Alfresco Credit Crunch Innovation Awards 2009 Finalists
Finalists
EMEA Commercial Sector
EMEA Public Sector
North America Commercial Sector
North America Public Sector
EMEA Commercial Sector
EADS Astrium & EADS EPS
Industry: Aerospace
Geography: France
Summary of project and achievements:
Global EADS integrated paperless Human Resources administration system. Dematerialized workflows, electronic employees folder.
Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project:
Folder constrained structure: within an "employee folder", a document must live within a particular subfolder depending on its type (resume, contract, etc.). Naming is entirely automated, and some types of document must go through workflows.
Workflow enhancements/constraints: workflows are first-class citizens: you create a workflow concerning a given employee and *then* attach documents. A workflow type defines which documents (types) are required or optional for each state. Upon approval, documents are automatically saved in the appropriate subfolder depending on their type. ACLs apply to workflows: you may have rights to see a workflow but not attach documents to it and/or process it (depending on its current state).
Administration: decentralized user/groups administration ("BU administrators" manage users and groups for their BU)
ACL management (on employee-related objects) via "rules" : employees are virtually grouped within "populations" (criteria matching), access rights are given to user groups on "populations", different ACLs are applied to each document, folder and workflow depending on its "confidentiality level" (tied to its "type"). Workflow assignment depends on these rules too.
Given this is an HR solution security was key – for example account locked during 30 minutes after 5 failed login attempts (permanently locked for admin users); passwords expire and the last 12 used passwords cannot be reused.
Please describe why you chose Alfresco. Were you using a different solution previously? If so, why did you change?
Advanced Content Security Management. Open source that allows easy evolutions. No client installation. Pre-configured workflows. Pre-configured space templates. Easy administration. Distributed architecture. Intelligent repository.
Describe the solution/service/web site you built using Alfresco:
A unique system to support all exchanges between users, BUs and/or HR Central Service Operations (EADS Personnel Services or EPS). Capacities to implement directly BUs and EPS processes and workflows. An opportunity to have a new approach for better work, to reduce processing delays and avoid local paper documents copies. Documents sharing capabilities between EPS and BUs, inside each BU and between BUs in appropriate spaces. Interfaced with SAP HR. Capacities to trace and monitor processes. UBIC is a "Web 2.0" application made with GWT and talking to Alfresco through Web Scripts on HTTPS; Alfresco Explorer is never, ever used (CIFS, FTP and SOAP WebServices are disabled; WebDAV is used for online editing with MS Office and accesses through Windows' Network Places).
Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment (e.g. hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases). Please highlight the use of other open source software in the solution:
Linux, Tomcat, Oracle on a bi pro server with 8GB of RAM and 500GB of disks in RAID5 First phase: only one Business Unit Astrium : 8500 employees, 10000 workflows/year (estimate), 110 users (2/3 on the BU side vs. 1/3 on the EPS side) Next Phase: more than 40 000 employees with the French's BU. Later, the objective is to manage 24 million documents.
Did you work with a certified Alfresco partner? If so, please name them and describe your experience:
With Atol Conseils et Développements
What value did you gain from implementing Alfresco and how did this impact your business?
Time to market: 18 months
What sorts of “soft” benefits do you have (collaboration, ease of use, flexibility of deployment and access, etc.)?
Easy to use digitilized employee folder, Real-time system, no specific client required
What advice do you have for other companies facing a similar business challenge?
Look at example of UBIC.
EMEA Public Sector
National AIDS Control Council
Industry: Education
Geography: Kenya
Summary of project and achievements:
Deploying Alfresco ECM complete suite. Has greatly improved collaboration mostly with our 9 regional offices which are located throughout the country.
Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project:
Poor links, sometimes unstable links to our field offices meant that sometimes users were frustrated trying to access the system which is based at HQ.
Please describe why you chose Alfresco. Were you using a different solution previously? If so, why did you change?
Open source: to be able to customize and optimize to meet NACC's users' needs and requirements.
Describe the solution/service/web site you built using Alfresco:
A very collaborative site for sharing documents with our stakeholders at the regional offices.
Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment (e.g. hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases). Please highlight the use of other open source software in the solution:
The size of the deployment covered nine regional offices plus HQ. The database used was open source RDMS, MySQL. The system was implemented on a Windows 2003 server but there are plans to migrate this to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment before the end of the calendar year. The services currently under use are: - collaboration - DMS – WCM. We plan to rollout records management soon as other services await more resources to be allocated.
