Alfresco Content Services (historically Alfresco One, and before that Alfresco Enterprise Edition) is a commercial product with some proprietary components which is built on the open source core represented by Alfresco Community Edition. After Community Edition has been evaluated by our user community, additional features are added and the release is re-tested by our quality assurance team against our supported software stacks before being recommended to our commercial subscribers.
Our reasoning around how we differentiate the Community and Enterprise Editions is described in this blog post by Alfresco co-founder John Newton and further detailed in this blog post https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2016/03/29/applying-the-open-core-model-in-alfresc....
This is a list of capabilities that are available in Alfresco Enterprise Edition, but not in Community Edition.
There is a nice chart showing the main differences here.
This is a chart showing differences between the various Alfresco products.
If you are on Enterprise Edition and decide you want to move to Community Edition, you should read this page.
Non-Functional Differences
- Recommended for production use
- Hot Fix update and Service pack program
- Defect escalation and prioritization process
- Rigorously tested and certified against multiple OS, DB, application servers
- Support assistance for developers and administrators around installation, configuration and upgrades
- Certified for high availability
- 24x7 Severity 1 production support and services
- 24x7 support portal
- Defined support SLA
- Platform testing and certification process
- Limited warranty and indemnity
- Access to product knowledge base
- Certification training for developers and administrators
- Certified regional partner support
- Consulting and professional services available from Alfresco
Functional Differences
- Support for enterprise databases and storage (like Oracle, SQL Server, Centera, AWS S3 and Glacier)
- Support for enterprise application servers (like WebLogic and WebSphere)
- Integrations with proprietary applications (like Outlook)
- Clustering (and as a side effect, there are no persistent URL ticket caches on Community Edition.)
- Encryption of content in the repository
- Encryption of properties and sub-system properties
- Advanced media management
- HTML5 inline video viewing
- Video trimming
- Video commenting at timepoints
- Image cropping and rotation
- Custom metadata for media types
- Renditions panel in the document library
- JMX support
- Storage policies for defining classes of storage (i.e. new data to fast storage, old data to cheap storage)
- Transformation Server for offloading transformation from the main repository
- Hybrid Sync for connecting the repository with Alfresco in the cloud
- High performance desktop synchronization back-end
- Advanced reporting and analytics
- Integration with Pentaho Enterprise
- The Delegating Event Publisher classes
- By default, Enterprise Edition sends repository usage information to Alfresco as a 'heartbeat'. This helps us know what versions are in use, and make better decisions about the product. Community Edition usage is approximately tracked with our "logo pixel".
- Starting with the release of Alfresco Community Edition 5.1, the Microsoft Office integration is provided by a proprietary add-on called Alfresco Office Services instead of the open source VTI module. This allows Community Edition and Enterprise Edition to use the same implementation.
- Prior to Alfresco Community Edition 201801 / Alfresco Content Services 6.0, Jod Connector for high performance OpenOffice / LibreOffice transformations was only available in the commercial edition.
Administration tools
Some administration tools (due to their dependence on JMX) are not included in Community Edition even though their capabilities are. For instance Community Edition has IMAP and outbound email, but you cannot configure it from the Administration Console. Needing to change the configuration in XML and reload the property file often requires a restart of the Alfresco service.
From the Share 4.0 Admin Console:
- Repository
- Activities Feed
- Fileservers
- Google Docs
- Repository Descriptor (Originally installed)
- Repository Descriptor (Current)
- Subscriptions
- Sysadmin
- Email
- Email (IMAP)
- Email (Outbound)
- Transformations
- OpenOffice (JMX)
- Transformer ImageMagick (JMX)
- Transformer pdf2swf (JMX)
Add-on Modules
- Outlook Integration
- Amazon S3
- Kofax
- SAML
Alfresco Mobile
The Alfresco Mobile app that is available to Enterprise Edition subscribers contains the following features not available in the open source version:
