Legacy ECM customers are no strangers to overly complex systems and expensive license costs. Like most ECM platforms today, the Alfresco user interfaces have functionality that includes “everything and the kitchen sink.” The complex nature of such interfaces requires a large amount of user training, can lead to low user adoption, and requires lots of money to license and maintain. Additionally, consider the company that has business requirements to share documents with clients and third-party vendors—how can a per-user license be justified?

One successful method of enhancing Alfresco for our customers is implementing a search portal based on a read-only cache of documents and metadata that resides outside of the Alfresco repository. The Docuvela team has been implementing search portal applications for customers across many industries since 2005, and we have made the search portal even more robust with the release of Veladocs.  

In this post, we will introduce the concept of a search portal, explore how a Veladocs search portal can enrich an Alfresco implementation, reduce costs, and share how we continue to further improve the search portal approach with Veladocs.

What is a Search Portal?

A Search Portal is a secure, read-only interface that provides streamlined access to your documents and metadata stored in legacy ECM systems. It creates a cache of your documents in a cloud-based environment, allowing users to search, retrieve, and view content without altering the original data. This solution ensures that your valuable information is easily accessible while maintaining its integrity and security.

The most straightforward architecture for a search portal is depicted in the diagram below:

Alfresco metadata and full-text indexing are stored in OpenSearch, and document content is published to Amazon S3. Users wishing to search and view content utilize the Veladocs interface to find and view content and metadata. Security data can optionally be cached to ensure users only access content and metadata to which they have access.  The diagram above assumes an AWS installation, but the solution can also be deployed into Azure as well.

Benefits of an Alfresco Search Portal

The Veladocs Search Portal extends Alfresco implementations in several ways:

Simplified User Interface

• Simple Search and View – The search interface is designed to make searching intuitive, allowing end users frictionless access to their content. Features such as column selection, on-click sorting, advanced filtering, and content display without losing search results context, and optimize the entire search experience. Searching for content in Alfresco Share is anything but intuitive and Alfresco Digital Workspace search, while newer, is still quite basic and has not been updated in the past 4 years.
• Minimal Training – The Veladocs simplified interface is often rolled out to content consumers (read-only users) with minimal user training.  Most users don’t even know the content originated in Alfresco.

Increased Alfresco Stability and Performance

• Responsiveness – The Veladocs user interface is built with modern tooling, making it more performant and responsive for quickly and efficiently accessing content. 
• Scalable to Support Billions of Objects – As a cloud-native offering, Veladocs was built from the ground up to seamlessly support storing and searching across billions of objects. Each architecture component is scalable up and down, ensuring performance is never compromised. Alfresco’s latest releases claim to have been stress tested to support close to 1 billion objects, but few customers have implemented systems on that scale. 
• Improved Performance – Removing consumers and the corresponding search queries from the main Alfresco instance will improve Alfresco’s performance.
• Fault Tolerant – By creating a separate environment, consumers can continue searching for documents even if Alfresco is unavailable for upgrades, maintenance, or other unforeseen events.  AWS Outposts can be utilized should companies need to ensure that the Veladocs Search Portal is accessible even when broader network and internet access is down due to a catastrophic failure or event.

Multiple Repository Search

• Multiple Alfresco Repositories  – Multiple Veladocs.Sync instances can push content to a single Veladocs instance to facilitate document search across repositories.
• Non-Alfresco Repositories – Since the Veladocs UI does not know the source system, this solution extends to support other non-Alfresco repositories as well.

Alfresco Cost Savings

• Reduced Alfresco Licenses – Implementing a Veladocs Search Portal often allows for reducing Alfresco user licenses.
• 3rd-Party Content Access – Veladocs Search Portal can be installed in an external-facing environment, making it possible to share content and information with third-party consumers.  This would remove the need for these users to have access to Alfresco or the corporate VPN.
• Tiered Storage Support – The Veladocs Search Portal supports storing content in any of the AWS synchronous storage tiers. In the future, asynchronous storage tiers will also be supported. Moving content to lower-cost storage tiers can save companies tens of thousands of dollars monthly.
• Scalability – Since Veladocs is serverless and cloud-first, it is scalable both up and down, ensuring that companies can support peak performance times, but only pay for what they use.  

The Veladocs Playbook

Veladocs brings a fresh approach to the Search Portal model with its innovative cloud-first strategy. Here’s a closer look at why Veladocs is defining a new standard:

• Simpler Architecture – Veladocs leverages a cloud-services architecture, significantly simplifying the deployment and upkeep of the search portal over a more complex server-based approach. This streamlined approach not only reduces the technical burden on IT teams but also ensures a more reliable and efficient system. The simplicity of cloud-based solutions makes them inherently more robust and easier to manage, allowing organizations to focus on leveraging the data rather than wrestling with infrastructure complexities.

• Scalability – One key advantage of Veladocs’ cloud-first design is its scalability. As the data and usage needs of organizations expands, Veladocs can seamlessly scale up or down to meet these demands. This flexibility ensures that the search portal remains responsive and cost-effective, regardless of the volume of data being processed.

• Transparent Access to Metadata and Content – Veladocs enhances the search experience by supporting transparent access to metadata and content through both native AWS APIs and its own Veladocs APIs. This transparency in accessing data ensures seamless integration with a wide range of systems and platforms, making it easier to incorporate Veladocs into existing workflows and systems. 

• AI Readiness – Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are becoming increasingly crucial in today’s data-driven world. Veladocs is designed with AI readiness in mind. LLMs and other AI services can natively access content and data in S3 and OpenSearch, rather than require custom integrations through proprietary API and database layers. This forward-thinking approach ensures that Veladocs meets current needs and is poised to adapt to future technological advancements.

Make it Better Today!

Alfresco customers often need help with complex architectures, overwhelming user interfaces, and high licensing costs. Veladocs offers a solution by implementing a Search Portal based on a read-only cache of documents and metadata outside the Alfresco repository. This approach simplifies the user interface, minimizes training, and enhances performance and scalability. With its cloud-first design, Veladocs provides the added benefits of simplifying integrations, transparent access to metadata and content, and making content AI-ready, ensuring it meets current and future technological needs while reducing costs and improving efficiency.

Please contact us for more information on how this solution could enhance your ECM ecosystem.