The Repository Public API provides content and collaboration services for customizing and developing Alfresco applications. It was introduced with Labs 3b, and offers services such as site management, site activities, tagging, commenting, thumbnails, blogs, wikis, and forums for supporting social collaboration. The Alfresco Enterprise 3.
The CMIS implementation will provide the following benefits:. T he CMIS technical draft specification v0. Available at a lower cost and with no additional client installation, this is remarkable.
It also allows a choice for hardware, database, operating system, application server, and portal products. Alfresco offers Enterprise Content Management ECM , such as document management, collaboration, records management, knowledge management, web content management, and imaging. You can configure and customize Alfresco to address your specific business requirements. Some of these are listed below for your reference. Alfresco document management features provide organizations with all of the services necessary for creating, converting, managing, and sharing electronic documents.
Built on industry-standard open source platforms, Alfresco provides version management and search capabilities. The document management administrator interface allows you to import and export workspaces and documents, define security, and provide user management through the definition of users, groups, and roles.
Cost effective upgrades and data migration administration are some of the key benefits. A built-in data management and transformation engine provides you with the ability to transform the data into required formats, based on business rules.
Integrated workflow provides you with full control over the document life cycle, management, and process flow. Presentation templates and dashboard views provide you with a personalized and real-time reporting of your content. The preview feature is useful for viewing the content in combination with other content elements. Similarly, the composite document feature helps you to logically group documents and digital assets for your marketing projects. D igital Asset Management provides a single access point for all of your rich digital media and their underlying metadata information throughout the extended enterprise.
Alfresco centralizes storage and provides easy, efficient, enterprise access to digital assets, and allows them to be quickly repurposed, which streamlines processes and saves money. W hether it's an employment contract, a purchase agreement, a maintenance contract, or a collaboration agreement with a business partner, in order to protect a company's commercial interests, one should guarantee completeness, validity, traceability, and inalterability. Alfresco's document lifecycle management features ensure that people in various departments, divisions, or regions of a company can work together to support all of the processes relating to a contract throughout its lifecycle—from creation, through fulfillment and modification, to termination.
Using Alfresco, you can implement records management solutions, such as enterprise records management, compliance, imaging, forms management, and business process management.
Alfresco's record management features provide a secure, auditable environment for creating, declaring, classifying, retaining, and destroying records. Organizations can ensure compliance by defining and enforcing policies for records use, storage, and disposition, with a legally-defensible audit trail. Records management capabilities are modeled to support the US Department of Defense Alfresco provides file plan templates for numbering, classification, disposition, and other metadata-driven population of records.
Predefined reports will provide you with information about recent records, records due for cut-off, records due for expiry, records due for transfer, and records due for destruction. The lifecycle determines the disposition of the record, including when the records will be cut off or grouped together, how long the records will be held, and what happens to the record after the holding period expires—whether they are transferred to a records holding area, or whether they should be destroyed.
By integrating with scanning and OCR technologies, Alfresco provides an end-to-end solution for collecting paper documents and forms, transforming them into accurate, retrievable information, and delivering the content into an organization's business applications.
The information then becomes full-text searchable, and goes through various lifecycles based on the organization's defined business process. Emails are considered as records in some organizations. Alfresco enables you to drag-and-drop emails from Microsoft Outlook into the file plan space. The system will extract the metadata from email files and populate information such as who the e-mail is from, who the recipients are, and the subject of the email. Email content is stored in a secure and scalable repository, and is also fu ll-text searchable.
Using Alfresco, you can implement web content management solutions with a scalable content repository, a web 2. Alfresco web content management features provide a rich environment for creating, managing, and publishing web content, along with an infrastructure for supporting multiple sites. This managed content can include text, HTML, XML files, graphics and photos, video or audio, and specialized programming required for user interaction.
Through this solution, organizations can integrate multiple disparate sites and data formats, and give users often sales people, partners and customers rapid access to information, and in a timely manner. Because, Alfresco web content management is built on open source platforms, supporting, managing, and expanding these systems can be straightforward and cost-effective. With the help of technologies such as RSS and web services, the content is delivered to various channels such as public internet sites, internal marketing sites, and portals.
A granular level of security enables content authors to secure a single web page and also the files, embedded images, and videos within a web page. Users of the Alfresco web content management system are typically nontechnical business users, or subject matter experts who do not understand HTML syntax. Alfresco includes inline editors to edit text, HTML and XML content, and connectors to edit the office documents using desktop tools of your choice.
