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Is there any open source alternative to Documentum CMS. While doing the evaluation for this I came across Alfresco, Nuxeo and Apache Jackrabbit. I would like to know if I missed something and If there are any other products that I missed.

Thanks in advance.

Regards Ajai G

Ajai Gopal
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You pretty got the point. Nuxeo is based on Open Source but you have to pay the license, and is pretty expensive (at this point, Documentum is better anyway. Apache Jackrabbit, I personally never saw in action, so I don't have a clue. Apache is a strong Open Source mass of projects, so I think for a Java developer is a great point to start. Alfresco, at last, is the best choice here, 'cuz you have Enterprise and Community versions, if you want to pay for support or note. Here, if you are/have Java developers in team, you can create a pretty nice web-app with some great tools like sharing content/workflow/full text indexing and so on. I think it's the most complete system out there, and it really have great potential. I work for a company that is making business with this product, and I have to say we're very happy about it.

Teqnology
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  • Thanks for the response. For evaluation will it be a good option to consider Jackrabbit and Alfresco?. If you can share some more info on the way you use Alfresco, it will guide me a lot to proceed further. – Ajai Gopal Sep 03 '12 at 17:17
  • @AjaiGopal As my personal experience Alfresco is the far most complete platform nowadays. You could try as we did, download the community version, from here: [Download Alfresco](http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_and_Install_Alfresco) and start with the bundle installation. Then, depends on what do you want to do, like, some content management, or workflows, or some scheduled actions. There are plenty of things to learn and to do. We use it for bulk uploading documents and expose them via web script with a URL GET method. [Alfresco Web Scripts](https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Scripts) – Teqnology Sep 04 '12 at 08:08
  • Thanks for the update. Will evaluate Alfresco and post in case of any questions. Thanks again. – Ajai Gopal Sep 04 '12 at 10:48
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So full disclosure - I work for Nuxeo. But I want to clear up a misconception: Nuxeo is fully open source, and does not charge for licenses. The code's on GitHub. There's only one version - no enterprise / community versions. We charge for a subscription to support, maintenance, and a customization tooling.

Jane Zupan
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This is pretty much these ones, AFAIC I would go with Nuxeo

@Alch3mi5t Nuxeo is completely opensource and free (LGPL), even more than Afresco: There is no difference between a Community and a Enterprise version, it's just the same. Customers who are paying have the same product than any other people.

What are they paying for ?

  • Nuxeo Studio, a online graphical tool to easily customize Nuxeo without having to edit xml nor having to write java code.
  • Support to get answers to questions
  • Hot fixes on a specific release can be easily installed from the admin center. (sources are available in github, if you are not a Nuxeo Customer, and you can rebuild these one with maven)

If you need to do more complex customization, here is where Java developers would be happy. Nuxeo has a pluggable architecture with plugins and extension points, almost anything in nuxeo can be overridden in Nuxeo with extension points: UI, server and feature configuration, core configuration, document structures, rest services, backend DB, etc ... it's quite powerful.

There is a free and opensource plugin for eclipse to help java developers: Nuxeo IDE don't hesitate to ask any questions on the irc channel: #nuxeo in freenode

sunix
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