Lots of proprietry EDMS’s have been procured by trusts. This is silly seeing as Alfresco is a big player and leader in the world of EDMS.
totally agree, just being opensource does not make the project right ultimately you need to find a group of people who can do a good job and support the project after its been developed, having avenues available so you are not tied into those people for ever more (if its commercial) is a contractual thing which does not necessary rely on it being opensource.
Come on folks, surely this question needs to move on.
The real question is Why don’t organisations and suppliers admit that they are using open source and go further and promote the type of open source platforms they are using ?
Maybe suppliers might be concerned that the competition will get hold of their secret sauce and maybe do a better job of it?
Maybe organisations are concerned that they will be admonished by the closed source supplier community and their commissioning organisations?
Putting my white hat on - perhaps its time to introduce inducements tpublicise the wonderful array of open source platforms serving our healthcare market?
Putting my black hat on - maybe its time organisations insisted on open source labelling of software so that vulnerabilities in open source platforms can be addressed more urgently?
Yes - Why not press for Open Source labelling of software used in healthcare?
Malcolm
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couple of comments on the open source I’ve used:
Alfresco Activiti - think this would be really useful to complement our EDMS but have concerns on support ability especially when contractors (in NHS trust) have left. Similar to Phillip comments on trust adoption.
Mirth - tends to be used for small integrations. for bigger imlllementations it needs investment in staff and paid for model. I’d prefer to just move over to Apache equivalents which are better supported outside of health (and work well with FHIR)
Apache tomcat - introduced by commercial suppliers. See alfresco comment plus it works ok but suppliers expected more know how on NHS side.
Apache camel - organisation/people resistance. Works very well but change in technology (and pace) is worrying people
Hi Kevin
Interesting you mention activiti. We’ve been using that for a couple of years now and it forms a major part of our pathway/protocol engine. I’m a big believer in bpm, and it’s great to finally have a decent open source option. It gives you compliance, auditing and monitoring all out of the box. And Bpmn is a visual language which everyone can understand; a perfect fit in my opinion.
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Have any trusts used Alfresco?
It seems very powerful - BPMN2, googledocs, CIMS integration, libreoffice, etc. It would need development resources for a trust (even with the enterprise version) but that has to be expected with a powerful edms. Also needs more skills with support and network teams (Apache*) but I see that as unavoidable (many commercial products need same skills).
I’ve looked at Afresco Activiti, same comments as above but also would help if project teams move away from flowcharts to BPMN2.
I’m not a trust but we used Alfresco Community Edition for the CCIO Leaders Network as a filestore/document repository, alongside Discourse for our forum.
I found it extremely hard to configure and set up, clunky and slow to use, and underfeatured (for example even a basic feature like forgotten password recovery required an additional plugin - which itself was very buggy). We eventually just retired it. Using it for an EDMS in a hospital setting would (from my experience with it) require so much configuration and development that you are almost as well starting from scratch with a more modern web framework and writing something bespoke.
I was left feeling that Alfresco Community Edition was what they I OSINO (Open Source In Name Only), meaning it is basically there as bait to get you interested in buying Alfresco Expensive Edition™. During the time we were using Alfresco CE I was besieged by Alfresco’s marketing team asking if we wanted any help setting it up, but apart from the marketing calls I couldn’t get them to actually help, they were basically just doing a ‘wallet biopsy’ for how likely we were to buy the paid edition. I never even got to see an installation of the paid edition so I’d love to see whether the OOTB features are better.
Maybe I was doing it wrong. I’m certainly not a Java developer. If anyone’s got any pointers I’d be interested.
M
Cheers. My gut feeling was the community version would be a none starter, EDMS is so complex you’d need the support of a commercial supplier and the cost of doing it ourselves would be huge (don’t mean writing our own version).
What version did you use? Had a browse around v5 which seems to have angularJS front end (if it’s like activiti, the older version probably used some java product).
Don’t think the ootb version would be that much different, it’s going to need a certain amount of tomcat, spring, etc knowledge. Think we’d be able to use it dev environment to illustrate concepts and ideas.
Sorry, I am late to this tread. I think this question is confused by the difference between using open source components in a solution to the overall solution being open sourced.
Many of the solutions encountered these days have some open source licensed software in them. Often the overall system providers is respecting and supporting those licensing agreements. So using Python or MySQL is using open sourced components. Many years ago I have had IT Managers refuse to support MySQL over SQLServer. For no reason other than they only understood Microsoft. Now I find that IT Managers are very open to those kind of solutions and are often using software themselves that is open sourced.
Then we come to OpenSource applications for health and social care. I think there is a catch here often at the moment. These solutions are frequently only really supported by one company - who is open sourcing the application but is really the only option for configuration and delivery. That’s the honest trust at the moment I think. For me a solution that is truly open source can be supported and built on by any company - not just one or two.
As an example, we’ve just installed SuiteCRM for a health care client and that is an open sourced solution that uses open sourced components and can be configured and added to by a number of companies.
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