With an application as deep and powerful as Alfresco, knowing where to start learning can be daunting, and finding the latest detailed product information can be equally challenging. New for 2014, we’ve put together an updated list of Alfresco educational resources for you, including the addition of some great items that weren’t yet available when this index was first published nearly 3 years ago. We hope you find this useful, and please let us know if we’ve left off anything important!
Major Resources
Some of the best learning assets are also the largest and most comprehensive. If you have learning needs across a variety of topics, these major resources would be great places to start. Subsets of these items may be listed in the topical sections that follow.
- – A thorough white paper introducing the key business benefits of enterprise content management in general, and Alfresco in particular. Authored by Blue Fish founder Michael Trafton.
- Alfresco University – A great collection of both online and on-site courses, free and paid, covering a variety of topics. Helpful for beginners or veterans, administrators, developers, and end-users. All courses offered on an ongoing basis by Alfresco.
- Alfresco Docs – The canonical index of reference material for all Alfresco topics. Content is authoritative and covers all Alfresco types and versions.
- Alfresco Wiki – An impressive community-managed information resource containing code snippets, edge-case specifics, and technical cook books. Meant to round out the more formal array of information available on the Docs site.
Intro Topics (for end users, management, and project coordinators)
- Alfresco’s Getting Started index – An impressive stack of resources that may be a one-stop shop for many new learners.
- Blue Fish case studies – A collection of real-life solution stories that show off the power of Alfresco and other Blue Fish solutions.
- Alfresco Elements courses at Alfresco University – A curated series of online courses covering major Alfresco building blocks. Many modules available for free.
- Terminology Guide – An exhaustive glossary of Alfresco terms and concepts, maintained by the wiki community.
- What is ECM? – An introductory treatise on Enterprise Content Management, from the global community of information professionals.
- Trying Alfresco for yourself – see Trying / Evaluating below.
For Administrators
- Alfresco Administrator courses at Alfresco University – A series of mostly on-demand courses for Alfresco administration and configuration. Highly recommended.
- Blue Fish YouTube channel – Helpful demos and exploration of useful features and workarounds, covering Alfresco and other ECM tools.
- Data Dictionary – The key resource for understanding how Alfresco stores information in the repository. Also includes a step-by-step guide for creating new object model definitions with custom types, aspects, and associations. Relevant to both administrators and developers.
- Docs: Administering Alfresco Enterprise – Detailed formal presentation of administration topics, authored and carefully organized by Alfresco
- Alfresco101 YouTube Channel – Alfresco’s official YouTube channel covers a huge range of topics, but is particularly helpful for new administrators because of the wealth of good, free tutorial videos published here.
For Developers
- – Our own in-house blog contains more than 110 articles and tutorials (and counting), covering a huge range of topics from industry news to detailed technical walk-throughs.
- Alfresco Developer series at Alfresco University – Guided course modules through many Alfresco development topics, many of which are instructor-led.
- Develop in Alfresco – Major developer hub maintained by Alfresco.
- Wiki: Developer Guide – The Alfresco community’s best development resources.
- Alfresco Forums – A decent, free resource for getting your questions answered. As with any forum, this can be a great place to find or request a remedy for a very particular use case or roadblock that you may be facing. By the same stroke, be sure to note the date of any answers that you find, as Alfresco has been updated extensively in the last few years and these updates may invalidate some older recommendations on the forums.
- Alfresco Developer Series – A great list of development resources from Jeff Potts, a seasoned Alfresco architect.
- CMIS Resource Center – Another resource list from Jeff Potts, covering the critical API / query language for the Alfresco repository.
- Alfresco Issues – Search for existing issues in Alfresco or add new ones.
- Alfresco API Reference – The API reference is a great resource when you’re writing custom Web Scripts.
- Alfresco Add-ons – The successor to Alfresco Forge, a directory of enhancements and helpful configurations for Alfresco.
Other resources
Blogs, Periodicals, and Social Media
- – Six years’ worth of ECM expertise, mainly dealing with high-level discussion and demonstration of Alfresco’s capabilities.
- Alfresco webinar archive – A huge library of previously-recorded webinars, available for free and covering an extensive array of topics.
- ECM Architect – Jeff Pott’s blog is a great way to keep up with some of the changes in Alfresco and Enterprise Content Management.
- Alfresco Blogs – A hub for architects and experts writing on a variety of Alfresco topics.
- Alfresco on Facebook – Like here to track along with less formal updates from Alfresco.
- Twitter users worth following:
- @mikeytrafton – Blue Fish founder and Chief Architect – retweets the most interesting Alfresco tweets from around the tweetosphere
- @Alfresco – Alfresco’s company twitter account, posts Alfresco related news and retweets most Alfresco employees
- @pmonks – Alfresco consulting guru
- @johnnewton – Alfresco’s co-Founder and CTO
- #Alfresco – tweets about Alfresco from the entire Alfresco community
Trying / Evaluating Alfresco
- Alfresco One – The premier enterprise-level on-premise Alfresco tier used by world-class companies. Available for free trial.
- Alfresco in the Cloud – Evaluate Alfresco’s hosted SaaS edition, used by teams and enterprises.
- Alfresco Community – Community-supported on-premise version of Alfresco, always available for free download.
Books / In print
- Free book sections from Alfresco – Covering topics relevant for business owners, project managers, administrators, and end users.
- Alfresco 4 Enterprise Content Management Implementation – The most up-to-date information currently in print regarding utilization and administration of Alfresco
- Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management – Written by Alfresco CTO and engineering staff
- Alfresco Developer Guide – Jeff Potts’s book, full of step-by-step instructions on how to implement many of the most common configurations and customizations of Alfresco. Somewhat dated but still very applicable and relevant.
- Alfresco 3 Web Services
