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The Search functionality is one of the important aspects when choosing an Open Source CMS, and as you may know, Alfresco uses the Apache Lucene search engine; a high-performance, full-featured text search engine.

Along with the Lucene search engine, Alfresco's search capability is powered by Open Office, which is able to extract text from many file formats and make them available to the Lucene search engine.

Let’s say a user has a PDF file, which contains a few text images, but he wants to store it as a text file in Alfresco repository, and of course the user wants to search the file by providing some keywords or meta-data. Searching files with meta-data may be relatively easy because most CMS supports custom meta-data. However, the problem is that the PDF file consists of images not text, which means without converting it to text there is no way to search the file with content.

According to recent research, about 80% of information in a company is content and knowledge workers who spend about 30% to 40% of their time on document related tasks. But unfortunately only 5% of them use Enterprise Content Management (ECM), which means they spend about 2.4 to 3.2hrs per day to manage (find/create/update) documents manually. Especially, the time will be significantly increased if their tasks are related to the web content management.

For this reason, we have posted blogs and hosted a technology event to emphasize that -Document Management System is critical to any organization and Document Management System is employed to manage documents easily by reducing the work and time of the organization’s employees-

For instance, let's consider the following scenario: As a member of web content managers, you may want to create the source document in MS Word format for editing and keep the source document in the same format, but you would like to create a PDF version of the document for publishing on the web site.