The transformation engine is used to transform content from one form to another. For example, all of the incoming images of various types and sizes can be transformed to a standard format and size. Drag-and-drop layout development lets users customize the look and feel of web sites without waiting for assistance from developers. Alfresco speaks your language and supports multilingual content management.
Advanced search features enable you to search web content based on its metadata and keyword values. High-availability, fault tolerance, and scalability support for any number of sites, auto failover, and clustering of the delivery tier. Using Alfresco, you can implement collaboration solutions, such as corporate and departmental intranets, knowledge management, and client and project extranets.
Alfresco collaboration features provide the infrastructure, integration points, and tools required for accessing, sharing, and distributing content among users or systems. Built upon industry standards, open source platforms, Alfresco helps you to quickly define and develop environments for teams project teams, associations, research, and so on that will streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve time to market.
Users can manage and collaborate on documents, web information, and forms within a single system through a consistent user interface. A comprehensive security model that is based on individuals, groups, projects, and team spaces provides you with the highest level of control. The solution leverages the existing infrastructure, such as LDAP or Active Directory, for authentication and authorization. A web-based rules engine enables business users to define the business and content rules appropriately, without the help of programmers and IT.
Alfresco supports a graphical tool for defining the workflow and business process management for content flow in collaborative environments. Users can discuss content by using the discussion forums and discussion threads tied to the content. Users can subscribe to content and receive email notifications when content is added or updated.
The solution supports both inbound and outbound RSS syndication for sharing content beyond the corporate firewalls. This enables the bulk transfer of files between your local system and the central server repository. Users can use their favorite editors to edit the content that is mapped in the local network drive.
Knowledge Management KM refers to a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for re-use, awareness, and learning across the organization. Search functionality helps us to locate information quickly, to generate business reports, and to make business decisions. The following features of Alfresco will provide you with an enterprise search solution:. Because the architecture is flexible and extensible, you can build various applications using Alfresco, such as:.
Going through these case studies will help you understand the type of applications that you could develop using Alfresco. T his book is based on Alfresco Enterprise 3. This book is an update to a previous book, which was on the Alfresco 1.
The Alfresco system has evolved towards a state-of-the-art, one-point solution to the ECM needs. There has been so much interest from international organizations, governments, and multinational corporations that translation seems a natural extension of the Alfresco model.
Alfresco has weaved itself into a number of other products. Products such as Quark, Acrobat. Alfresco spent the summer of releasing Alfresco Labs 3, which includes a version of their new collaboration solution, Alfresco Share, and Surf which is a new development platform. From there, they spent time performing extensive testing to prepare for the release of their latest enterprise version. The enterprise version is the certified build of Alfresco—the one that is sold to production environments for companies and government organizations that want a stable, supported solution.
Alfresco currently has over organizations using the enterprise version. Enterprise releases are available to customers with an enterprise subscription.
Enterprise releases are tested and certified for customer deployment. The releases include a maintenance release train of engineering-led and customer-driven bug fixes to ensure successful operation in an enterprise environment. These bug fixes will periodically be made available in the community code-line, where they are mixed in with upcoming features and other product enhancements.
Maintenance release schedules are driven by Alfresco Support. Alfresco comes with multiple support options. Firstly, it is supported by the company Alfresco, which gives users direct access to Alfresco's engineering team and the most recent bug fixes.
This is currently the best way to receive high-quality support for the Alfresco software. However, as more and more people adopt the software, the options for quality support beyond Alfresco—the company—will improve. At any given point in time, the following three support alternatives exist for Alfresco open source software:.
In-house development support: Because the source code is open source, you can train your developers in-house to support your application that has been built using Alfresco. Community support: Alfresco already has a big community world wide. With a growing community, you can always get help through the Alfresco community forums, although the quality of support can vary. Alfresco enterprise network support: As mentioned, Alfresco Inc.
This support is provided to the company's customers who are using the Enterprise product. The Repository Public API provides content and collaboration services for customizing and developing Alfresco applications.
Labs 3b introduces new services such as site management, site activities, tagging, commenting, thumbnails, blogs, wikis, and forums to support social collaboration. The CMIS technical draft specification v0. Give our Enterprise 3. This is the normal behavior if you try to launch a file on any Internet page.
