Preface

For the past 13 years at CIGNEX Datamatics, our focus has been on proving value to our customers using open source alternatives to the commercial CMS products. We talk to customers who have done multi-million dollar implementations of proprietary software, and faced all kinds of challenges, including vendor lock-in, rigid code base, and expensive upgrades.

Alfresco 4 offers a true Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system by providing an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, and FileNet. Everyday, over seven million business users in 75 countries rely on Alfresco to manage four billion documents, files, and processes—behind the firewall, in the cloud, and even on their mobile devices (as per the information listed on Alfresco's website, www.alfresco.com). It is the most popular Java-based CMS with over 25,000 active forum users and with more than 300 application extensions in forge. And most importantly, it is created using completely open standards. This excited us a lot, and we started implementing Alfresco since 2006. We have trained many users, administrators, and developers in Alfresco. This book distils the hands-on approach of our training courses into a concise, practical book.

This book focuses on business needs rather than technical syntaxes. We start by showing you how to do something—a step-by-step example. We explain how that process works. Then, we explain what other options are available, and how they fit into the overall picture. We hope this helps you "generalize" from such examples. We hope that you take advantage of this book by setting up a flexible enterprise content management system for your company and customers.

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