Alfresco Issue Log

"I am not a Alfresco Hater! I wish next version of Alfresco really address these issues"

The below observations are specific to the installation I have done and may vary in your case. I am  blogging some of the disadvantages I have observed while working with Alfresco content management.

1. Installation with Oracle very confusing. The installation highly supports the use of MySQL and there is no clue what option to choose to install with Oracle. This makes it not enterprise friendly. The Enterprise edition supports Oracle, but no good documentation is available for how exactly to configure the oracle database with Alfresco. I have to do several re-installations to make it happen

2. Reverting back configurations are not secure. For example, after installation I have set the property “hibernate.default=alfresco”. Then I have started the server. I was overjoyed to see the site working perfectly. The first time startup created and populated the oracle database without any error. But after stopping and restarting the tomcat, it gives an error saying “schema cannot be updated”. The system never recovered even though I have corrected the wrong property configuration. I have to re-install the server to fix the issue.

3. No option to select desired username for Alfresco. The invitation is sent through email and username is automatically created from first name, last name combination. This may not be desirable in enterprise environment.

4. Uploaded a PDF and selected Edit Offline option. The below error displayed


07280003 Wrapped Exception (with status template): 07280018 Failed to execute script 'classpath*:alfresco/templates/webscripts/org/alfresco/slingshot/documentlibrary/doclist.get.js': could not deserialize
The log gile displayed the below error
java.io.StreamCorruptedException: invalid stream header: 00540001

5. After the above error occurred, the Document Library never recovered. I did not see any of the documents I have uploaded but only see the error described above.

6. Add calendar event, unable to select a different end date. I have created an event but accidently selected an end date prior to start date. After that I was unable to correct the date. The popup calendar never re-appeared again. I have closed the window and clicked the “Add event” option again but the popup window remains same with pre-populated values. The OK button was also disabled and leaving me no option to correct the mistake.

7. I have tried to create a quick link using the Links component and got the error “Unable to load link link data”. After seeing the error, I have clicked on add link again and created another one. Very simple one just a quick link to www.yahoo.com. I got a message saying link created and then immediately followed by the same error again. Then I clicked the Link List menu from left menu bar and I got another exception describing some classpath problem.

The issue with the above one was, I never selected a "tag" for the link. In the UI, it is not mentioned that it is mandatory. I have created another link with a tag and it worked properly

8. It is not possible to select a separate theme for individual sites. If you create a site for a community, it will be good if you can select a different theme for the site. At present the theme applies to all community unless you have to manage the theme by passing a URL parameter.

Despite of all these Alfresco is a great product and I recommend trying it. It has got lot of great content management features worth trying.

njoy
Sajith