Choose a file from your hard disk that is not an HTML or text file. In the space header, click on the Add Content link. The Add Content Dialog window is displayed. To select the file that you want to upload, click on the Browse button. In the File Upload dialog box, browse to the file that you want to upload, select it, and then click on the Open button. Alfresco inserts the full path name of the selected file in the Location text box.
Click on the Upload button to upload the file from your hard disk to the Alfresco repository. A message informs you that your upload was successful, as shown in the following screenshot: 4.
Click on the OK button to confirm. The Modify Content Properties Dialog is displayed 5. Verify the pre-populated properties and enter information in the text boxes as required. The file that you have uploaded appears in the Content Items pane. Alfresco extracts the file size from the disk properties of the file, and includes the value in the size field. Now that you have two files, you can edit them as you like. Note that you need to have edit permission on the content to edit them, as explained in the previous chapter.
If you have edit access to a file, then you will notice a small pencil Edit Online icon as shown in the following screenshot: Clicking on the pencil icon will open the file in the appropriate editor. Once you select the option to Edit Online, a working copy of the file will be created for editing, and the original file is locked, as shown in the following screenshot: The working copy can be further edited, as needed, by clicking on the Edit Online button.
Once you are done with editing, you can commit all of the changes to the original document, by clicking on the Check In icon. If, for some reason, you decide to cancel the editing of a document and discard any changes that you have made, then you can do so by clicking on the Cancel File Editing button. If you cancel the editing of a document, then the associated working copy is deleted, and all of the changes made to it since it was checked out will be lost.
A working copy of the file is created for download. Then a window is displayed, giving you the option to save the working copy of the document locally on your personal computer, as shown in the following screenshot: [ ] For More Information: www.
In order to deactivate Offline Editing, click on the User Profile icon in the top menu, and deselect the option for Offline Editing, is shown to be selected in the following screenshot: The working copy can be updated by clicking on the Update New Version button.
Once you have finished editing the file, you can commit all of the changes to the original document, by clicking on the Check In icon. Alternatively, you can cancel all of the changes by clicking on the Cancel File Editing button, as shown in the following screenshot: [ ] For More Information: www. If you click the Update icon, then the Update pane is displayed. Click on the Browse button to upload the updated version of the document from your hard disk.
It is always a good practice to check out the document and update the working copy, rather than directly updating the document. Checking the file out avoids conflicting updates by locking the document, as explained in the previous section. Content actions Content has clickable actions icons , as shown in the upcoming screenshot.
These clickable actions are dynamically generated for content, based on the current user's permissions for that content. For example, if you have copy permission for the content, then you will see the Copy icon as a clickable action for that content. When the content is deleted, all of the previous versions of that content object will also be deleted.
Moving or copying content using the clipboard From the list of content actions, as shown in the screenshot above, you can click on the Cut action to move content to the clipboard. Then, you can navigate to any space hierarchy and paste the cut content into it, as required. Similarly, you can use the Copy action to copy the content to another space.
Creating a shortcut to the content for quick access If you need to access a particular content object very frequently, then you can create a shortcut similar to the way you can with Internet and Windows browser's Favorite option to that content, in order to reach the content in one click. From the list of content actions, as shown in the preceding screenshot, you can click on the Create Shortcut action to create a shortcut to the content.
Shortcuts are listed in the Shelf on the left-hand side. Managing content properties Every content item in Alfresco has properties associated with it. Refer to the preceding screenshot to see the list of properties, such as Title, Description, Author, Size, and Creation Date.
The content properties are stored in relational database and are searchable using Advanced Search options. What is Content Metadata? Content properties are also known as Content Metadata. Metadata is structured data, that describes the characteristics of the content. It shares many similar characteristics with the cataloguing that takes place in libraries. The term Meta derives from the Greek word denoting a nature of a higher order or more fundamental kind.
A metadata record consists of a number of pre-defined elements that represent specific attributes of the content, and each element can have one or more values. If access to the content is required, then it should be described using metadata, so as to maximize the ability to locate it.
Metadata provides the essential link between the information creator and the information user. Most of the content, such as Microsoft Office documents, media files, and PDF documents contain properties within the file itself.
Therefore, it is double the effort, having to enter those values again in the Content Management System, as well as in the document. Alfresco provides built-in metadata extractors for many popular document types, that extract the standard metadata values from a document, and populates the values automatically. This is very useful if you are uploading the documents through FTP, CIFS, or a WebDAV interface, where you will not have to enter the properties manually, as Alfresco will transfer the document properties automatically.
