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  1. Documentation
  2. DOCU-57

Documentation severely lacking in several areas

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    • Improvement
    • Resolution: Outdated
    • Major
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      I signed up yesterday for the 60 day EE trial after seeing this on the Magnolia website:

      "Customers of Magnolia Enterprise Edition receive additional documentation upon purchase. The documentation for Magnolia Enterprise Edition includes detailed information on all added functionality.

      Please contact us for further information"
      (source: http://www.magnolia.info/home/community/documentation.html )

      So I clicked the link and asked for the documentation. Here was the response I received back:

      "As we cannot find you in our POC records, may I ask why you are asking? Regards, Boris [Kraft, CEO, Co-Founder, Magnolia Americas, Inc.]"

      I responded back:

      "I just signed up for your 60-day trial yesterday and I'm finding the online documentation and mailing lists severely lacking. I'm hoping this 'additional documentation' will help answer my questions."

      Boris's response:

      "Please be so kind and add in the most specific way possible what you are missing as a task to jira, so that we can update our documentation accordingly. We have seen many successful projects and happy clients with less than the existing documentation, but people have different expectations, and we are working on meeting them."

      Alright Boris, here's the constructive criticism that you're seeking:

      I am currently evaluating open-source JCR-based CMS solutions. I need to know if a CMS package does the following:

      • Does it store the following:
        o XML (including metadata extraction upon check-in and searching of that XML metadata)
        o Binary Files
      • Does it permit versioning, and if so, how does it work?
      • Does it offer multiple "spaces"?
      • How do the User and Group Permissions work? What types of authentication servers can it use? Can it differentiate within a single group between those users who have read-write privileges and those users who have read-only privileges?
      • Does it permit easy purging of "expired" files - preferably via automatic means?
      • What types of replication / clustering does it permit?
      • What are the backend database choices?
      • How does it do a consistency check between the database and the files to make sure (a) orphaned files do not occur, and (b) files are not deleted without updating the database?
      • Is there a web service option? What is the web service API? Is there sample Java code using this web service API?
      • Is there a Java API for an embedded server? Is there sample Java code using this embedded server?

      The first CMS I looked at was Alfresco. Alfresco has VOLUMINOUS documentation - so much so that it's very difficult to browse. But if I google the various topics I listed above, I quickly found what I needed.

      Magnolia was the second CMS at which I looked. You folks need far more documentation. As an example, regarding my question of versioning, Google searches failed, so I had to hunt in the user-list to find the following stashed in the middle of threads (and it took me a while to find the message that described how to enable it in the documents section):

      Compare that with Alfresco - this information was at the top of Google searches for "Alfresco versioning":

      Do you see the difference?

      I still have three open queries in the user-list:

      http://www.nabble.com/Replication---clustering-td19080762.html
      http://www.nabble.com/XML-Metadata-Extraction-for-searching--td19080480.html
      http://www.nabble.com/Can-one-set-Magnolia-to-expire-files-automatically-after-a-specified-time-period--td19080532.html

      The answer I received on that last query is not what I wanted to hear. Automated expiration of documents should be a standard feature, not something I need to write and debug myself.

      Alfresco appears to meet our needs right now, especially in the documentation department. With Magnolia, I'd have a lot more work to do to get it in shape, praying to G-d that I found the bugs in my code before we went live. I hope this will help y'all get a better picture of what your users need.

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              gjoseph Magnolia International
              philip.schlesinger Philip Schlesinger
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