5 year retrospective – Project document management in Alfresco

Project goals

Government subsidised programs and projects have a great deal of red tape associated with. There are pre-defined reports and milestones associated with each project. Forms must be filled and filed all the way through the project and even after it’s completed the results must be reported. The projected spending must be reported along with the actual spending, and the remaining budget must be visible. It takes lots of paper pushing and record keeping to keep things aligned with the expectations.

Constraints

The University has recently introduced a new ECM system, Alfresco. Since the goal was to base as many projects as possible to Alfresco, the project had to make use of its’ abilities, like the task management, rights management and the document management features. The financial data had to go be stored alongside the relevant documents.

The user interface had to be separated from the Alfresco, as this was a purpose made application, and had to be task centric.

There were only two months for developing the application, before the project subsidy expires. The time frame has also set the maximum possible amount billable.

Development was to be started before the winner of the public bidding was announced. If we didn’t win that would have been a wasted effort.

The source code along with development documentation was to be handed over. The documentation must be detailed enough to make the code understandable for qualified developers.

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