Creating workflows in Alfresco

The Alfresco Document Management system comes with two types of workflows, a basic workflow and the advanced workflow. This is a comprehensive tutorial on the workflows that Alfresco provides. It covers both theoretical as well as practical aspects of using a workflow within Alfresco. Most small businesses would be using the basic workflow internally. For complex workflows, it would be prudent to hire a professional to help build the workflow and deploy it.

The advanced workflow within Alfresco is an internal effort called Activiti. It is built by the key people behind JBoss. A background in programming is required to setup advanced workflows. Alfresco open sourced Activiti and is used by other projects. A comprehensive manual is available here. Some Java background is needed to understand it. However, it works both as a manual and a tutorial. If there isn't time, there is a 10 minute overview to get started.
Activiti has even been forked into a project called Camunda. More technical information on Camunda can be found here.

Installing the Alfresco Document Management system

Alfresco is a document management system that has been around for a while. It has a decent community edition that is clearly geared to push a business using it to use the Enterprise Edition. For small businesses however, it will take a long time to reach that point. It can be also extended with add-ons of varying quality.

Setup is really easy. Techmint has a great how to on how to setup Alfresco together with the Ngnix web server. The instructions are meant to be executed on a dedicated server or a freshly installed server. So preparation for Alfresco itself is minimal. The instructions are clear, explaining what the commands are for as well as showing them. This is great for installing on other Linux distributions because the commands for doing certain actions would be different. Knowing what the command does allows it to be easily replaced. The only known issue is with downloading Alfresco community edition itself. The download speed can be slow and break off. That is why the HOWTO covers that too, using wget to download the installer file. Overall, if a basic document management system is the requirement, Alfresco is the case.