http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2007/02/08/738 Jeff Potts on ECM, portals, search, collaboration, and a bunch of personal stuff Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:25:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2007/02/08/738/comment-page-1#comment-1753 ecmarchitect.com » Book review: Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Thu, 22 Feb 2007 02:43:33 +0000 http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2007/02/08/738#comment-1753 [...] I’ve recently finished the new Alfresco book. The bottom-line on this book is this: End-users evaluating or learning to use Alfresco may find the book helpful. Most chapters are aimed at teaching people how to work with the web client. For this audience, the book does a pretty good job of presenting a logical progression through the product. Although most of the information in the book is readily available through the Alfresco wiki, forums, demos, and documentation, the book pulls it together in a hassle-free, portable format. Technical users, however, will be disappointed. If you want technical depth this book isn’t for you. Before you shell out the $60 you really need to consider what kind of information you are looking for. You may ultimately be better off surfing blogs, forums, and wikis. When I originally saw the announcement for the book, I was excited. Shelf space is one datapoint that can be used to measure technology adoption and maturity. More specifically, I was hoping the book would be a one stop shop for business users as well as technical users–sort of an Alfresco Unleashed. But as the preface clearly states, “This book is not targeted at developers who want to change the core code structure of Alfresco.” I don’t necessarily want to change the “core code structure,” but I do want to implement, customize, and extend Alfresco for my clients. In that respect my expectations  for the book turned out to be way too high. For now, at least, from a technical publication standpoint, Alfresco has yet to be “Unleashed” or “Exposed”. Workflow is an example where the book could have gone into much more depth, particularly with the introduction of the JBPM integration in release 1.4. But the chapter on workflow focuses almost exclusively on the simple folder-based workflow functionality. Although there is a section on advanced workflow using JBPM, it only skims the surface by providing the steps one goes through to define an advanced workflow. It does this at such a high level it really provides little value other than to inform the reader that there’s such a thing as advanced workflow. [...] [...] I’ve recently finished the new Alfresco book. The bottom-line on this book is this: End-users evaluating or learning to use Alfresco may find the book helpful. Most chapters are aimed at teaching people how to work with the web client. For this audience, the book does a pretty good job of presenting a logical progression through the product. Although most of the information in the book is readily available through the Alfresco wiki, forums, demos, and documentation, the book pulls it together in a hassle-free, portable format. Technical users, however, will be disappointed. If you want technical depth this book isn’t for you. Before you shell out the $60 you really need to consider what kind of information you are looking for. You may ultimately be better off surfing blogs, forums, and wikis. When I originally saw the announcement for the book, I was excited. Shelf space is one datapoint that can be used to measure technology adoption and maturity. More specifically, I was hoping the book would be a one stop shop for business users as well as technical users–sort of an Alfresco Unleashed. But as the preface clearly states, “This book is not targeted at developers who want to change the core code structure of Alfresco.” I don’t necessarily want to change the “core code structure,” but I do want to implement, customize, and extend Alfresco for my clients. In that respect my expectations  for the book turned out to be way too high. For now, at least, from a technical publication standpoint, Alfresco has yet to be “Unleashed” or “Exposed”. Workflow is an example where the book could have gone into much more depth, particularly with the introduction of the JBPM integration in release 1.4. But the chapter on workflow focuses almost exclusively on the simple folder-based workflow functionality. Although there is a section on advanced workflow using JBPM, it only skims the surface by providing the steps one goes through to define an advanced workflow. It does this at such a high level it really provides little value other than to inform the reader that there’s such a thing as advanced workflow. [...]

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