Slashdot Mirror

There are already tools to detect that, at least some of them are FOSS:
https://www.alfresco.com/blogs...

For example this one is open source:
https://coreos.com/blog/vulner...

Livelink
Alfresco

If your company/country wants to create its own private cloud storage, here is the fast way:

1) Set up an Alfresco server on Linux. Enterprise-class, scalable, very customizable.
2) Have users install CmisSync, it looks like a Dropbox client, but syncs with Alfresco (or any other CMIS-compliant server).

You are stating that you need a secure data solution under ITAR, keeping your cloud based data within the USA. Alfresco Enterprise http://www.alfresco.com/ would be a solution, since you can limit what data is being handled by your users via the web, mobile or PC via role based management using Alfresco Share. Developer tools for Alfresco allows you create custom plugins, if one does not exist at the moment, have your developer team create a custom plugin to meet those requirements (say, ITAR??). And it works with either Windows or Linux. Data inside your firewall is kept secure on both sides of the firewall. Will probably catch hell for even suggesting this for your organization.

I use the community edition of Alfresco for that task.
You can tag all documents, add custom fields and have full text search and versioning out of the box. Documents can be accessed via web interface, smb, ftp and even imap.

Alfresco is great and all, but it seems a bit heavy for a home use scenario and it doesn't handle or automate the scanning tagging aspect of things either. He's looking for a lot more than a DMS.

I use the community edition of Alfresco for that task. You can tag all documents, add custom fields and have full text search and versioning out of the box. Documents can be accessed via web interface, smb, ftp and even imap.

This is actually the perfect place to incubate distributed object stores (e.g. Hadoop on one end, something like Zimbra on the other). One namespace .gov, with sub-namespaces. With a CMIS interface. Anyone see VMWare Project Octopus yet? Well, take that times 10,000 and you have a pretty nice records management system, platform independent. There's also Alfresco which is using the JCR spec which I believe can be moved to some type of distributed backend. But it implements CMIS, has a DoD spec records management system.. So the general spec would be a CMIS framework, each department/branch/whatever makes available a service for document retrieval, central .gov listing of the services, basically what Amazon does for literally everything it does. Do not compromise, executive order Jeff Bezos style, everything is a service with a public interface. I think it is possible, but it would take a lot of just plain buying in and our government (the bureaucratic, non-political side) has gotten really really good at dragging their feet and doing nothing. The cuts are coming though, and they will have to improve efficiency just like we all have in the private sector. Of course Defense is the worst, but education can use some work as well.

Alfresco Community Edition:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_and_Install_Alfresco

Definitely take a look at the Alfresco Community Edition, which is free but without support: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_and_Install_Alfresco
Just install it and try it out, it's an easy install and quick to learn, but full of the options used in enterprise document management systems that you can master when you need them. We use the Share interface to manage the documents in each of our projects.

Perhaps this would have been a better wiki page for me to link to then?

The review was probably written and edited by the morons at Packt, therefore most useful information is overlooked.

Nope, seems to be Johnny Gee who was asked to review it by Packt. Not a bad thing, I've been asked to review things for Slashdot and have, at times, refused because the book was garbage. Right now I'm fiddling with an Arduino and a couple XBee Pros in order to review a book for O'Reilly. It's a good book but the Arduino is proving to be too fun to fiddle with so I'm having a hard time getting around to the review.

I am a little confused as to why Johnny gave the book 8/10 here on Slashdot but 5/5 stars on Amazon with a similar worded review. Does he add a Slashdot bias to his scores here?

I myself take a lot of heat when I review a book that has content which is already available online and I would have to question what this book offers in addition to Wiki information and the nicely formatted guides and manuals. I also downloaded the code examples from Packt and found a couple spreadsheets and a very sparse tomcat file tree. Wish the reviewer would have commented on this stuff.

As a QA engineer, I only use Office 95% of the time really :) Remember, my work is to produce ISO-9001 documents, which doesn't require much more than a word processor.
Now of course, we have a content management tool to organize all the junk we produce (we use Alfresco), and other services like QM, purchasing, marketing, R&D and production all have specialized software to carry out their work, but I can't tell you which because my employer forbids me to.

Have you considered Alfresco?

Full disclosure: I am an Alfresco SI partner. Alfresco is actually a SharePoint server and it has an open source version and a fully supported version. If you like what SharePoint does but don't like MS, give Alfresco a try. In addition Alfresco supports the draft CMIS which should allow it to interoperate with other DMS should you choose to swap out the back end.

