CMDBuild Forum

Documentation/Import OCS/etc

I have read every piece of the documentation regarding CMDbuild, I think that I have read almost every entry in the forums (both the english and the Italian - using google translate), and all presentations from CMDbuild day 2012. 

I hate to say that this is probably the worst documented software I have every tried to install. The documentation is basically a joke - the technical documentation is, to say the least, inconcistent and incomplete. The "tutorial videos" are of absolutly no help whatsoever unless you allready know all the bits and pieces of CMDBuild. 

There are a whole lot of "request for help" in the forums, but very few answeres pointing in the right direction. 

After spending days on trying to get the basics up and running (alfresco, shark, cmdbuild) I have now been struggling for about a week trying to get the OCS import to work, but all it does is that it creates a number of workflows that will not run (i have added the "CompleteTask=true", I have made the change of the actionDetail to "modificablie" as stated in the italian documentation as contrary to the english version, etc, etc, etc).

Note that all this is using the demo database, the demo xpdl-files (even though I have tried to rename everything to be consistent with the naming used in the english demo database). 

 

I have even tried to write an e-mail to tecnoteca trying to get a quote regarding help (but for two weeks I have not received any answer), since I thought that it could be that tecnoteca's business is to sell configuration help.

For this project to be usefull for anybody execpt the very few that allready has it up and running and to not scare of people testing the product somebody needs to create better documentation, a clear tutorial on how to setup the basics (or a virtual appliance with everything working that can be downloaded).

 

I will not return to this forum since I am giving up on CMDBuild and have started to look at other opensource products (like OneCMDB and iTOP). What initialy looked like a very good promise in CMDBuild ended up beeing two weeks waste of time. 

 

I hope that this post will not be deleted, but will either get the attension of the developers who will find the time to create proper documentation - or serve as a warning to others looking at setting up CMDBuild.

We are really sorry your experience with CMDBuild was not satisfying.

As you can see, we do not delete the negative opinions from our forum.

 

Hundreds of users have autonomously and successfully installed the applications. Your difficulties might derive from a particular operating environment.

 

Since it is an open source product, the documentation has been prepared both by Tecnoteca and the contributors that are successfully using this product. If you could help us by sending a more complete documentation, we would be very glad to count on your contribution.

 

Tecnoteca Team

 

P.s. We are sorry, but no quotation request from your account has arrived

I would be happy to write better documentation if I was able to get it working. 

 
I have tested with CentOS, OpenSUSE, Windows, but the latest test was with Ubuntu 12.10. 
I have tested with installing Tomcat, Postgress, Alfresco and cmdbuild separatly and to install Alfresco only with the other parts running ontop of the Tomcat+Postgres provided with alfresco (this was my last attempt).
 
I have been able to get everything working with trial and error, but not the OCS imports. I have tried to minimize the number of fields in the xsl file. 
 
The only thing I get in logfiles is below (from shark.log)
 
2012-12-19 13:25:49,035: loading class 'org.cmdbuild.workflow.api.SoapSharkWorkflowApiFactory' that should be a 'org.cmdbuild.workflow.api.SharkWorkflowApiFactory'
2012-12-19 13:25:49,035: trying to get class org.cmdbuild.shark.toolagent.ExternalSyncToolAgent through class org.enhydra.shark.toolagent.ToolAgentLoader...
2012-12-19 13:25:49,036: cannot execute tool agent - application  terminated incorrectly
 
The same question has been asked in this post: http://www.cmdbuild.org/forum/forum-in-english/187508163/975254988/add_comment_form

Hi,

we have rewritten the xpdl so it can works with Shark 4.4.
You could find the full reply for this problem inside the thread you linked: http://www.cmdbuild.org/forum/forum-in-english/187508163/
 
Best regards,
Tecnoteca