What is the document management solution and what does the integration look like in cuba platform.
I see that activiti is integrated, but didn’ see anything about alfresco
Hi,
CUBA has a built in feature called File Storage. It is an option to upload and store files in the system. Files can be references via the FileDescriptor entity to associate them with your own business entities.
Normally the storage option is the local filesystem, but it can be stored in other places like AWS S3 as well. Therefore i think it is possible to integrate with other DMS like alfresco. Im not really sure how other features of alfresco expect for file storage could be integrated - but it’s definitely interesting to think through.
Perhaps a Haulmont person can elaborate on that - i thought about something like a DMS integration as well - perhaps anything like that has already been done before?
Activiti is for business process management, so i don’t see any relation here, or was this just an example of another integration?
Bye,
Mario
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hi there, we are debating between developing in alfresco and activity, our copmanyes workflow, cms, and document management and, between developing in cuba , which was recommended by one of our developing partners.
however, i can’t really understand the benefits or disadvantages of cuba and alfresco/activiti. thanks for the feedback
Hi,
ok, so all of the the mentioned alternatives, although have something in common, they are used for very different purposes or to be more precise have different scopes in what can be done with them.
Lets start with Alfresco. Alfresco is a DMS which mainly stores documents (like docx, pdf files and alike). In addition to this main feature they created certain options regarding collaboration (like commenting on documents, working together on a document etc.) and workflows around this documents (like e.g. a worker has to create the document, than the manager can accept or reject it etc.). These workflows can be defined on what is needed - nevertheless they are based around the documents. This is basically the scope of something like Alfresco.
Activiti is a BPMN tool. Although the term workflow is the same as above, the meaning is much more general. A workflow in BPMN means any business process that occurs in an organisation. Activiti can model workflows like “order process” or something along those lines. It is not at all based on documents (although it can interact with documents in different ways).
Then we have CUBA. This is a tool that allows people to develop software. Mainly the software will be business applications meaning that it solves quite often problems that occur within an business / enterprise (although it can solve other more general problems like calculating any kind of computation). So from this point of view it at first glance nothing directly to do with a business process (or workflow). It is more that you can create software that will support the execution of a business process (or the people that are acting on it). But CUBA has certain integrations to better solve the problems from above: workflow management (via integration with activiti) and document integration (via above described FileDescriptor or a possible linking to alfresco).
These can be seen as super-sets of each other. Like alfresco solves only certain workflows regarding documents. Then Activitiy is a super set of the stuff that alfresco provides (from a workflow perspective), because it can solve any kind of workflow. Then CUBA can be seen as a super set of Activiti, because it can not only solve workflow problems directly via a workflow engine, but also indirectly via software that supports business processes and any other business software problems (and other problems as well).
The next step would be the programming language Java. It is a superset of CUBA because it allows to do mostly anything that is doable via a computer.
Additionally, the tools differentiate themselves from being “used” (activity) to being “programmed” (Java).
So to tell you about if CUBA solves your problem, you need to tell us, what the problems actually are, that you want to try to solve.
Bye,
Mario
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Hi,
There is a ready-made BPM and document management platform already built using the CUBA Platform called THESIS (www.thesis-ecm.com) which provides workflow and document management pre-built in to the off the shelf solution.
I would be happy to tell you more if you are interested.
Thanks,
Rishi
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