The Alfresco forums need your help

I was looking at the “unanswered posts” view in the Alfresco Forums today and was surprised to see it was 40 pages long. I know the growing list of unanswered posts has been a problem for quite a while because Nancy Garrity has mentioned it multiple times and I don’t know what the high water mark is for unanswered posts but 40 pages seems bad.

I admit that I haven’t been answering questions in the forums as often as I’d like and that’s bad too. So I took some time today to answer a few. You should do the same. Why should Russ Danner (503 posts) have all the fun?

Maybe instead of “follow fridays” on Twitter we should encourage “forum fridays” amongst the Alfresco community.

15 comments

  1. Seth says:

    Hey, I try to get onto the Workflow forum as often as possible. There are quite a few questions to answer out there though. Start the revolution, Jeff.

  2. Brett Berdine says:

    As someone who is trying to learn Alfresco you just hit upon one of my major frustrations. There is so much to this system and when I go to the forums to learn either there are no answers or the solutions are so complex that I cannot digest what they are saying. The wiki is good but a lot of the info in it is for the older versions

  3. David Bullock says:

    Just to be a bit contrary, do you think the new revolution might be better served by taking each enquiry and thinking “what is the documentation or patch which could to be written to prevent this question arising again”?

    On a related note, ought not the community be using Alfresco Share to collaborate on the content which comprises the wiki?

  4. delalande says:

    You are absolutely right, Jeff.
    I’ve been doing my best for a few weeks to help people on the forums.

    Btw, you’ve made excellent job with these “Developer Series”, thanks a lot !

  5. jpotts says:

    David,

    There’s no doubt that in many cases, questions that are brought up that should result in a wiki update or a JIRA ticket, so you make a valid point. It is great when forum members can go the extra mile and make those changes on the wiki and submit JIRA tickets when they are appropriate.

    Regarding Share, Alfresco has started to use Surf (the framework Share is built with) for its own stuff. The Enterprise Network site (http://network.alfresco.com) is an example. It’ll be interesting to see when/if Alfresco migrates its current forums to Share-powered forums.

    Jeff

  6. g1soori says:

    I have deployed alresco war bundle on jboss in RHEL5.
    Everything run well.
    I created a advanced workflow as login by administrator.
    And users assigned to each space. When user log in and try to execute workflow, flollowing error occurs..
    any help is highli appreciated

    “Failed to reject the document due to system error: 07100009 Access Denied. You do not have the appropriate permissions to perform this operation.”

  7. jpotts says:

    g1soori,

    Do you mean that the users cannot start the workflow at all or they can start the workflow but cannot move the workflow forward?

    If it is the latter, what logic do you have in the workflow? Are you taking actions against the documents in the workflow? If so, does the user managing the workflow task have the appropriate permissions on those documents?

    Things to try:
    – Are there any users at all that can successfully execute the workflow? If so, what’s different about those users when compared to the users who are not successful?
    – Can admin? If admin can but the other users cannot, try giving the users Coordinator access. If that works, you know it is a permissions problem.

    If no one (not even admin) can successfully execute the workflow, you’ve got a problem in the workflow somewhere. Use the debugger (both Eclipse and Rhino JavaScript) to resolve.

    Good luck,

    Jeff

  8. Yazid says:

    As a developer, i have worked lately on Alfresco community version, and i am facing big difficulties in answering my questions on the forums, in addition to difficult to understand WIKI, my added Bugs to the Jira stay for a long time without fixes!

    i had the intention to be specialized in Alfresco, and add it to the technical culture in my country, Jordan, but this needs a convenient community solution, so that people adopt the Enterprise one, if things continue like this, i would look for another solution as a DMS!

  9. jpotts says:

    Hello, Yazid. Yes, forum responsiveness is something our community is working on. According to this year’s community survey, 55% of people have received responses that were somewhat helpful, exactly what they were looking for, or exceeding expectations. A little over 10% received a response that wasn’t helpful. About 34% never saw a response.

    Yes, the organization of the wiki can be chaotic. The wiki is maintained by the community, so if you’d like to help organize it, please do. At our Developer Conference last week I met some others who are also interested in making this better. By the way, if you are looking for documentation, an additional resource to consider is http://docs.alfresco.com. It isn’t as deep as the wiki in many respects, but depending on what you are looking for, it might work better for you.

    Jira is something that the Engineers have been focusing on even more lately. They have been working towards a goal of having every issue dealt with in some way (fix, mark as won’t fix, identify as not a problem, etc.). So ongoing work is taking place there.

    I’m glad you are evaluating Alfresco as something to specialize in. It is a hot technology and because we’re based on standard frameworks and libraries, the skills you learn will be applicable even to your non-Alfresco projects.

    We both agree that Community Edition is an important gateway to Enterprise Edition and that if people are frustrated with Community, they may move on to some other technology and never become and Enterprise user.

    Thanks for the comment and I hope that, rather than getting frustrated and leaving, you’ll stick around long enough to get engaged and help work on some of these issues to make it better for the next person that comes along.

    Jeff

  10. Matt says:

    Downloaded the free 30 day trial and installed it on a Windows 2012 R2 VM port :8080.
    I have IIS hosting a website on port 80.
    I am able to access my IIS site from my host PC however im not able to access the Alfresco site.

  11. Jeff Potts says:

    You will have to look in the log under $TOMCAT_HOME/logs/catalina.out to see what the problem is. If the error listed there does not make it immediately obvious, please post something in the forums with as much information as you can provide and someone will help you.

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