Editing metadata To edit metadata, you need to click on the Edit Metadata icon in the content details view. You can update the metadata values, such as Name and Description, for your content items. However, certain metadata values, such as Creator, Created Date, Modifier, and Modified Date are read-only values, and you cannot change them. Certain properties, such as, Modifier and Modified Date will be updated by Alfresco automatically, whenever the content is updated.
One way is to extend the data model and define more properties for a content type. More information on this is provided in Chapter 7. The other way is to dynamically attach the properties and behaviour through Aspects. By using aspects, you can add additional properties, such as Effectivity, Dublin Core Metadata, and Thumbnailable, to the content.
More information on this is provided in Chapter 6. Library services Library services are common document management functions for controlling the users through permissions, for creating multiple instances of a document versioning , and for providing users with access into a document to make the changes checking-in or checking-out. Versioning So far, you have learned about creating spaces, adding files, and editing them.
You might have more than one person who can edit a document. What if somebody edits a document and removes a useful piece of information? Well, you can make use of the versioning features of Alfresco to resolve such issues.
Versioning allows the history of previous versions of a content to be kept. The content needs to be Versionable, in order for versions to be kept. You can enable versioning in four different ways: 1.
Individually: To enable versioning for an individual content object item, go to the View Details page and click on the Allow Versioning link. The screenshot on the next page illustrates how to enable versioning on an individual content item. Using Smart Spaces: A business rule can be set for a space to allow versioning of all of the content or selected content within that space.
More information about this is provided in Chapter 6. By Type: By default, versioning is disabled for all of the content types in the Alfresco content model. Versioning can be enabled for a specific content type, irrespective of the location of the content. More information about this is provided in Chapter 7. Globally: Alfresco can be configured globally to enable versioning for all content throughout the site.
Click on the Allow Versioning link to enable versioning, as shown in the following screenshot. You will immediately notice that a version with a version number of 1. At the time of writing this book Alfresco version 3. There is a plan to support this feature in future releases of Alfresco. The workaround is to download the older version and upload it again as the current version. For a checked out content, the version is updated when the content is checked in.
The version number is incremented from the version number of the content object that was checked out. Auto Versioning Auto versioning can be enabled by editing the content properties and selecting the Auto Version checkbox. If auto versioning is enabled, then each Save of the content results in an incremented version number, when the content is edited directly from the repository.
Each Update upload of the content also results in a new version with an incremented version number being created. If auto versioning is not enabled, then the version number is incremented only when the content is checked in. What if two people edit a document at once, and you get into a mess with two new versions?
To resolve this issue, you'll need to use the library services. Library services provide the ability to check out a document, reserving it for one user to edit, while others can only access the document in read-only mode. Once the necessary changes have been made to the document, the user checks in the document, and can either replace the original, or create a new version of the original. Check Out locks the item and creates a working copy that can be edited both the content and the details.
Check In replaces the original item with the working copy, and releases the lock. You can either check out the file into the current space or to any other pre-defined space. As a best practice, it is recommended that you check out the working copy to your own Home Space. For the current example, choose to check out the file to the In the current space option, and click on the Check Out button.
The original version of the file has a lock. This indicates that no one else can check out this file until you have checked it in again. The original version of the file can't be edited there is no Edit icon and cannot be checked out there is no Check Out icon. The desired effect of all of these features is that you cannot edit a checked out file, either deliberately or accidentally. You can only update the working copy. The checked out file has Working Copy inserted into the file name.
The Working Copy can be edited and checked in. Updating the document is explained earlier in this chapter in the Upload updated binary file section. After you have updated the working copy, you can check in by clicking the Check In button, as shown in the screenshot above. Once you click on the Check In action, you will see the Check In dialog window, as shown in the following screenshot: [ ] For More Information: www.
By selecting the Minor Change checkbox, you will be able to increment only the number after the decimal for example, from 1. For this example, select the Minor Change option, and provide some meaningful version notes.
Version notes are very important documentation to help understand the differences between various versions of the same document. There will no longer be a Working Copy of the document. Notice the latest modification timestamp of the original document. If you click on the View Details action and scroll down to the Version History, then you will see that the history has been updated, as shown in the following screenshot: Undo Check Out to unlock a document Now that you are able to use the library services, you might still have questions, such as, how long does a file remain checked-out?
