Introduction to Alfresco

Introduction to Alfresco
Doc. v. 0.1 - 03/03/09

Wildan Maulana
wildan.m@negeripelangi.com

http://wildan.negeripelangi.com

© 2009, OpenThink Labs. All Rights Reserved

Overview of Alfresco
● Alfresco was founded In 2005 by John Newton,
co-founder of Documentum and John Powell,
former COO of Business Objects
● Its investors includes Accel Partners and Mayfield
Fund
● Based on JSR-170 standard


Leverage the Benefits of Open Source
● Enterprise customers can reduce costs, minimize
business risks, and get competitive advantages
by adopting the right open-source-based business
software solution
● The open-source models allows Alfresco to use
best-of-breed open-source technologies


State-of-the-Art Content Repository


Scalable Architecture
● Alfresco supports pluggable aspect-oriented architecture
out of the box by leveraging the open source standard
such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, MyFaces, JSR 168,
JSR 170 and JSE5
● The Alfresco architecture supports high availability for
mission-critical applications using clustering, fully
distributed caching, and replication support across
multiple servers


Alfresco Architectural Layers


Scalable Architecture
● Alfresco provides horizontal scalability by having each tier in the
architecture deployed on multiple servers
● Alfresco can also scale vertically by partitioning and load balancing
in a multi-server environment
● Alfresco can scale in information using complex search, structure,
and classification of information
● Alfresco can scale in activity using complex information per activity
with dynamic views and with full object-level securities


Open-Standards based Underlying
Components
● Open standards protect enterprise investments,
promote innovation, and make it easier for IT
department to support software


Open-Standards based Underlying Components

● Alfresco is completely built on the following open standards :
● Java 1.5
● JSR 170 – Java Content Repository API
● JSR-168 – Java Portlet Integration
● Spring 1.2 Aspect-Oriented Framework
● ACEGI Aspect-Oriented Security Framework
● MyFaces 1.0.9 JSF Implementation
● Hibernate 3.0 ORM Persistence
● Lucene 1.4 Text Search Engine
● JLAN – Java-based File Server supporting Windows Files sharing (SMB/CIFS), NFS, FTP
● WebDav/DeltaV
● JBoss App Server 4.0
● JBoss Portal 2.0
● Jakarta POI – Java API to Access Microsoft File formats
● PDFBox – Open Source Java PDF Library
● Open Office
● JSR-223 Java Language Integration – Scripting for Java Platform


Globalization Support
● Alfresco designed with globalization in mind
● Out of the box Alfresco supports major language
including Chinese, Dutch, English, French,
German, Italian, Russian and Spanish


Security and Acces Control
● In Alfresco, permissions can be applied at a
space (folder) level or can be set for each
individual content item
● Alfresco supports a relational database-based
membership system and also supports external
identity management system, such as LDAP,
NTLM, Kerberos, and Active Directory


Essential Library Services
● Alfresco provides library services such as Check-in/Check-out, version
control, auditing information, and content streaming
● Using Alfresco, we can define the library services to be executed
automatically based on the business rules, for example :
● Every edit to the content can version the content automatically or
● Every check-out can move the content to a specific location based on
the business rules
● Alfresco also provides additional intelligence to the content by adding
metadata, business rules, security rules, and collaboration rules
dynamically


Business Process Automation
● Business-process automation increases
productivity, reduce costs, streamlines processes,
and shortens operation cycles.
● Alfresco includes JBoss Business Process
Manager (JBPM) as a business process
manager and automation solution


Enterprise Integration
● Alfresco provides Web Services and the Java Content
Repository Application Programming Interface (JCR API) to
integrate with external applications
● Alfresco integrates with an open sources J2EE-based leading
portal framework called Liferay
● The Alfresco-Liferay bundle is an out-of-the-bos solution, which
provides an excellent portal-based ECM solution
● Alfresco integrates with external identity management system such
as LDAP and Active Directory and supports centralized secutiry
and single sign-on


How we can Benefit from Alfresco
● Alfresco offers Enterprise Content Managemen
(ECM) such as document management,
collaboration, records management, knowledge
management, web content management, and
imagin


Alfresco for Document Management
● Key features :
● Flexible metadata management
● Full audit control
● Transformation of data
● Security and version control
● Indexing and full-text search
● Locking, check-in/check-out
● Offline briefcase synchronization to access content offline
● Taxonomy and categorization content
● Advanced search with combined metadata, location, and multi-category search
●
Advanced reporting and dashboard


Alfresco for Document Management
● Key Features : (continue)
● Document composition by logically grouping
various content
● Preview feature with presentations templates
● Soft deletes and deleted document recovery
support
● Scheduled jobs and actions
● Management of web assets
● Digital image library


Alfresco for Records Management
● Key Features :
● Record plans (modeled to support the US Department of Defense 5015.2 records management standard)
● Automatic conversion from proprietary office formats to long-term vendor-neutral formats such as Open
Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF)
● Vital records information management
● Record cutoff information management
● Record holding and retention management
● Record transfer process
● Record destruction management
● Record lifecycle management
● Archival policies
● Disposition schedules
● Restriction of user functions
● Audit trails


Alfresco for Web Content
Management
● Key features :
● Contextual delivery if information based on community intellegence
● Standards-based forms to create pages
● Email-based workflow and approval process
● In context review : View changes in the context of live site with no
broken URLs
● Manage branches : Parallel branching & merging
● Dependency management : Impact management and automatic
update
● Pre-built templates : Web sites and web sites component


Alfresco for Collaboration
Management
● Key features :
● Team spaces
● Full audit control
● Discussion forums
● Message boards
● RSS syndication
● Ad-hoc security
● A version controlled content repository
● Full-text search of various content items
● User-controlled routing
● Integration of enterprise systems
● High availability, fault tolerance, and scalability
● Business process-driven content management


Alfresco for Enterprise Content
Search
● Key features :
● Provides single-point access to enterprise content repository
● Provides full-text search of documents
● Helps to index the documents and provide metadata searching
● Helps you to build and share reports using saved searches
● Helps search for users and collaborative groups
● Searches archived contents


Applications of Alfresco
● You can build various applications using Alfresco such as :
● Enterprise document repository
● Intranet
● Enterprise knowledge management
● Scalable content repository
● Corporate web sites
● Marketing Communications
● On demand publishing
● Compliance and records management
● Financial applications that involve security, forms handling, and approval process
● Research portals for collaboration and sharing of information


Reference
Alfresco, Enterprise Content Management
Implementation, Munwar Sharif, PACKT
Publishing


Q&A

Thanks! ^_^


Introduction to Alfresco

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