Others have talked about Documentum and other open source systems, I spent 6 months looking at systems like Nuxio, Hippo, basically all the big open source players. Alfresco is by far the best supported and easiest to customize. Out of the box, the interface isn't pretty, but it is usable. They have a collaboration tool and a traditional ECM interface (both browser based). If you are looking at closed source systems, Alfresco beats them all on price hands down. Documentum can cost 7 figures with customization and it is very difficult to use. There is a whitepaper here on total cost of ownership: http://www.alfresco.com/products/whitepapers/.

Oh and Alfresco is extremley scalable. SharePoint does not do delta's with versioning, so you change some metadata on an 80 MB PDF file and you now are using 160 MB. SharePoint becomes pretty unusable before you hit 100K docs in the repository. Alfresco can handle 100 million docs and still be very usable.

I would second the idea of looking into alfresco. I have not used it.
However, what it will do for you is that it will make sure that you can be using a common file system with revision control. So what would happen is that you would allow your users to network mount the alfresco filesystem across the firm. Users would read and save files to this filesystem. Anytime, it is saved, versions are created.

Alfresco Documents

Also, it does handle signatures with the plugin from http://www.viafirma.org/ (note, that is in spanish but works fine with google translate) http://viafirma.googlecode.com/svn/

Those saying stop working on this and hire people are thinking that you have a large firm. That is not really a great option.
What I would recommend is that you do setup single signon if you can.
The first start is to have an LDAP server.
ActiveDirectory does provide that. If you want to provide kerberos/active directory and ldap there are open source solutions.

• The way to technical solution is: http://freeipa.org/page/Samba_4_Installation
• Note: some of this can be done with: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/393283
• The no to technical solution might be: http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html

...but I assume in your case you should probably have a look at something backed by a commercial company which will take the hassle to certify the system and your workflows. Have a look at Alfresco (alfresco.com) which already has some certifications (e.g. http://www.alfresco.com/media/releases/2009/10/records-management/).

I have been looking at http://www.alfresco.com./ Looks like it will be included in Ubuntu soon.

Alfresco takes what is essentially an unstable snapshot of the publicly available and GPL'd Community Edition, branches it into a private source repository, stabilizes that private codebase, and makes stable point releases of the commercially licensed Enterprise Edition from that. Sure, fixes from Enterprise Edition are eventually rolled back into the unstable Community Edition trunk, but there is never a stable point release made for the GPL licensed Community Edition. So, if our company wants open source (ie GPL) code for all the products we use in production, we can't get it from Alfresco!

Alfresco partner companies are banned from providing services to clients against the open source Community Edition.

If I fix a critical bug by patching the code for my licensed copy of Enterprise Edition, then I can no longer receive support from Alfresco for the product.

If I try to take part in the open source community and send patches for the product upstream to Alfresco, they either languish untouched:

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETWOTWO-1125
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-2810
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3301

Or are just flat out closed with no reason given (despite being obvious problems):

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3308

So, it seems to me Mr Asay, that although you really like to talk the talk, and although you might just meet the basic legal requirements to qualify as Open Source, when it comes to the spirit and community surrounding Free Software, I don't think you really understand how to walk the walk?

Alfresco takes what is essentially an unstable snapshot of the publicly available and GPL'd Community Edition, branches it into a private source repository, stabilizes that private codebase, and makes stable point releases of the commercially licensed Enterprise Edition from that. Sure, fixes from Enterprise Edition are eventually rolled back into the unstable Community Edition trunk, but there is never a stable point release made for the GPL licensed Community Edition. So, if our company wants open source (ie GPL) code for all the products we use in production, we can't get it from Alfresco!

Alfresco partner companies are banned from providing services to clients against the open source Community Edition.

If I fix a critical bug by patching the code for my licensed copy of Enterprise Edition, then I can no longer receive support from Alfresco for the product.

If I try to take part in the open source community and send patches for the product upstream to Alfresco, they either languish untouched:

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETWOTWO-1125
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-2810
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3301

Or are just flat out closed with no reason given (despite being obvious problems):

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3308

So, it seems to me Mr Asay, that although you really like to talk the talk, and although you might just meet the basic legal requirements to qualify as Open Source, when it comes to the spirit and community surrounding Free Software, I don't think you really understand how to walk the walk?

