Recommending a DMS for a Large-Scale Enterprise

Question

It's been two days I'm searching to select an appropriate open-source DMS for a large-scale enterprise. Among all of the open-source document management systems written in Java, Nuexo, LogicalDoc and Alfresco seem to have a good reputation. However, I couldn't find a fair comparison among them and as I don't have any experience in this context, it's so hard to choose among them. So far, I have installed Nuxeo and LogicalDoc and checked some of their functionalities. It seems both have many common features. I don't have any idea about Alfresco yet but it made me somehow disappointed because it seems its community edition does not include most of its useful features (http://www.alfresco.com/products/community).

Finally there some important criteria I'm supposed to consider in all of them:

• Easy customization
• Changing language and theme
• Supporting interfaces for third-party applications
• Developer guide (documentation)

I'd be grateful if you share your experience in this context.

Answer 1

Nuxeo might suit your needs:

• It is OSGI-based, so you can customize it heavily with XML and / or Java (see Nuxeo Explorer for an exhaustive list of extension points, contributions, ...). Nuxeo Studio is available if you choose to subscribe to Nuxeo Online Services, it is not mandatory but makes it faster to customize Nuxeo through a UI.
• It fully supports i18n and theme customization. It is part of the OSGI model.
• Nuxeo already provides addons to communicate with some third-party applications through standard protocols. But, depending on what you need, you can build a custom one, containing web services for example, or any other custom communication protocol.
• The documentation is available here. Nuxeo is fully open-source, you can find the sources on GitHub.

Nuxeo Platform is free, there is no restrictions on which OS or DB is or is not supported. The subscription to Nuxeo Online Services provides access to Nuxeo Studio, Nuxeo Marketplace, Nuxeo Cloud and Nuxeo Support. You might want to subscribe, depending on your needs.

Answer 2

Alfresco community may address all the criterias you mentioned since

• being primarily a Spring based application, it is easy to customize and extend using webscript technology
• it widely supports i18n and theme changing on Share
• it can easily interact with some third-party applications like Liferay, Kofax and others through addons
• it has a very consistent and wide community and lot of documentation, blogs and many books written by most known Alfresco partners.

Obviously, in a production, enterprise wide application you should go for an Enterprise Edition license. Alfresco is fully open source but this doesn't mean it's free at all.

You can find a very good comparison between community and enterprise edition in this SO post