We recently met with a publishing prospect that was looking for a document review and approval approach. As we have been discussing here since back in 2012, there is a significant benefit to having both a form AND dynamic workflow approach rather than just relying on workflow templates. This post will summarize some of the key differences. Form and Workflow Background Forms are often a part of workflow processes. Forms are typically used to capture data from users in order for the ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco and Angular 2.0: Technical First Look
In July, Alfresco released a new Angular 2 framework which promises to deliver developers a new modern way to develop custom Alfresco applications. This post will cover what we've learned about this new framework. Watch a quick demo of the new Angular Interface. https://youtu.be/JHSfLmpFcsI When releasing this framework, Alfresco is actually releasing three different independent pieces. Let's dive into each: ... [Continue Reading]
BPM/Workflow – Why “I want the user to define the form and workflow” doesn’t always work
We had a call last week with a client evaluating form and workflow as part of an overall BPM effort. In evaluating solutions, often we will see technical resources push for a solution “that allows the users to build their own forms and workflow without any IT involvement”. This post will discuss the issues of user constructed workflows as well as share best practices. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco Activiti – Overview of BPMN Suite
In December, we highlighted the Alfresco announcement of the new Activiti BPMN Suite, a new web interface that runs on the Activiti engine that allows users to design workflows on the fly and to share them with different users with different levels of permissions. We sampled the BPMN Suite using a 30 day trial at https://activiti.alfresco.com/. Since then, Alfresco released an early version of the enterprise version of the suite, which we installed on our servers for a test run. The video below ... [Continue Reading]
Productization of Alfresco Activiti (and the Standalone Activiti BPMN Suite)
During Alfresco Summit 2014, Alfresco announced they would begin offering Activiti, their popular workflow and BPM engine, as a separate product offering complete with web interface for building and deploying workflows called the Activiti BPMN Suite. Previous versions of Activiti were able to be used without an Alfresco installation. In previous years, TSG converted all of our Active Wizard workflows to Activiti, which run on both Alfresco and Documentum. The big news about 2014's announcement ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco Summit 2014 Recap
This year, for the first time, TSG had a booth at both the San Francisco and London Alfresco Summit events as the 2014 Americas Partner of the Year. The major announcements included the release of Alfresco 5.0 and the standalone Activiti Designer. We will be reviewing the product updates in an upcoming Alfresco user group meetup on Thursday, November 20. Please join us! Read on for a recap and our thoughts on San Francisco and London. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco and Box – An Integrated Approach for Collaboration and Approval
TSG just finished a successful proof of concept for a life science company that, like many companies, uses Box for collaboration (among other tools) but wanted to add more traditional ECM capabilities like workflow approval and electronic signatures. Alfresco, combined with TSG add-on products, provides robust workflow review and approval. This post will discuss the proof of concept and results. ... [Continue Reading]
Enhancing Alfresco Share with HPI 2.1 – Summary of Series Posting
In preparation for our webinar with Alfresco on February 11th (recording has been posted) on how to enhance or extend Alfresco Share with HPI 2.1. This post is the summary of a series of posts on how HPI 2.1 can work with Share. ... [Continue Reading]
Enhancing Alfresco Share with HPI 2.1 – Document Workflow
TSG will be conducting a Webinar with Alfresco on February 11th (Recording Posted) on how to enhance or extend Alfresco Share with High Performance Interface (HPI) 2.1. This post is the fourth in a series of posts on how HPI 2.1 can work with Share and will focus on Document Workflow. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum and Alfresco BPM – Activiti and Active Wizard 5.0
As you may know, the latest generation Active Wizard codebase utilizes the Activiti Business Process Management (BPM) Platform to provide dynamic workflow for Active Wizard forms and controlled documents. We started down the path of using Activiti in 2012 when we ported the Active Wizard to Alfresco. You can read more about our initial thoughts of using Activiti for Active Wizard in this post from November 2012. For this post, we thought we’d update our readers on the 2013 developments of ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum – EMC World/Momentum 2013 – TSG Recap
Thanks to all of you that again made our Momentum EMC World our most successful posting days. This year was an interesting time. It really made our day to get feedback that many of you look forward to the summaries as well as how the blogs throughout the year have helped with Documentum-related decisions throughout the year. This post will try to wrap-up and summarize all the other postings, as well as express TSG's opinion on the event. ... [Continue Reading]
Activiti BPM Engine – Active Wizard 5.0
As mentioned in our previous post about managing controlled documents in Alfresco, Active Wizard 5.0 utilizes the Activiti BPM platform for dynamic workflow processes. If you're curious about how dynamic workflow works in the Active Wizard, check out this post from earlier this year, which we wrote after we had posted our initial thoughts about Activiti. In this post, we will review how Dynamic workflow has worked in the Active Wizard in the past, and contrast that to how we're using Activiti ... [Continue Reading]
Migrating from Documentum to Alfresco – Controlled Documents – Introducing Active Wizard 5.0
TSG has over 15 years experience building systems to manage controlled documents. Most of these systems have been built on top of Documentum for clients in various industries including Pharmaceuticals, Nuclear Energy, Manufacturing and others. When talking to these clients about their thoughts on moving from Documentum to Alfresco, the inevitable conversation comes up: "How do we manage our controlled documents?" One of our products, Active Wizard, is an electronic forms and workflow product ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum and Alfresco – Electronic Forms and Workflow User Requirements
We met with a client this week that is evaluating the Active Wizard for an electronic forms infrastructure to replace many paper, Word and PDF forms within the organization. The Active Wizard is TSG’s most popular Open Source offering (currently on version 4.0). This post will present the “high priority” requirements along with our thoughts and capabilities of the Active Wizard. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco – Activiti Workflow Thoughts
In a previous post, we discussed how Alfresco compares to Documentum for managing Controlled Documents. A big part of the controlled document process is the workflow engine used for review and approval. This post will go into more detail on Activiti, the workflow engine used in Alfresco 4.0. ... [Continue Reading]