Can we see who checked it out and when? And who can cancel the lock? A document remains in the checked out state locked , until either the working copy is checked in or somebody cancels the checked out status from the working copy. To cancel a check out, locate the Working Copy of the document, and click on the Cancel File Editing button, as shown in the following screenshot: [ ] For More Information: www.
The owner of the document, or a coordinator, or an administrator can unlock the document by executing the Cancel File Editing action on the Working Copy. Other users, who have read access to the space, can still see the Working Copy of the document but they can never edit or check in the document.
The possible actions on a Working Copy by other users are shown in the following screenshot: You can enable auditing in the Alfresco repository, and display the audit trail information, such as who locked the content and when. More information about auditing is covered in Chapter Categorizing content Categorization allows information to be classified in a number of ways.
Various technologies use various terminologies such as hierarchies, taxonomies and ontology for the same concept. In Alfresco, all of the content can be linked to one or more categories. Categories are defined and managed by administrators only. Categories can have sub-categories, and there is no limitation on the number of categories that can be defined, or depth of the hierarchy. Categorization aids in searching, and the advanced search form in Alfresco allows you to search for content based on categories.
Managing categories Carry out the following steps to create two new categories called Technology and Products for your sample application: 1. In any space, click on the Administration Console icon in the top tool bar.
The Administration Console pane is displayed. Click on the Category Management link. The Category Management pane is displayed, as shown in the following screenshot.
In the header, click on the Create Add Category link to create a new category. As an example, create a new category called Open-Source Products. Under that new category, create a few sub-categories, such as Alfresco and Plone. You can add additional categories and sub-categories, and can edit the existing categories.
Adding categories to content In order to categorize content, you need to have one of the administrator, editor, collaborator, or coordinator roles, on that content. Click on the Change Category icon, as shown in the following screenshot, to apply categorization to the content. Apply two different categories to the content. Click on the OK button to confirm the assignment. You will see that these two categories are assigned to your document, in the View Details page.
Search content by category Categorization helps to narrow down a search, or filters the search results. From the earlier example, we will search for marketing documents containing the text Content, and categorized under Open Source Products Alfresco.
From the form options, click on the Show me results in the categories pane. Click on the Click here to select a category link.
Then, click on the Search button. Managing multilingual content You can make content multilingual by selecting the Make Multilingual action, as shown in the following screenshot. You need to select the base language Pivot Translation and, optionally, add other translations. Once multilingual support has been added to a file, you will see the following window in the view details page. You can change the properties, such as Pivot Translation, by clicking on the Edit button, as shown in the following screenshot: [ ] For More Information: www.
In either case, a new content object will be created in the selected language. Clicking on the Add Translation link will open up a dialog box, enabling you to upload a file with the selected language translation, as shown in the following screenshot: Versions of Multilingual Content At the time of writing this book, Alfresco's multilingual support is very basic.
It is equivalent to associating—and thus, grouping—the documents. All of the latest versions of the documents are associated as one logical document group, as shown in the following screenshot. The latest version of the English document could be 1. The German translated version could be 1. They can have different versions, different metadata, different categorization, and different workflow processes.
All of these translated files will show up in the Search result, if they match the search criteria. Deleting Multilingual Content You can't delete the base file if it has translated files available for it. In our example as shown in the following screenshot , the content, with the base language set in English with the icon EN , has two translations available: German with the icon DE and Japanese with the icon JA. You will see that you cannot delete the base English version.
However, you can delete the translated versions. If a particular content does not have translated content, then it can be deleted. Using network drives to manage content Out of the box installation includes a web client, that you can use to connect to the Alfresco repository through a web-based application.
It is the standard way for computer users to share files across the intranet and Internet. CIFS enables collaboration on the Internet by defining a remote file-access protocol that is compatible with the way that applications already share data on local disks and network file servers. CIFS supports the usual set of file operations, such as open, close, read, write, and seek.
CIFS also supports the locking and unlocking of files and records. CIFS allows multiple clients to access and update the same file, while preventing conflicts by providing file sharing and file locking. CIFS servers support both anonymous transfers and secure, authenticated access to named files.
You will be able to bulk upload files to the server and edit them directly by using your desktop applications. Mapping the drive As an example, you will now map one of your spaces, say Intranet Marketing Communications, as your local folder.
To map a space as a network drive in Windows Explorer, follow the steps given below: 1. The Map Network Drive dialog is displayed, as shown in the preceding screenshot. Select an unused drive letter say, M for the Marketing Communications space.
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