Month: December 2005

Alfresco and Plone comparison

Seth Gottlieb has posted a good Alfresco overview with a brief comparison to Plone. Seth concludes,

I would use Alfresco for a targeted document management solution that would fit into a larger enterprise content management architecture…I would use Plone to build an all-in-one intranet or extranet where I wanted to mix article, page, and file content and opportunistically deploy new features to improve collaboration and retention.

I agree with Seth’s conclusion and the point he makes in the article that the lack of LDAP integration in the community edition of Alfresco limits it to departmental use. I’m sure they’ll move that feature down at some point–when they do it should boost adoption.

Tried out Alfresco 1.1

I tried out the new release of Alfresco (1.1). They got the security stuff fixed–you can now secure spaces to specific users. I had to shake my head and chuckle a bit when I saw “Contributor” and “Coordinator” as user types. Those are also used for “capability” settings in Documentum.

I’m anxious to dig deeper but I’m too busy with end-of-year projects.

Downgrading from Documentum 5.3

I recently found myself billing at two different clients, each of whom use different versions of Documentum. I used VMWare to create a development environment for one client and used my laptop as the dev environment for the other.

When I created the VMWare image, rather than starting with a fresh, clean Windows image, I started with my “Documentum 5.3 Clients” image. I uninstalled everything, cleaned out the registry, deleted all directories, and re-booted.

All of the 5.2.5 software installed cleanly except for Documentum Application Builder. It was still seeing traces of the 5.3 components. I double-checked the registry and the file system and re-booted again but it still had the problem. Puzzling.

Luckily, support clued me in to the “vpd.properties” file. This file lives in the Windows or winnt directory and keeps track of the installed Documentum components. After uninstalling 5.3, you have to delete the lines that start with:

e2d8fde61467a0c5ba79004516db8af4|5|3|113

Yours may vary depending on the specific build you are running. In this case, I was running 5.3 build 113.