Hopefully, this chapter has given you several ideas about how Alfresco can be used to implement Document Management, Web Content Management, and custom content-centric applications by walking through examples of each. The details may still be fuzzy, but the goal was to introduce the major components and capabilities of the Alfresco platform.
The key points covered in this chapter were:
Alfresco can be used to solve a variety of content-related business problems from document management to web content management to workflow and collaboration.
Throughout the rest of the book you'll customize and extend Alfresco to meet the needs of SomeCo, a fictitious consulting firm.
Alfresco is assembled with open source components, runs as a web application within an application server, and exposes the repository through many different protocols and APIs.
Alfresco can be customized. Some types of customization are very basic (more configuration than customization) and can be performed by end users through the web client. Others are more advanced and require coding. The advanced customizations are the subject of this book.
The most common tools used to extend the platform are Java, JavaScript, FreeMarker, and XML.
The two flavors or editions of Alfresco—Labs and Enterprise—are somewhat analogous to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Labs is "daily build", primarily for developers and experimentation while Enterprise is for production systems.