Last month,I got a review copy of this book from Packt Publishing and just finished reading.I would like to share my thoughts and opinions. Here I go.
The book starts with the chapter Introduction to alfresco which describes about alfresco architecture and its various components and products.Here the authors have also explained how can you get benefited from alfresco but they did not include topics like case management and contract management.
Chapter 2 focused about the alfresco installation in different operating systems.Good to see that the authors nicely explained about how to deploy alfresco bundle in tomcat.I believe it is very useful who are novice to alfresco.
Chapter 3 started with administration and few basic configurations about alfresco explorer user interface.Next chapter described about alfresco membership and security with how can you create users and groups using the above said UI.
Folder/content creation,library services (versioning,check in and check out),rules creation and management is introduced in next two chapters. Here the authors also clearly explained how an action can be scheduled using cron jobs.
Content modelling is introduced in chapter 7 which is a back bone of any DMS for managing metadata.This chapter well described different terminologies like type,aspects,associations and constraints related to alfresco content model.
Next chapter explained about both simple and advanced workflows. Here,The authors made a right choice to introduce activiti BPM frameworks. Advanced workflow creation and deployment using activiti with few examples are also well explained.
Basics of web script and its creation are available in next chapter. Nice to see the authors finally introduced alfresco share and administration in chapter 10. I thought alfresco share customization would have been introduced in very next chapter instead of alfresco explorer but that did not happen.
Search,search engines and its related basic configurations are described for alfresco explorer in next chapter.The last chapter explains about system monitoring and maintenance. Few tips related to data back up and upgrade to higher versions described here.
To conclude,I feel this book is the next version of Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation which is authored by all most the same authors.It is a bit surprising for me that the book is mostly focused on alfresco explorer and its basic customization instead of share. This book is basically about the installation,administration and few customization of alfresco explorer UI. The book is perfect for anyone who does not know alfresco at all and what alfresco can do for them.
