Do you experience slow response time? Are your UI pages taking forever to load?
Are you running an old, unsupported Alfresco version? Do you experience version control issues? Are you reaching a +50M documents milestone?

If you have answered yes to any of these questions, it might be time to get ready for the digital future. To do so, we advise conducting an Alfresco audit.

Intelligent Information Management systems (also well known as Enterprise Document Management) play a central role in business infrastructure. With the acceleration of the digitalization of the processes, we experience an increase in volumes and customers’ requests. However, while most companies have digitized their document management, those systems are becoming less effective.

They’re less effective because they’re not keeping up with technology. They’re not keeping up with the increasingly rapid changes happening in the workplace, organizations’ systems and processes, and changes in the market.

As digital use cases are growing, document numbers and types are exponentially generated. This increases pressure on ECM systems. Non-acceptable service or performance levels become the biggest challenges for ECM delivery teams. 

Fig 1: Zia Consulting Alfresco DevCon 2019 Performance Tools of the Trade

On the other hand, our customers hardly intervene on the central platform.

First, it has become critical to many of the business processes, across multiple departments. This means that making changes or upgrades might imply changes all over the place. Secondly, because operational budgets are lacking or not correctly anticipated. 

Thirdly, most don’t know there’s an issue until a support ticket is created, an internal developer contacts the ECM team, or business management escalates an incident to the ECM application owner. Most of the time, issues could have been avoided if tackled during Business Implementation or if the ECM team was involved in business projects.

We are now facing customers for whom the ECM performances are beginning to be a bottleneck in the continuous digital transformation. At this point, they are looking at several options, from upgrading to replacing their ECM system. Our audit methodology offers them an objective way to answer those questions and find the best path for them.  

As a premier and technological partner, we have been working with several companies around the world to assess their current Alfresco implementation, estimating the current risks, pain-points. Those audits lead to upgrade paths or major changes to their infrastructure. The results of audits helped to avoid big, lengthy, costly projects while making their ECM operational for more than a couple of years. 

Alfresco Audit: 3 steps to fine-tune

1. Analysis at rest. In this phase, we evaluate the key metrics of the Alfresco system, from the size of your ECM (including the number of documents, database, indexes,…) to the construction of the document model, access control, use cases, and infrastructure. At this stage, we understand where issues can arise from your Alfresco usage. We recommend deploying our Alfred Ops Monitoring suite to rapidly collect metrics about all the system’s components. 

2. Dynamic analysis. In this phase, we evaluate the performance of the system under usage with the aim of finding the performance bottlenecks. 

3. Quick Wins & Recommendations. Based on the outcomes of the analysis, we recommend the next steps and potential solutions. Specific issues can be tackled during the whole process. There is no need to wait until the end of the audit to leverage quick wins. If requested, the final deliverable might include a step-by-step upgrade plan. 

Getting all the power out of Alfresco requires the correct settings for the correct use case. Our expertise help to identify the right set of parameters to get the best performance for your organization. Get started with your Alfresco audit.