I agree with you usability points regarding Alfresco. Any application that seeks to be an alternative to email (which is today’s most prevalent app for document sharing and collaboration) has to be as easy or easier to use than email. Alfresco has a long way to go on that front.

Is Alfresco harder to use than Sharepoint? I’m not qualified to say because I’m not a Sharepoint user.

What gives me comfort, though, is that when we implement solutions for clients, I’m confident that we can address the usability shortcomings, either through tweaking the existing client or by implementing a custom client, much more easily with Alfresco than we can with Sharepoint. That’s because there are so many more options with regard to the technologies we can work with on the front end and the general openness of the underlying repository.

I don’t mean to deflect the thrust of your post, though. Alfresco definitely needs to spend some time on usability. I’m hoping 3.0 will see vast improvements in this area.

Jeff

Most of the comparison points I am seeing between Alfresco and Sharepoint are technical in nature. This is fine and does apeal to technical peopleé

The fact is end user and NOT technical, adoption is the key to a sucessful ECM and this is why Sharepoint is so prevalent.

I am now evaluating Alfresco for a large FI and the one thing that is just glaringly wrong with it is the fact it is not user friendly, even though it looks simple it has a strong smell of Interwoven and Documentum (I have experience in large deployments with both adn user adoption has always been the weak spot) the concepts are the same as the legacy products the founders came from.

I think that this is where the battle will be won, if Alfreso want to stay alive they must adress this ASAP. Object size, performance are all nice but if users do not want to use it, they will fail.

My 2 cents.

I have to say, I winced at in-context editing. I have seen Documentum try and fail over and over to get this to work. It is notoriously difficult to implement for anything beyond simple websites.

Hope they find a good way of doing this.

Yes, additional details would be helpful and should be forthcoming. Enjoy Paris. If you get any further detail on the benchmark, feel free to post it here.

Jeff

Looking forward for any details in Paris

The office integration is available from 2.1 version, and the documentation is available here : http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Microsoft_Office

As for size limitation, Alfresco stores its content to filesystem to avoid DBMS bottlenecks. The total size limits is the available storage space.

I’m looking forward to the Paris meeting next week !

There are no size limitations that I’m aware of. And you can stream things like video into and out of the repository.

There also doesn’t appear to be any theoretical limit on the total size of the store.

I would be really surprised if Alfresco could top SharePoint’s integration with Office 2007, so it will be interesting to see it in action.

As for object scaling, does Alfresco have object size limitations? SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server so is limited to a max object size of 2 GB. This is not a big deal for most people, but I have run into one case where this caused problems.