Hyland Alfresco

My main use case for Alfresco  was that I was a sales rep for Alfresco .

A specific example of how Alfresco was used by my customers is loan automation to take an onboarding for a bank loan and automate that process for the consumers.

In addition to that, I was involved with insurance claims processing as another typical use case I saw with Alfresco.

From what I have seen in those projects, the best features Alfresco offers include the ability to customize using APIs and using Alfresco as a headless repository.

Customers typically make use of Alfresco's APIs or the headless repository by building their own custom front end, either a web page or a Java application that would use APIs to talk to the repository.

Regarding features, the flexibility of the APIs is something that mainly stands out.

Alfresco has impacted my organization and my customers' organizations positively by enabling them to have a very flexible solution that could meet their requirements.

Specific outcomes that demonstrate how Alfresco helped those organizations include process improvement and being able to search and find documents within seconds versus manually having to hunt for them in other systems.

Alfresco can be improved as the roadmap went a little stagnant for the past few years, so there had not been any new development, and coming out with a new roadmap with new features and executing and delivering on those new features would be an improvement.

Additional needed improvements include the ability to use a NoSQL database versus relying on a relational database, which has capped performance at 50 million documents, so being able to leverage something such as MongoDB, a NoSQL database as part of the architecture would be a big improvement to enable high volume in the hundreds of millions of documents, and claims processing scenarios to be more efficient and performant.

I have been using Alfresco for 15 years.

Alfresco is deployed in my customers' organizations predominantly with about 70% of the customers being on-premise or 80% on-premise, about 20% cloud, and it was probably more 90% on-premise and 10% cloud, with the barrier being that if it is a federal government, FedRAMP compliance was not available at this point and that kept a lot of the heavy compliance government customers from being able to go cloud.

For those customers using cloud, they typically had to use AWS , as that was the only option. Some of those customers purchased Alfresco through the AWS Marketplace .

My advice to others looking into using Alfresco is that it depends on the use case; there is definitely a fit if you need high customization to meet a requirement, and it should be considered, but if you are looking for more out-of-the-box solutions, then there are other solutions that are a better fit. I would rate this product a 7.

My main use case for Alfresco  was working for a healthcare company in 2023 that was using Alfresco , where I helped them migrate all their documentation out of it into Contentful .

The documentation I was migrating included Word documents and PDF documents, all healthcare-related. I was in charge of the team that was to extract them and ensure that they did not get corrupted, while ensuring that everything naming-wise was detailed correctly for the metadata to be transferred into Contentful .

Alfresco had the ability to store a large volume of documents, which was excellent, although handling images, videos, and clips was somewhat more challenging. It proved to be a good data document CMS system.

The best features Alfresco offers in my experience include a strong document repository, the ability to conduct audits on the history of the documents, and having security and permissions around it, which I found very useful.

Alfresco positively impacted my organization by enabling the ability to store hundreds of thousands of documents. This capability helped my team save time and reduce errors. It enabled users to find exactly what documents they were looking for in a timely fashion, as well as to export to patients and healthcare members what they needed to do for Medicaid, Medicare, or any other secondary insurance, including the documents they needed to fill out as well as prescriptions.

Alfresco can be improved by having a more intuitive interface and greater ability to be customized without needing a developer, making it a more user-friendly out-of-the-box CMS.

There is always a learning curve for users, and more helpful documentation on how to find things for people who are not accustomed to working in a CMS platform would be beneficial.

I have been using Alfresco for about a year.

Alfresco is stable.

Regarding Alfresco's scalability, I think it is able to be scaled for specific industries. However, if you are looking to expand into areas with more images and videos, the scalability is somewhat limited without a developer and customization.

Before choosing Alfresco, they did evaluate other options. At that time, Alfresco had the most security and governance for regulated industries, which is why they chose it.

I have not seen a return on investment, as at the time it was not saving them money at Evernorth and Cigna, which is why they moved out of it.

I would give advice to others looking into using Alfresco that it is a strong document management system great for version control and security. However, sometimes finding content if you do not use the right metadata practices can be difficult, and user understanding of how to search is not quite as easy. More documentation and how-to guides would probably be more helpful, along with a bit more technical support. I am rating this review five stars.

My main use case for Alfresco  is to centralize client records, loan documentation, digital contracts, onboarding processes, internal approval workflows, and evidence for audits.

Alfresco  works excellently for audits since all documentation of the processes is stored there, and when auditors request access or a document, we find everything directly.

