Difference between Alfresco Community edition and Enterprise edition

It's a very basic question. Isn't it? If you would have just started with learning about Alfresco, you may have been trying to find out what are the key differences between the different editions of Alfresco. If you would have been a seasoned professional who has spent years working on Alfresco, you may have come across situations where the prospect/client would have been asking about differences between community and enterprise edition. Also, in technical round of interview as well, you may have come across this question at some point of time. 

So, what would be your answer when someone asks you this question about differences between Alfresco Community edition and Alfresco Enterprise edition? It may sound a very basic question yet it's a significant one and you should be able to clearly differentiate the key points between the two. In this blog post, I will try to answer this question to provide key points about differences based on my understanding and knowledge. I hope you may find it helpful.

Let's start with Alfresco One enterprise edition first.It's an enterprise ready edition which is extensively tested by Alfresco with different configurations across both open source as well as commercial technology stack of supported databases/operating systems/application servers. Range of different modules available for Alfresco One Enterprise edition which provides additional capabilities such as seamless integration with outlook, effective desktop sync functionality, analytics module to provide complete visibility over the content, Salesforce connector to bridge CRM and ECM world, media management and so on. Supports clustering to achieve enterprise level scalability and reliable high availability. It also provides cloud sync capability of on premise content, basically a hybrid ECM approach. It is fully supported by Alfresco and one can get different options for availing commercial support. Also, a wider partner network is also present. 

Let's talk few points about Alfresco Community edition now. There are periodically stable releases of Alfresco Community edition are being released by Alfresco. It is designed to work effectively on the open source technology stack of database/operating systems/application servers and it is automated tested on a single stack per my understanding. It needs to be self supported using community resources as there will not be official support available by Alfresco. Also, it includes community driven development and contributions. Clustering capabilities are not available as default with community edition. Hence, it is best suited for small scale deployments.

In Summary, if you need to have an ECM system which caters to mission-critical requirement and requires enterprise integrations then your preference would be to go for Alfresco One Enterprise edition. However, if you just want to have a small sized in-house ECM for which you have required resources to support then Alfresco Community edition is the most suitable choice.

That's it. I have tried to share the key points of differences based on my understanding here. If you have anything additional to share then kindly do drop in your comments. 

Top 15 most common development tasks you will have in almost all of your Alfresco projects

In any of your alfresco projects, based on your project requirement there would be number of different development tasks you will carry out ranging from customizing some of the things available out-of-the-box to adding the new things per your implementation. Out of them, here I have tried to list out the most common items that you will find in almost all of your Alfresco development projects. There would be many more as well however, I have just tried to put up the most common ones related to development front, based on my opinion.

If you are a beginner who have just started with development in Alfresco and are curious to know what are all the common things you must learn in order to be productive from day-one in your assigned alfresco projects then you should try to explore and learn how to achieve below things in Alfresco. That would surely help you in my opinion.

Let's take a look at them.

1. Creating custom content types in your custom content model
2. Adding a form configuration to create/edit the custom content type
3. Adding a new option in the document library view to create your custom content type i.e. adding a menu item to the "Create.." menu in document library
4. Starting a workflow as soon as a new content of your custom content type is created
5. Creating a new workflow and integrating it with Alfresco Share
6. In a workflow task view, display transition buttons instead of a list view.
7. Creating custom control for your workflow task form for example, to select an assignee, instead of searching for a user, you want to pre-populate all the users from some specific group and then select assignee from it.
8. Adding a custom action for your content in document library
9. Writing an evaluator to show the custom action to only specific type of user
10. Creating a custom page for example, to display a list to show the contents created for your content type and providing actions such as edit/delete and so on.
11. Creating a Dashlet to display and list out the contents in some specific state such as all the contents in review process and so on.
12. Automatically creating a default folder structure when a new site is created
13. Displaying create site link to only specific users
14. Adding your custom page to the site navigation menu (by default you only see document library there)
15. Customizing File Upload dialog

Hope this helps.