Alfresco is a very flex­i­ble content-platform in gen­eral. It pro­vides mech­a­nisms to cus­tomize almost every com­po­nent (Spring-Bean, Web­script, Tem­plates) shipped with the core product.

Still, some­times the tech­ni­cal solu­tion does not prove to be even close to what the devel­oper had in mind. This post is about a recent per­sonal chal­lenge and the jour­ney to the solu­tion in an Alfresco Share cus­tomiza­tion project tar­get­ing ver­sion 3.4.

Busi­ness Requirements

The project con­sisted of var­i­ous sto­ries. One was about cus­tomiza­tion of the Share invi­ta­tion email with the fol­low­ing requirements:

• As a Site-Manager, we want an optional per­sonal mes­sage to be included in the invitation-email.
• As a Site-Manager, we want to receive invi­tee read-receipts for invitation-emails
• As a Site-Manager, we want the com­pany logo to appear in the invi­ta­tion email.

The cus­tomer was fairly prag­matic — require­ments imple­mented quickly and decently priced being far more impor­tant than edu­ca­tional value of the code. Hence, it was ok to apply these cus­tomiza­tions on a global level - to all share sites with no fur­ther scop­ing. That all sounded rea­son­ably to me and I was con­fi­dent to get it imple­mented “properly”.

The project was of type fixed-scope and fixed-price. A No-Go due to Heisenberg’s uncer­tainty prin­ci­ple — sure, but there was no way around.

Now, if you are an Alfresco devel­oper read­ing this, please take a minute vir­tu­ally out­lin­ing your solu­tion and make a rough effort esti­ma­tion before pro­ceed­ing with solu­tion jour­ney on the next page. But even if you have no clue what Alfresco is, it might be worth read­ing further.