Recommending a DMS for a Large-Scale Enterprise

Question

It's been two days I'm searching to select an appropriate open-source DMS for a large-scale enterprise. Among all of the open-source document management systems written in Java, Nuexo, LogicalDoc and Alfresco seem to have a good reputation. However, I couldn't find a fair comparison among them and as I don't have any experience in this context, it's so hard to choose among them. So far, I have installed Nuxeo and LogicalDoc and checked some of their functionalities. It seems both have many common features. I don't have any idea about Alfresco yet but it made me somehow disappointed because it seems its community edition does not include most of its useful features (http://www.alfresco.com/products/community).

Finally there some important criteria I'm supposed to consider in all of them:

• Easy customization
• Changing language and theme
• Supporting interfaces for third-party applications
• Developer guide (documentation)

I'd be grateful if you share your experience in this context.

Longing

What do you want to customize? What third-party intefaces do you want to integrate? For what kind of usecase? – Spearhead

@Tichodroma: Thanks for your response. I'm supposed to customize the theme and language. Moreover, this system may need to provide some third-party applications with services and that's why the third feature I previously mentioned is so important. – Longing

Answer 1

Nuxeo might suit your needs:

• It is OSGI-based, so you can customize it heavily with XML and / or Java (see Nuxeo Explorer for an exhaustive list of extension points, contributions, ...). Nuxeo Studio is available if you choose to subscribe to Nuxeo Online Services, it is not mandatory but makes it faster to customize Nuxeo through a UI.
• It fully supports i18n and theme customization. It is part of the OSGI model.
• Nuxeo already provides addons to communicate with some third-party applications through standard protocols. But, depending on what you need, you can build a custom one, containing web services for example, or any other custom communication protocol.
• The documentation is available here. Nuxeo is fully open-source, you can find the sources on GitHub.

Nuxeo Platform is free, there is no restrictions on which OS or DB is or is not supported. The subscription to Nuxeo Online Services provides access to Nuxeo Studio, Nuxeo Marketplace, Nuxeo Cloud and Nuxeo Support. You might want to subscribe, depending on your needs.

Barbabas

Thanks a lot. I've already checked Nuxeo but I've got two questions: 1) Is it possible to create a workflow without using Nuxeo Studio. I ask this because I found two predefined workflows in administration panel and I couldn't create a new workflow because it seems that I should subscribe to its online services such as Nuxeo Studio(it's been mentioned in its documents). 2) The second question is about customizing its theme. Should I purchase license in order to customize the theme? – Longing

There is nothing you cannot do without Studio. Studio generates a JAR file containing an XML file and some resources, you can do the same by writing the XML file from scratch. See doc.nuxeo.com/display/NXDOC/Workflow for workflows (aka DocumentRoute) and doc.nuxeo.com/display/NXDOC/Theme for theme customization. Studio makes customization easier, that's why you might find references to it in the documentation, but it is not mandatory. You can try Studio during 30 days (I think) if you want, and open the JAR it generates to see how to create your workflow. – Barbabas

So it's possible to customize the theme using XML files. Can I create new workflows in the same way? – Longing

You can create new workflows without Studio. Take a look at the two predefined workflows (XML file and ZIP files). Workflows allow to do a lot of things in Nuxeo, and need a lot of configuration in return, it's not the easiest example to start with. That's why Studio makes it faster to create new workflows. – Barbabas

Thank you so much for your useful response. – Longing

Here is, as an example, the Serial workflow: SerialDocumentReview. It's a set of XML files. – Ba

Answer 2

Alfresco community may address all the criterias you mentioned since

• being primarily a Spring based application, it is easy to customize and extend using webscript technology
• it widely supports i18n and theme changing on Share
• it can easily interact with some third-party applications like Liferay, Kofax and others through addons
• it has a very consistent and wide community and lot of documentation, blogs and many books written by most known Alfresco partners.

Obviously, in a production, enterprise wide application you should go for an Enterprise Edition license. Alfresco is fully open source but this doesn't mean it's free at all.

You can find a very good comparison between community and enterprise edition in this SO post

Duce

"it can easily interact with the majority of third-party applications" I doubt that claim. What third-party applications did you integrate? What technology did you use? – Spearhead

For example Liferay portal through CMIS – Duce

That's one very specific example. But claim "majority of third-party applications". It is my experience that applications that for example expose a simple REST interface are difficult to integrate. – Spearhead