Alfresco's two interfaces
There are really two main interfaces in Alfresco: Explorer and Share. When I first started Alfresco with the alfresco command in the Alfresco subdirectory, I got the Explorer interface, which was initially the most confusing thing I had seen. Nothing appeared to resemble a content management system. There was no dashboard, no way to add widgets and so forth.
It took me a while to figure out what was going on. Explorer directly reflects the content of the repository and only runs on the machine where the repository resides. In SharePoint terms, it was the equivalent of the Central Administration server. What I really needed was the Share interface, which is much more familiar territory for ECM users in general and SharePoint users specifically.
Located at ../share, the Share Web application is a remote interface to the Alfresco repository that can be deployed on any application server. You can have multiple Shares (individual Web interfaces that can be unique across departments and teams in your company) hitting the same repository. Once I figured this out, things started to make a lot more sense, thanks to a robust dashboard that offered the familiar tools I was used to, such as events, lists and document libraries.
Alfresco has a wide range of functionality that puts it on par with SharePoint. Users can add whole sites within the company site, with each site tailored to meet your needs. Creating a site in Alfresco was just as easy as creating a SharePoint site. There's not a lot of configuration to be done at the beginning. Alfresco gives you certain templates, which you can customize after the fact -- as opposed to SharePoint, which allows some customization before the site goes live.
The only site type available in the trial is a collaboration site template -- which is fine with me, since collaboration is probably the primary use for an ECM system. Other templates are available if you choose to go with the Enterprise version. Besides the collaboration template, you can also get a document management, Web content management or records management template. You can also get the content platform template, which provides the combined functionality of the document management, Web content management and collaboration templates.
The collaboration site template features all of the goodies that one would expect: a document library, a wiki, a blog and calendar tools. There is also a collection of data lists that can be used to quickly create a contact list, an event agenda, an events list, an issues list or a location list.
I was impressed with the number of features that are ready to go, and with how intuitive the interface is. Links to create new lists and libraries are easy to find, not buried in a ribbon interface like the one SharePoint 2010 now touts.
One touch really charmed me: When building a task list, there are an impressive number of pre-made workflows, which you can use to set up very flexible workflows for your organization. SharePoint, too, enables flexible, configurable workflows, but the configuration is buried inside the settings pages. I liked how Alfresco lets you set it up right from the start.
However, I also found something that was missing from Alfresco: Personalized user websites like the My Site functionality in SharePoint, which lets users create their own mini-collaboration sites. This is not a deal breaker, unless you really want your staff to have this kind of functionality, but I think it is something that Alfresco will need to add and highlight as future versions come out. I have found My Site to be a less-than-stellar website tool, and this could be an area where Alfresco could blow SharePoint away.
Comparing the cost
It's nearly impossible to pin down a straight price comparison for the two ECMs.
Data provided by Alfresco in a presentation states that the first-year license cost for a 1,000-user Alfresco Enterprise deployment is $33,500 ($18,500 for 100 users).
Because Microsoft lets solution providers set their own prices, and because feature sets vary widely, SharePoint pricing can be difficult to determine. Alfresco's presentation states the average list price for SharePoint users as $318,738 for 1,000 seats and $24,669 for 100 seats -- which necessarily has to be taken with several teaspoons of salt. For example, it is common practice to deliver deep discounts for new Microsoft users, depending on what kind of deal an enterprise can cut with Redmond's sales team or the independent solutions provider in question.
Still, because of Alfresco's open-source applications, it's likely that there's a considerable difference between Alfresco and SharePoint. To find out how radical that difference is, I'd suggest contacting the two companies.
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