Alfresco has positively impacted my organization because everything is centralized, so you do not have to waste time figuring out if the information you need is on this server or on the other server. Everything is in one place, and everyone has their own access.

I have noticed a change in team efficiency, response times, and error reduction thanks to the centralization of information. Time has improved; time is not wasted searching for documents, and errors have been reduced. You always have the correct version of the file. There is not one version here and another one there; you always have the updated version.

I consider the best features that Alfresco offers to be its management of document versioning, legal retention, traceability, and granular permissions, which helps a lot for audits.

Security has been improved with Alfresco since with granular permissions we can give the appropriate access to collaborators. Those who need to read a document only have that permission, and we can also see who has permission to view a document and regulate who can edit and who can upload a document.

Everything is centralized, so you do not have to waste time figuring out if the information you need is on this server or on the other server. Everything is in one place, and everyone has their own access.

For the moment, I have not had any complaints about how Alfresco could be improved that I could escalate.

I could say that it is not a plug-and-play platform. It has a considerable implementation curve, and the technical administration is demanding.

I have been using Alfresco for around two years.

The stability of Alfresco has been excellent; I have not had any availability issues.

The scalability of the platform has been good. It adapts well to the growth of my organization, and as more departments are added, you only need to buy additional licenses, and they join the process efficiently.

I consider Alfresco's customer support to be good. They respond quickly and with the solutions we are looking for to the cases we have had.

Before using Alfresco, I employed an in-house developed platform, and I decided to change to have something more robust that complied with regulations.

I have seen a return on investment with Alfresco because errors due to outdated documents have been reduced, processes have been improved, and process flow has also been improved.

By having all documentation centralized, errors such as using a contract where the incorrect version was taken have been reduced. Since everything is centralized, the correct version of the document is always used.

My experience with the price, implementation cost, and platform licenses has been that it has been a fair price, the implementation cost stayed within budget, and I consider the platform licenses to be fair.

I evaluated other options before choosing Alfresco, including OpenText , IBM, and Microsoft.

My advice for others considering implementing Alfresco is that they must take into account that the implementation curve is considerable, and they should have a project team dedicated solely to that, not shared resources, so that the project turns out well. I would rate this review as a nine out of ten.

This is mainly for unstructured document management systems with workflow and data classification.

The overall extensive base APIs are available, and it is open for extension. This part is something I appreciate. You can have your own use cases and customizations. It is highly extensible, meaning you can do whatever you want. You can meet your users' expected features without having Alfresco's involvement. You don't need Alfresco to be there for your future enhancements, which is very advantageous.

After onboarding Alfresco, many applications got decommissioned and everything merged into Alfresco.

Currently, the challenge is the general availability to users. Initially, they had poor documentation, but over the years, their documentation has highly improved. Initially, we had challenges finding the extension points and understanding how to extend the system. The workflow was one of the hurdles we had. At that time, it was not that beautiful or feature-rich. Even today, workflow consists of basic workflows. If you want to extend, you have to implement your own customizations. They are using it extensively with features such as records management, CMIS, Share UI, and Web Scripts. All these features are being used extensively.

Governance of this system is required. If you don't have proper governance, things can go wrong. If you don't have a proper policy of how documents should be maintained, issues can arise. You have to make rules, such as one folder should not have more than 5,000 subfolders or children. This was advised by Alfresco, but we did not have that advice, so we had challenges when everything was dumped into single folders. It slows down the systems and sometimes becomes unusable. Whoever is going to use it should have that governance system in place.

It has been in use for around 10 years now.

Deployment is now straightforward with WAR-based deployments. They have a straightforward one-file deployment system. If you have different components, they need to improve that part as sometimes requirements are not declared.

Initially, the clustering was not efficient as you could not start multiple servers together. Those issues have now been corrected. In the past, you had to restart or start servers one by one, as two nodes could not join the cluster at the same time.

Customer support is good because they are responsive. Sometimes it takes time to resolve issues, but the customer support team attends to concerns promptly.

Before choosing Alfresco, there were in-house document management systems. Many document management systems existed with every business unit having their own system.

Initially, there were challenges. After release 6.2, these things became much better. Before 6.2, we faced various issues. With the help of Alfresco Technical Account Manager, we could resolve many of the problems.

I give Alfresco a rating of 8 out of 10. If I expect resolution today, I sometimes don't get it until tomorrow. However, the overall experience is not bad.