Did you work with a certified Alfresco partner? If so, please name them and describe your experience:
No. It was done in-house.
What value did you gain from implementing Alfresco and how did this impact your business?
Time to market - 1 month
Cost reductions - Yes, a lot
Service delivery improvements - Improved collaboration
What sorts of “soft” benefits did you gain (collaboration, ease of use, flexibility of deployment and access, etc.)?
Collaboration and hence a more satisfied user.
What advice do you have for other companies facing a similar business challenge?
Implement Alfresco.
North-West University, South Africa
Industry: Education
Geography: South Africa
Summary of project and achievements:
Alfresco was chosen as ECM technology solution for the North-West University in June 2008. We started off with Alfresco Enterprise 2.2.1 and has recently upgraded to Alfresco Enterprise 3.0.1.
In South Africa we have a very real infrastructure problem with low bandwidth between centers. The North West University comprises 3 campuses with very low bandwidth in between. We had to come up with a solution which addresses high availability as well as search across campuses.With the help of I-Kno Knowledge Solutions we managed to set up clusters on each campus for high availability and a repository on each. With Alfresco Share's new Surf technology we managed to set up a dashboard with one search across all 3 campuses (repositories) as well as search results for all 3 campuses. This is all transparent to the user who may only experience a slight delay when editing a document on another campus.
Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project:
North-West University was formed following the merger of two separate universities back in 2004, and as such we were faced with the prospect of having to integrate two sets of records and documentation. Added to this, we needed to effectively store and manage this information across three geographically distinct campus locations. With no existing central repository, staff at the university were relying on shared file drives on their desktops and paper-based filing.
The day-to-day administrative work at a university is very similar to that of any small to medium business enterprise. We were integrating an ever-increasing amount of documentation on to the shared drives, and the sheer quantity of data on the system meant that it was becoming very hard to search and locate files in an efficient and timely manner.
Legislation passed down from senior management at the university stipulated that a content management system was required to address the problem. One of the major challenges we would face in terms of implementing such a system, was the very real problem of low bandwidth issues across South Africa. Not only that, but there was also the ongoing criminal activity of people dismantling the phone lines to steal and sell the copper inside.
Given that the university was spread over three campuses, we had to come up with a solution which would address high availability as well as search across the campuses.
Please describe why you chose Alfresco. Were you using a different solution previously? If so, why did you change?
Previously we had not been using a different solution – only shared file drives on desktops. The Alfresco architecture was open source, modular and standards-based which offered us the performance and scalability to integrate into our existing infrastructure. It was also easy-to-use and far cheaper than the competition.
Describe the solution/service/web site you built using Alfresco:
There now exists a robust enterprise content management system, allowing for searches based on attributes, content, categories and folder location. A single dashboard provides this search facility across all 3 campuses (repositories), as well as search results for all 3 campuses. This is transparent to the user who may only experience a very slight delay when editing a document on another campus.
The cross-campus repository is accessible via an easy-to-use single sign-on, designed to allow users to view content held on each repository without logging to each one separately.
Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment (e.g. hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases). Please highlight the use of other open source software in the solution:
We started off with Alfresco 2.2.1 and then upgraded to Alfresco Enterprise 3.0.1 midway through the project. We used Alfresco’s Share’s new Surf technology to develop the searchable dashboard across the 3 campuses. In order to create an easy-to-use cross-campus repository with a single sign-on for users, we used a Central Authentication Service (CAS) – designed to provide a trusted way to authenticate users through a single-sign on.
Did you work with a certified Alfresco partner? If so, please name them and describe your experience:
I-Know Knowledge Solutions were used as a certified Alfresco partner, and we have been incredibly happy from a support perspective. From a development perspective things maybe progressed a little slower than expected, because we loaded I-Kno with a lot of unforeseen infrastructure issues so had less time to spend on the development issues.
What value did you gain from implementing Alfresco and how did this impact your business?
Although hard to quantify a return on investment at this stage, there is no doubt that user productivity at NWU has increased immeasurably.
What sorts of “soft” benefits did you gain (collaboration, ease of use, flexibility of deployment and access, etc.)?
Things are at an early stage, but plans are afoot to implement a multi-repository search function with the capacity to search all 3 repositories at once, and there has been talk of opening up the system to students to create an online collaborative knowledge forum.
