Alfresco Community

Alfresco is a free enterprise management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating system. Alfresco Community is an open, powerful enterprise content management system that manages and controls all the content inside an enterprise and provides services.

Alfresco Community is a platform that can be easily extended, customized and integrated with the existing applications and processes. It focuses on developers and technical enthusiasts who want to use it in non-critical environment. Alfresco Community is freely available open source distributed under LGPLv3 license.

Alfresco Community is an innovative open source which allows organizations to manage any type of content from scanned images to office documents. Alfresco Community is an open source platform for community driven development and contribution. It has limitations in terms of scalability and availability.

Community editions have repository as its core. The repository provides a store for a wide range of functions and services. The repository is mostly used by content applications to tweak instance of the content.

The diagram shown below (credit-alfresco) shows three main components that the community edition comprises. These components are-the platform, UI, and the search engine. The components here are implemented not as a part of the main app but as separated web applications-

The Platform is the main component and is now under implementation in the alfresco.war web app. It is the repository we talked of above and stores not just contents but all the content services associated with it. 

The User Interface (UI) to Alfresco Share is provided by a web client called Alfresco Share. The same is then implemented as the share war web application. Share simplifies managing sites, facilitates documentation and user-management. Search functionality in Share is deployed on top of Apache Solr 6 and is known for providing indexing of all content, which enables powerful search functionality. There are also several mobile clients that will access content using ReST APIs provided by the platform.

Alfresco Community edition of Alfresco has all the core features that an enterprise edition has but you do not get official technical support for Community edition from the company. It is a leading tool for content management providing records, knowledge and document management. It is a powerful tool that supports wide range of features and offers a user friendly interface for managing your content.

Alfresco Community offers a user friendly interface for managing content and supports a wide range of features. It is not a web content management system but an enterprise content management system that has highly scalable repository.

Alfresco is world’s largest open source enterprise content management platform.

Almost all community editions will implement a domain specific to the web client. The client is based on Alfresco’s development framework. The framework is designed to give you client-specific process to support exactly the cases needed by the domain. This gives end-user the best experience possible in alfresco.

Both Platform and the UI run on same Apache Tomcat web-app server. Search components in Apache run in their own servers. The platform usually comes integrated with Directory Server. The Platform and UI components run in the same Apache Tomcat web application server. The Search component runs in its own Jetty web application server. The Platform is usually also integrated with a Directory Server (LDAP) to enable users to sync and groups with Alfresco Community Editions. Several installation integrate with single SMTP server so the Platform is also capable of sending invitations as emails.

Below we have Mentioned Some Key Highlights (from WiKi) that Could Impact Your Decision to Choose Either Enterprise or Community Editions-

1. Community edition does not support clustering. When deployment requires more than one servers (say high availability (HA)), only the Enterprise version can support the same.

2. Oracle and SQL is part of the Enterprise edition. Community Support for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server is part of Enterprise edition.

3. JMX connectivity is available in Enterprise edition and the community version of the same omits it.

4. Cloud synchronization is also available with the Enterprise license. No cloud instance can be called from Community Editions.