Alfresco takes what is essentially an unstable snapshot of the publicly available and GPL'd Community Edition, branches it into a private source repository, stabilizes that private codebase, and makes stable point releases of the commercially licensed Enterprise Edition from that. Sure, fixes from Enterprise Edition are eventually rolled back into the unstable Community Edition trunk, but there is never a stable point release made for the GPL licensed Community Edition. So, if our company wants open source (ie GPL) code for all the products we use in production, we can't get it from Alfresco!

Alfresco partner companies are banned from providing services to clients against the open source Community Edition.

If I fix a critical bug by patching the code for my licensed copy of Enterprise Edition, then I can no longer receive support from Alfresco for the product.

If I try to take part in the open source community and send patches for the product upstream to Alfresco, they either languish untouched:

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETWOTWO-1125
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-2810
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3301

Or are just flat out closed with no reason given (despite being obvious problems):

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3308

So, it seems to me Mr Asay, that although you really like to talk the talk, and although you might just meet the basic legal requirements to qualify as Open Source, when it comes to the spirit and community surrounding Free Software, I don't think you really understand how to walk the walk?

Alfresco takes what is essentially an unstable snapshot of the publicly available and GPL'd Community Edition, branches it into a private source repository, stabilizes that private codebase, and makes stable point releases of the commercially licensed Enterprise Edition from that. Sure, fixes from Enterprise Edition are eventually rolled back into the unstable Community Edition trunk, but there is never a stable point release made for the GPL licensed Community Edition. So, if our company wants open source (ie GPL) code for all the products we use in production, we can't get it from Alfresco!

Alfresco partner companies are banned from providing services to clients against the open source Community Edition.

If I fix a critical bug by patching the code for my licensed copy of Enterprise Edition, then I can no longer receive support from Alfresco for the product.

If I try to take part in the open source community and send patches for the product upstream to Alfresco, they either languish untouched:

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETWOTWO-1125
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-2810
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3301

Or are just flat out closed with no reason given (despite being obvious problems):

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3308

So, it seems to me Mr Asay, that although you really like to talk the talk, and although you might just meet the basic legal requirements to qualify as Open Source, when it comes to the spirit and community surrounding Free Software, I don't think you really understand how to walk the walk?

Are you trying to index all files, or just documents, or what? If you are trying to cheap out on indexing documents, I highly recommend Alfresco

I know a bit about SharePoint (they've inflicted it on us at work) and as far as I can tell, the best alternative to SharePoint is Not Using SharePoint. Everything beyond that is basically gravy.

There's always this: http://www.alfresco.com/ though I haven't looked at it in a few years, so I can't really comment on how good it is.

You mean the Document Management Alfresco and not the CMS software. The Community Edition is free but unsupported, and the Enterprise edition has a free 30 day trial. It looks like it won a government award for document management which is rare for open source document management software.

Yes, Google's Search Appliance (GSA) could be used, I have seen it used with limited success. The main problem was how to respect access control on documents: either you index them or you don't, and if you index them with GSA, sensitive data may show up in search results. Also, we had a lot of trouble "taming" GSA: it would regularly take down servers that were dimensioned for light loads.

I would suggest using Alfresco http://www.alfresco.com/ as a CIFS (Common Internet File System) or WebDav store for all those documents. This would give you the simplicity of a shared folder and the opportunity to enrich the documents with searchable metadata such as tags, etc. Each folder (or any item, in fact) could have the correct access control that would be respected by the search engine, Lucene. http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/

Alfresco comes in both Enterprise and Community Edition, it's very easy to try out -- even our non-techie project manager could install it on his PC within 10 minutes. Try that with Documentum, FileNet or IBM DB2 Content Manager!

It's also a protocol that enables the collaboration features in MS Office products. Alfresco is an open-source (Java) based application that implements the sharepoint protocol and additionally implements document management (version control, metadata, etc), and it's pretty cool. It's sort of like Google Docs, where you have a little chat box on the side.

If you look at deploying MS-Sharepoint, you'll find that you need to have MS-ActiveDirectory, and hence, MS-Windows PCs and CALs. Sharepoint deployments are usually $25K+ for anything beyond a trivial lab deployment.

OTOH, http://www.alfresco.com/ provides similar DMS and CMS capabilities. You can use the free version very easily or pay a $3k for support. It can connect to any LDAP for authentication and authorization. There are no CALs. Alfresco was created by former EMC/Documentum people - they understand document management.

I'm just a CIO that deployed the free Alfresco in our company over a year ago. Besides that, I have no other affiliation.