North America Commercial Sector
CRIX International
Industry: Clinical Research
Geography: USA
Summary of project and achievements:
Integrated Alfresco with jBoss Portal and security subsystem to create MyTeams, an ability for portal users to create and form teams and have a team-oriented, secure workspace generated and available through the portal. Primary partner is Rivet Logic.
Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project:
Business challenges are the requirement for high security and integration with complex credentialling requirements. Technically, Alfresco capabilities need to be surfaced via the portal, so JSR portlets are required.
Please describe why you chose Alfresco. Were you using a different solution previously? If so, why did you change?
We chose Alfresco because of the capabilities on the backend repository and the caliber and extent of integration tools available with Alfresco. We don't have to invent any of the sophisticated content management features, just expose them.
Describe the solution/service/web site you built using Alfresco:
CRIX collaboration portal, which is offered in a SaaS mode with the jBoss portal stack being used for presentation and Alfresco being used for content management and collaboration. MySQL is the primary db technology.
Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment (e.g. hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases). Please highlight the use of other open source software in the solution:
The solution is 90% open source, with the exception being proprietary pieces used for security, specifically PKI. We are engineering the portal to support thousands of users, with the potential of 50,000 research doctors using the portal regularly in the US. We are using Dell hardware with fault tolerance built in at the disk, NIC and server level for most servers. We are using the financial services configuration for MySQL and will be looking at federated and distributed servers and data centers in the future, likely toward the end of 2009.
Did you work with a certified Alfresco partner? If so, please name them and describe your experience:
Yes, and we're very pleased to be doing so. Our partner for this has been Rivet Logic and we continue to work with RL as a key partner. They have been instrumental in helping CRIX with architecture and strategy as well as providing stellar development.
What value did you gain from implementing Alfresco and how did this impact your business?
TCO: is expected to be reduced dramatically from proprietary conent management alternatives
Time to market: Much faster with configuration over custom implementation
Cost reductions: significant with shared platform
Service delivery improvements: Self-service model is available, so teams can get up right away
What sorts of “soft” benefits did you gain (collaboration, ease of use, flexibility of deployment and access, etc.)?
Immediate collaboration capability in a secure environment across organizations. No organization has to expose infrastructure, tinker with firewalls or provision credentials to users.
What advice do you have for other companies facing a similar business challenge?
Look at business requirements and security and architect the solution picking products and solutions that can meet both from the start.
TravelMuse
Industry: Travel
Geography: USA
Summary of project and achievements:
TravelMuse is the online destination for finding travel inspiration and planning trips. Our startup selected Alfresco WCM to aggregate and correlate content from various sources (internal editorial, open-source geospatial data, as well as licensed travel content) into XML format. This mine of information of over 300k documents is made available at the fingertips of TravelMuse members researching their vacation destination through lucene-based full text searches as well as TravelMuse unique processing of Alfresco’s internal extracted metadata for database-driven vertical searches leveraging community data such as ratings.
Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project:
- enable travel writers to add/edit articles to the site w/o application changes
- XML-based datastore to aggregate disparate travel content from the web and partners
- full text search engine with the optional ability to search XML field
- authorization framework for different roles
- content versioning
Please describe why you chose Alfresco. Were you using a different solution previously? If so, why did you change?
- Java-based
- XSD-based dynamic webforms
- separation of authoring & runtime engines
- no licensing fee
Describe the solution/service/web site you built using Alfresco:
Alfresco manages all the static content on www.travelmuse.com including articles, destination information, activities, restaurants, hotels, etc. Alfresco lucene-based search is also used for the main search feature of the site.
Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment (e.g. hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases). Please highlight the use of other open source software in the solution:
- Sun x86 hardware
- Solaris 10 Virtual Containers
- Sun Glassfish Application Server
- Open-source Java libraries include DataNucleus JDO, jMaki, Shale & Tomahawk
- MySQL 5 database
Did you work with a certified Alfresco partner? If so, please name them and describe your experience:
No. We hired Peter Monks from Alfresco Consulting arm for a kickoff engagement to get us started and then he later helped us with some customization needs.
What value did you gain from implementing Alfresco and how did this impact your business?
Time to market: 3 months
What sorts of “soft” benefits did you gain (collaboration, ease of use, flexibility of deployment and access, etc.)?
