Abu Dhabi Ship Building was looking for a cost effective solution that would streamline inter-departmtent communication and document exchange and solve issues like version control, tighter security and semantic searches. After initial evaluation the choices were narrowed to Microsoft Sharepoint and Alfresco.

Alfresco won the bid due to its advance content management features, ease of use and cost effectiveness. Customization by Businessware Technologies further increased the ease of use.

Instead of relying on proprietory sharepoint protocol and its support in applications; Alfresco's respository can be mounted as normal shared drive that most of users in general and at ADSB already knew about.

The shared drive were replaced transparently with alfresco repository, further to enhance the ease of use Businessware Technologies enhance the core package with following

• Scripts were written to display actions in windows explorer see the screenshot below, so if you want to make a file versionable, just right click the file and make it versionable, means a smarter more, powerful shared drive.
• The Alfresco and Share clients were patched so moving between application can be eaiser.

The provided solution had the following

• SSO (Single Sign On) with Active Directory integration
• Search form was enhanced for custom content
• Custom forms was created (e.g. in bonita) for submitting the content to repository.
• Repository access through CIFS (Shared Drive) and shell scripts to enhance ease of use.

The normal phases of ECM implementation such as, Content classification and modeling, security roles and permissions definition, content migration planning and end-user training were part of the undertaking.