O3Spaces

Lenya

SugardCRM

Alfresco

Main pyrus

Nuxeo

Some of the suggestions above says that you should just chuck everything haphazardly into a big pile and then use search engines to trawl the whole mess. I don't buy that. Instead, (like some others) I'd suggest a proper content management system such as the ones from http://www.alfresco.com/, http://www.interwoven.com/ or http://www.hummingbird.com/.

The reason for this suggestion is that I know that these systems are being used by organisations which handle, as OP said, hundreds of thousands of documents and which have satellite offices (e.g. large multinational lawfirms). They provide several benefits such as the possibility to structure projects, have both project related documents and e-mails saved and indexed in the project folders, allows for searching and proper document version chains (meaning that you can revert to older versions of documents if some klutz breaks a newer version).

Of course, this means quite an investment, a learning curve for everyone at your company and, most likely, the hiring of an individual with experience of the chosen system.

I forgot to mention Alfresco as well, although I've never personally tried it.
http://www.alfresco.com/index-b2.html

...something like this:

1. You want to be able to store documents that currently exist electronically, and also handle documents you're going to scan. The latter may, or may not, be OCR'd.

2. You want to attach keywords to the articles, and be able to bring up a list of articles that match some arbitrary combination of these keywords.

3. Full-text search isn't as important (but would be useful if available).

If that's the case, I'm thinking Alfresco might be what you're looking for. Multi-platform, open source, java-based content repository. Supports document tagging (and loads, loads more). Relatively easy to use right out of the box, and has a CIFS interface so you can just create a project and simply tree-copy your current documents into the project. Don't let the "enterprise" designation on the software scare you away.

I've actually considered going that route for my own personal document library, but while Alfresco might be one of the only good solutions, it's like killing a fly with a cannon.

I'm frankly amazed that with the "paperless living" meme currently going through the productivity circles that someone hasn't come up with a simple tool to do something just like what you're looking for: point it at a root folder, let it suck in all the files, then start tagging away. Search with keywords or filenames or both, and provide a clickable list of hits. Full-text search isn't needed, as there's already a ton of tools out there that'll happily index your hard drive for you.

And, if a tool like that exists, could someone point me to it, please?

... where he could archive the PDFs and scanned documents and be able to search by keywords?

So, my big concern is the part where you said he scans things from books and articles and so some of the PDFs might just be massive images, right? I don't think you're going to find systems with OCR built in so you might have quite the chore on your hands. If you don't have it electronically or if it's just an image electronically, you may have to implement some sort of process for getting a doc into this system so it can be searched, right? Look into GOCR or Tesseract if this is the case.

Also, judging by your nickname ("Sooner Boomer"), you're at the University of Oklahoma. Why in the world would you name yourself after a group of people who not only disobeyed the Indian Appropriation Act but also moved out onto Native American territory before it was officially declared property of the United States? And then you also chose "Boomer" which refers to "white settlers who believed the Unassigned Lands were public property and open to anyone for settlement, not just Indian tribes. Their reasoning came from a clause in the Homestead Act of 1862, which said that any settler could claim 160 acres of public land. Some boomers entered and were removed more than once by the United States Army." If you are a descendant of either a Sooner or a Boomer, I respectfully do not agree with their actions.

There really aren't very many more "killer apps" to be invented. This is completely opinion, but I think SharePoint is going to be Microsoft's last hurrah. It is their last chance to get organizations tied into a single, unified respository for all of their content. SharePoint is like a Wiki on steroids, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a proprietary Microsoft technology. They have the benefit of being able to easily integrate their Office Suite with SharePoint. As a proprietary vendor, they have the benefit of being able to issue edicts to their developers and align a lot of resources toward a common goal. Accomplishing the same thing in OSS land would take a lot of coordination and would probably require an outfit like IBM or the like to develop a competing project.

Competing OSS products already abound.

Alfresco is probably the pick of them.

http://www.alfresco.com/

Does everything that Sharepoint does, but does it for free, with no CALs, and so that you can run Windows, Mac or Linux as desktop clients. OpenOffice has extensions for using it with Alfresco.

Linux application support is getting better every day. Just take a look at Zimbra. Now, I'm not about to scrap MY Exchange servers and migrate my users to Zimbra. But if I were a small business owner and I needed email for my company, I wouldn't even be looking at the cost of Exchange licenses.

OpenChange also is on its way.

http://www.openchange.org/

There is also Citadel to consider.

http://www.citadel.org/doku.php

Samba 4 will support Active Directory and, of course, be a capable file server.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/273515/active_directory_comes_linux_samba_4

All free (no cost) and Free (freedom) as well. All of these OSS solutions will support Windows, Mac or Linux desktop clients, or any mixture of them. There is absolutely no need to pay any more for server software or server access licenses.

