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I am looking for an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) or Collaboration suite (tend to be used synonymously) solution to manage the following:

  • Scalable: Start with 10 users, scale up to 1000+.
  • Document management: Hosting, Versioning, Workflow (approvals, annual reviews) labeling, retention rules
  • Shared and Tiered calendars (so 3 teams report to one higher level org, create a roll-up view calendar.
  • Publishing suite, wikis, RSS or equivalent, change notification
  • Integration with MS Office Suite
  • Ability to write custom integrations
  • Phone, email and community support
  • Tasking
  • Ability to create custom integrations for other tools via API
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  • What is your budget, because from Open source to Emc2 Documentum, the choice is very wide.
    – рüффп
    Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 21:26
  • At the moment I am not necessarily considering open source just for the sake of support. Lets say top end for 1000k users annually is 300k. No Documentum...I looked at them, they want over a million a year...they are very proud.
    – James
    Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 21:52
  • 1000 users or 1000k = 1M users? What client tools does this need to integrate with (e.g. Sharepoint integrates well with Windows but sucks if you have Linux users)? Does the document management have to interact with the calendar in any way — I'd consider them wholly separate concerns?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Feb 27, 2014 at 18:02
  • Top end for # of users would end up being around 1k. We would like the tool to integrate with the office suite and common files types (images PDFs etc), users are all on Windows, though some access Linux servers it is not their desktop OS. No, documents and calendars do not need to interact. I also just edited and added a new integration related requirement
    – James
    Commented Feb 28, 2014 at 15:13

3 Answers 3

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I am using Alfresco everyday for this, and designing custom ECM solutions based on it is my job.

Scalable: Alfresco can easily scale to 1000+ users or much more. It is good at clustering.

Document Management Hosting: Yes, that's Alfresco's core feature.

Versioning: Of course. Can be enabled/disabled for a particular type/etc.

Workflows: Yes, one of the great strengths of Alfresco with the Activiti workflow engine included out-of-the-box.

Labeling: Alfresco has two ways to do this: tagging and categories.

Retention rules: For full-fledged Records Management there is a RM extension certified DoD 2015.02. Or you can just create rules.

Calendars: Each site has a calendar. I don't think roll-up view is possible though. You can also re-use .ics data and integrate with Google Calendar to a certain point.

Not sure what you mean by "publishing suite", but some of our customer use Alfresco for media publishing.

Wikis: Yes, in the sense of documentation that anyone can edit. It is not wikisyntax but a TinyMCE wysiwyg editor, though (which is better in most cases).

RSS or equivalent: Via this add-on. Activity feeds for your sites/teams.

Integration with MS Office Suite, Google Docs. And LibreOffice via CMIS.

Custom integrations are the real power of Alfresco. Web Scripts are easy to implement without restarting your server, for instance to implement your own REST APIs. For more heavy customization needs, Spring-based open source architecture allows you to modify anything with relative ease.

Phone/Email support with Alfresco Enterprise. From my experience, community support is the best among all ECM products.

Tasking is achieved via workflows, or issue trackers (an instance of Data Lists)

Integration for other tools: Yes. I would recommend the CMIS standard API so that your other tools stay product-independent.

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  • I have read some on Alfresco, and my concern with it, and please correct me if I am wrong here, is that it has to be developed and maintained internally. We have plenty of developers but none with spare time to help manage and create content on a tool. Let me know if I am off base on this.
    – James
    Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 14:06
  • No, there is no such need. Many companies use Alfresco without having any developers. Just have an administrator do backups from time to time, and upgrades when needed, that's very straightforward and requires no development skills. To be safe, get an Alfresco Enterprise subscription and they will help you.
    – Nicolas Raoul ♦
    Commented Mar 7, 2014 at 4:55
  • Ill have to give it a more in depth look. Thanks
    – James
    Commented Mar 7, 2014 at 14:37
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I realize the question is old by now, but in case anyone is still looking... I've started using Bitrix24 (https://www.bitrix24.com/), and I've been impressed with the depth of features. It's still a bit new, only 3 years old, but they've made huge strides in those 3 years and their product has come a very long way. It's the only service I've found that combines all of the following:

  • File sync (dropbox style)
  • Tasking
  • Time tracking
  • Calendars and meeting scheduling
  • Wiki (for each workgroup)
  • Video conferencing / voice calling / IM
  • Social network-style activity feed, "Liking," commenting
  • CRM
  • Email integration (especially useful if you have a domain; you can create email addresses on your domain natively within Bitrix24)
  • Workflow management
  • Org chart
  • lots of other stuff

And you can write plugins too, they have an open API.

They still have a ways to go before they're perfect... kind of buggy at times, but support is fairly responsive and they release big updates twice a year.

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If you are still looking for a solution, I would like to suggest our Engineering Project Collaboration and Document Management Solution - eikondocs (http://www.eikondocs.com/)

It complies with most your requirements, including price, and is available for a 30 days free trial:

  • Scalable - we have pricing plans for 5/25 and unlimited users

  • Document management:

    • Hosted on Amazon AWS,
    • Versioning - yes
    • Workflow - yes, based on document life cycle you define
    • labeling - yes, you define the document codification and set of attributes

  • Shared and Tiered calendars - not clear what you mean by that, consider a no

  • Publishing suite, wikis, RSS or equivalent - no

  • Change notification - yes

  • Integration with MS Office Suite - available on Enterprise plan

  • Ability to write custom integrations - available on Enterprise plan

  • Phone support- available on Enterprise plan

  • Email support - yes

  • Community support - not yet

  • Tasking - yes, manual and automated

  • Ability to create custom integrations for other tools via API - yes, some integration resource available by configuration, advanced integration resources and service api available on Enterprise plan

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