answer, just silence.
3. Alfresco is a Java Application running on Tomcat (by default). It is just a normal Tomcat app, so if you want to customize it, you’ll be best served by Java development. Some fairly trivial view modifications may be possible with view changes using the template engine that Alfresco uses. However, I’d never heard of this markup – must be a java thing.
4. Alfresco is an impressive OSS product that competes with many commercial applications that charge $50K – $1.5M for deployment licenses, They make money by selling enterprise licenses and providing support contracts. Deployments are usually performed (98% of the time) by VARs. This means they need to concentrate on supporting paid customers and may trial different techniques on the Community Edition. Sometimes it isn’t very stable and sometimes core functions are broken in the community edition.
5. Most of the attendees were using the enterprise version or were VARs who, by contract, were only allowed to deploy the enterprise version. If you are an Alfresco Partner, I understand you cannot support the community edition for your customers.
6. If you deploy Alfresco, think of it as a content container back end, not a complete solution unless everything you see out of the box is exactly what you want. Almost every user of the tool creates customizations for their environment.
7. CMIS is an emerging standard for communicating with ECM, DMS, WCM systems. A number of vendors have signed up. Alfresco is saying it is like SQL for content management systems. Both RESTful and WSDL interfaces are provided with this standard and it should allow customized front ends to communicate using a standard language to CMS back ends regardless of vendor. EMC, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Alfresco were listed as backers.
8. The Alfresco folks were really nice, but couldn’t really help me. This community appears to be made up of folks that do ECM for their primary jobs and not just 1/20th of their responsibilities like me.
9. Alfresco is an extremely capable platform, mainly suitable for normal DMS requirements. Less so for WCM based on the Best Practices session. The BPM parts appear to be very powerful, but only when you customize with Java.

I plan to stay 1 revision behind the currently recommended Alfresco release. So, right now, v3.2r is recommended. That means I’ll be re-deploying v3.1 when I get around to dropping the current install and re-importing.

I was in way over my head with all levels of the conversation. The terms used were Alfresco and java specific, neither of those are my skill set. What I need is a newcomers’ introduction to Alfresco, Best Practices for the FOSS version, and how to determine when it is time to pay for the enterprise supported version.

I wrote this summary quickly as a dump when I got home and didn’t proof it. Some of it could be inaccurate to what actually happened. I am prone to selective memory when I’m frustrated.