Enjoy. Prosper.

http://www.knowledgetree.com/">Knowledge Tree and Alfresco are open source, standards based and highly regarded.

http://www.alfresco.com/

For me, KB is not really a pure category. More of a hybrid that fits somewhere
between/within a ContentMgmtSys and a DocMgmtSys

You mention mediawiki, which I feel is quite impressive, as a collaborative CMS.
If mediawiki is overly-complex then maybe a different one would work better:
http://twiki.org/
http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki
http://moinmo.in/
http://www.pmwiki.org/

OTOH, if yo mean a KB that is concerned about DocMgmt, then you probably know that
many Document Managements Systems, though ofter synonomous with a "Knowledge Base Systems" (KBS), but probably contain better features related to lifecycle management for documents,
  publication workflow and access rights management.
http://www.alfresco.com/
http://www.knowledgetree.com/
http://www.epiware.com/
http://www.jaspersoft.com/
http://www.jivesoftware.com/clearspace/
is not free for use, but I've deployed it and can say 1st hand its worth mentioning;
you can download a free 30-day trial for evaluation.

http://www.alfresco.com/ http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ I'm sure there are more.

Use Alfresco for document sharing.

Alfresco does not supply source code for releases!

The Community Edition release binaries don't come with source and would be impossible for a "community" member to (re)create! The release SDK's don't have source for nearly the whole server either! The only complete server source code available is unstable SVN trunk - where they provide (delayed) merges from their private internal branches! No public access to their stable branches/tags or anything!

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=9932
http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12610

Alfresco does not supply source code for releases!

The Community Edition release binaries don't come with source and would be impossible for a "community" member to (re)create! The release SDK's don't have source for nearly the whole server either! The only complete server source code available is unstable SVN trunk - where they provide (delayed) merges from their private internal branches! No public access to their stable branches/tags or anything!

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=9932
http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12610

This is news to me. If this is true, it sounds like the Microsoft is making an attempt to entrench businesses with OOXML through there popular web-based collaboration software.

A quick search on Google turns up Alfresco as a F/OSS alternative to Sharepoint. Can anybody comment on the quality and effectiveness of Alfresco, and mention if it is mature enough to be a viable (and recommendable) alternative to Sharepoint as an enterprise solution for collaboration within large businesses?

For the User/Developer, among the best are ... "Open".

Apache FOP: http://freshmeat.net/projects/fop/
Apache FOP: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/download.html
    NetBeans: http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.0/final/
    Alfresco: http://www.alfresco.com/

Good Guide: http://www.vrcommunications.com/PDFs/ditaotug141-03122007-pdf.pdf
Title DITA Open Toolkit User Guide: Fourth edition, December 17, 2007. Based on release 1.4.1 of DITA Open Toolkit. All files copyright 2006-2007 by VR Communications, Inc., unless otherwise indicated. Licensing Edition, release, copyright and usage of this document and related materials is regulated by a Common Public License (CPL) granted by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), http://www.oasis-open.org/ . DITA Open Toolkit is an open-source, reference implementation of the OASIS DITA standard (currently DITA 1.1).

JAVA: http://www.java2s.com/Open-Source/Java/CatalogJava.htm
Open Office: http://www.2008-official.com/openoffice/

You should also check out http://www.alfresco.com/. It was started by some of the founders of Documentum and Interwoven. It does some interesting Enterprise Content Management foo, which may be of use to you.

http://www.alfresco.com/

Zimbra and Alfresco both look nice. Check out the Alfresco demo.

It's called Alfresco http://www.alfresco.com/

I posted this before on slashdot. I discovered a while ago a cool system called Alfresco. There is a free (as is liberty) and commercial versions. It acts like a SMB (like SAMBA), ftp, and WebDAV server so you don't have to use the web interface to get files into the system. Users can map it as a network drive. The web interface allows users to set metatags, retrieve previous versions of the file, and most importantly, search the documents in the system.

Alfresco also has plugins for Microsoft Office so you can manage the repository from Word, etc. They are also working on OpenOffice integration.

Don't use SAMBA for .doc and .pdf's, use Alfresco.

I am not affiliated with Alfresco, just a happy user.

That means there's no OSS equivalent or competitor to Sharepoint?
http://www.alfresco.com/
http://www.nuxeo.com/en/

Yes. What's on the Alfresco website is indeed demoware. You can get the open source edition from their dev site here.

Alfresco