At one place I worked, we were looking into some content management systems. When I found out the licensing cost for one tool we were already using, I was pretty much floored. The old pricing scheme was pretty high, but in order to update, we had to move to a licensing scheme that seemed pretty insane to me.
Since there already was a Microsoft license in place, the recommendation was to move to MS Sharepoint and dump the more expensive tool. It literally meant quite a bit of conversion and testing time, though. There was a weird path assignment for many documents, and it would have been easy to have a lot of broken links.
Well, Alfresco offers an alternative to the more expensive contenders.
Twenty years of experience drove us to believe that the Enterprise Content Management industry was driven by:
- High Cost — Application driven purchases with a high up-front investment and per user pricing
- High Complexity — Long rollout cycles and complexity resulting in software either not being implemented or used
- Lack of Customer Control — Proprietary control preventing choice and ability to switch to other vendors
For these reasons the vast majority of people do not use ECM systems but instead work with shared drives and email to create, share and store content.
That last paragraph really hit home with me. At the company I was working for (above), there were quite a few pockets of people using shared drive because no one wanted to pay for the overpriced licensing. While an older version of Sharepoint was in place, it’s use was mostly for project work. There really was no central schema to how to get information.
At any rate, I plan to have a further look into Alfresco.