Preview web content from personal sandbox in real dynamic page on QA server.
What advice do you have for other companies facing a similar business challenge?
Think through your data model needs very thoroughly at the beginning and do your best to get the design as complete as possible upfront as it is much harder to make any change later after you go live with it!
North America Public Sector
Warren County Correctional Center
Industry: Government
Geography: USA
Summary of project and achievements:
Alfresco’s open source ECM software formed the core of the Warren County Correctional Center Inmate Document Management (IDM) system. When an inmate is booked, basic information (such as name, date of birth, contacts) is entered into IDM and a set of Alfresco folders are created for the inmate's documents. At this time the inmate’s fingerprint is also captured and registered to be used when signing online forms later on.
Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project:
We were drowning in paper and needed an easy-to-use document management system that was cost effective. With approximately 1,400 inmates being admitted each year, Warren County Correctional Center was accumulating roughly 100 pages of documents per inmate. Typically, inmates have multiple files related to bookings, medical and classified documentation which cumulatively created a massive amount of paper files. The amount of paper documentation created by each new inmate combined with the millions of pages of historical documents, were quickly out-growing the storage capacity. We realized we needed a document management system that would alleviate the hard-copy paper files accumulated for inmates as well as provide a central place for personnel to look up files. Also, the system needed to provide the appropriate level of access control so that files were available to authorized users and restricted to others.
Please describe why you chose Alfresco. Were you using a different solution previously? If so, why did you change?
Our systems implementer, Chenoa recommended Alfresco as the basis of the solution due to its low cost as an open source enterprise content management vendor. Warren County had experience using other proprietary ECM solutions such as Documentum, but the cost of implementing these solutions were significantly higher. Alfresco surpassed all of the technical requirements, was more flexible and allowed for easy customization.
Describe the solution/service/web site you built using Alfresco:
Alfresco’s open source ECM software formed the core of the Warren County Correctional Center Inmate Document Management (IDM) system. The most significant feature of the new IDM solution is the ability to transform all internal forms into digital paper that contain digital signatures by inmates, officers, supervisors, nurses, doctors, and others. As a result, Correctional Center staff can better manage inmate documentation in one central location while maintaining the access controls required by the state. Per New Jersey state requirements, all inmate documents require a TIFF file. This is generated from the PDF online form, and both are stored in the Alfresco repository. This helps meet the state storage requirements for inmate documentation and makes it easy to provide inmate documentation when it is transferred to other facilities by providing all the forms on a CD or DVD.
Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment (e.g. hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases). Please highlight the use of other open source software in the solution:
Alfresco’s open source ECM software formed the core of the Warren County Correctional Center Inmate Document Management (IDM) system. Other technologies integrated into the IDM solution include Kofax for document scanning, Adobe PDFs for online forms, Ascertia for digital signatures (on the online forms), and DigitalPersona for user authentication through fingerprint recognition. To enhance security of these internal documents, Warren County Correctional Center requires both the inmate’s digital signature and the digital signature of the officer or staff member filling out or modifying the form. The IDM system includes strict controls and rules-based policies that restrict staff member access to inmate information. This ensures that access is given only to the appropriate individuals. The fingerprint authentication is used to identify form signers, thereby eliminating the need for identification and passwords, which are not practical for an inmate population.
Did you work with a certified Alfresco partner? If so, please name them and describe your experience:
Chenoa, a global technology firm, were used to develop and implement the solution
What value did you gain from implementing Alfresco and how did this impact your business?
TCO: Alfresco was significantly less expensive than other vendors and offered us the same functionality with greater customization and interoperability.
Cost reductions: Reduced volume of paper storage by 90 percent; eliminated the duplication of documents in different folders; and increased efficiency of the inmate booking process.
Service delivery improvements: Established greater access controls over inmate documentation; facilitated instantaneous document retrieval.
What sorts of “soft” benefits did you gain (collaboration, ease of use, flexibility of deployment and access, etc.)?
The solution will help us dramatically improve our inmate document management procedures. Not only will we reduce the amount of paper, but all of the files will be kept electronically making it easier to search, control accesses and comply with state document regulations. The system can grow with us as document management regulations evolve as well as integrate with other applications used by the county and state. Alfresco’s flexibility and openness make it easy for the IDM application to interface with internal documents as well as documents from outside the jail system such as complaints, warrants, bail warrants, court papers or police documents.
