When you work for a while in the software you get numbed to “technologies have come and gone…” occasionally though some become commodities and others trend setters. We have seen that with many products like Apache, Tomcat, Lucene, Drupal …etc that have stabilized and matured over the past years with the help of increased development from the open source realm. Wait! Did I mention the word “Open Source” and going to talk about the enterprise content management?

So without any more ado, we have Alfresco- catering to a rapidly increasing demand of the enterprise content management solutions which is built over the open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, and Lucene platforms. Having done years of Documentum development and several Alfresco projects of late, I think there are some interesting overlaps and differences of approach that I feel would make the developers get adapted quicker.

With the wiki site overwhelmed with Introduction, API’s, Development, Deployment and the Forums to answer all the questions regarding the issues faced during the project phase, I am here to talk purely from the developers perspective on what’s the key areas that I happen to witness the difference from the Documentum space.

The road map for my next series of blog is going to cover each of the areas mentioned below in more detailed, code abundant and developer centric approach which will answer the questions:

• Does this feature exist in Documentum or Alfresco or both?
• If yes, how different is the approach?

So with that preamble, and in no particular order, I give you my list of the key areas I got hands on and learnt how different Alfresco is:

• Aspects

Custom data model is the core for any enterprise content management solution. The use of “Aspects” as its core is the fundamental concept for content modeling in Alfresco. Although in the form D6, aspects was introduced, how different is the use and approach in Alfresco is something I will take a deep dive in my next blog.

• Web Scripts

Alfresco Web Scripts brings together the world of content repository and the web. Being a Documentum developer earlier ways of interaction with the repository have been either using DFC API’s or DQL. In Alfresco, Web Scripts provide RESTful access to content within the repository and we can build our own interface using java script. A custom move operation is implemented using the Web Scripts and the comparison of the implementation with the Documentum would be a something to be noted.

• Integration

On my last project, we had requirements for the customers to be able to permanently redact Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from existing documents stored in the repository and version the original document upon save. For various reasons, we decided to integrate the 3^rd party tool Daeja ViewOne module to provide this capability. I will discuss the topic as part of this blog series.

I started this series based on my experience implementing Alfresco projects and I invite you to share any of your experiences with any part of the road map wherein you run into interesting twists and turns? Did you drive off the road to get some help? I welcome your feedback as the blog takes its shape. See you all soon in Take 2.