In this book, we'll assume we are rolling out Alfresco throughout a consulting firm. Professional services firms make great examples because they tend to generate a variety of different documents. The other reason is that document and content management is usually a big challenge, which is the core to the business. But the examples should be applicable to any business that generates a significant amount of documents.

The example firm, SomeCo, wants to leverage document and content management throughout the organization to make it easier to find important information, streamline certain business processes, and secure sensitive documents.

SomeCo's company organization is pretty standard. It consists of Operations, Sales, Human Resources, Marketing, and Finance/Legal. Examples of the different types of content each department is concerned with are shown in the following table:

Examples throughout the rest of the book will show how Alfresco can be implemented and customized to meet the needs of the various organizations within SomeCo. During a real implementation, time would be spent gathering requirements, selecting the appropriate open source components to integrate with the solution, finalizing architecture, and structuring the project. There are plenty of other books and resources that discuss how to roll out content management across an enterprise and others that cover project methodologies. So none of that will be covered here.