ecmarchitect.com

This is too many steps - it seems a solution similar to Yahoo Pipes is more appropriate and will win over time:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8569811679113799879

not just the web visual editor, but the much simpler process language too - of course I’m not arguing for more complexity with BPEL

I first experimented with jpdl/jbpm enabled content-repositories in a very similar open source project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_(software)
and became frustrated with the debug cycle - we had many command line analysis applications to integrate with human workflows. Daisy is actually quite nice in many respects though - and has generally been ahead of the curve for the features that are important to me. Alfresco has now been on my radar screen more (with the latest releases), but it seems to still be catching up to Daisy on e.g. REST interface w/ full query language, etc.. Of course there are several features unique to Alresco too, and I’m very eager to see what the future brings, since the development cycle has been very rapid. Perhaps when you release scaling statements, you can release the results in the context of a comparison with Alfresco’s common cited peers.

The problem with Alfresco, Daisy, and most other applications is: complex relationships are stored in a single table of triples which can quickly become overwhelmed with joins. A few apps are now allowing you to extract subsets of triples into a new db table once a sufficient number accumulate, which is better, but still doomed to fail with large complex models. So, projects such as hadoop using hbase as a distributed database, and also now including a REST API, perhaps (one day) with a light workflow language, appear to be the way forward to scale the management of large content stores, and provide an analysis toolchain.

just my opinions - and my needs are perhaps narrow: scaling to large amounts of metadata and files (TB’s w/ up to 100 GB files) - complex relationships, graphs actually - and the need to mine the content for new relationships, perhaps using a simple visual dataflow language (timers, etc) to orchestrate various batch operations and human workflows

so -daisy, alfresco, hadoop hbase/RDF, or one of the other RDF + filestore hybrids - all seem interesting in this context

As usual Great article on Alfresco!

Thanks a lot for this works!

Jeff, thanks for your commitment with us.

Would you consider to pack those articles and some extra ones in a book ?. Alfresco Cookbook on the press !. I’m pretty sure the guys at Packt Publishing would consider your excellent work.

Thank you again.

Hi,
Just want to thank you for these great articles.

My high level impression is that the sphere of influence for Alfresco is widening very quickly, while the baseline content manager is likely suffering in adoption because of difficulties around learning what i think of as “best practices”.

For example your first article ( “Implementing custom behaviours” has probably the clearest explanation of the TWO extension directories ( server and client) available. This is a vital piece of information for a new admin/user but is hopelessly buried in the wiki and forums ( across multiple releases of alf).

In a simlar vein try doing a forum search on “repository.properties” or “custom-repository.properties” and one rapidly balks at the 35 _pages_ of forum topics containing some relevance to the phrase.

I find myself currently longing for some sort of alfresco admin/developer “best practices” whitepaper that is written so that, for example, one can command line run org.tools.alfresco.Import without a 180 jar temporary class path list for jave -cp xxxx, or know that under linux install the tomcat “endorsed” folder doesn’t unpack on its own ( but it does in an XP install)…

In short the community of new admins needs someone with clear writing skills such as yourself to shine a light on the endless “gotcha’s” that plague the baseline content manager installs; sure this is where Alfresco and Optaros et.al. can make money in support. That said my sense is the volume of their sphere of influence is growing much faster than a linear support model can handle and things will start to go badly if the core content manager (mistakenly) earns a rep of “difficult to support” simply because of lack of obtainable knowledge about “best practices” in administration and dev environments.

The Sharriff book is a good primer, but long in the tooth in terms of version… may be it is time for an update, but more likely the real need is for some sort of orthogonal view on how to think about ALF and how to have a personal environment that makes working around it easy / easier.

Your articles tend to exhibit that orthogonality and for that I am grateful.

thanks again.
..rr

Yes, Please a book is most welcome. Something along the lines: “Advanced Alfresco”

In fact, i think it is almost there with your articles pus some more content:

- advanced administration (e.g. how to tackle migrations and repository corruption)
- little bit more of jBPM (may be a complex workflow with sub-preocesses) plus debugging
- Integration od reporting engines (e.g. pentaho, Jasper Reports, BIRT)
- Console/Dashlet to manage Advance workflows (e.g. REST based)

Please a book!!

Anyway, thanks for your most needed articles.

@Luis, Thanks for reading. Do you have suggestions for additional topics that need to be covered?

@Richard, This is exactly why I’m writing the articles and tying them together with a single cohesive business case. The Alfresco wiki does a decent job of showing small examples of very specific pieces of functionality, but there’s no bigger story there, and as you point out, it can be frustrating to find what you’re looking for.

I hope that after reading these articles people have a better understanding of how different pieces of functionality within Alfresco can be pulled together into an actual solution. And, if I can help people that may be familiar with content management but not with Alfresco specifically get a jump start, that’s great too.

@mabayona, migrations can be tricky. We’re actually struggling with this internally. We have a North American Alfresco repository and a European Alfresco repository and we’d like to merge the two into a new, centralized repo, but we’ve had all sorts of trouble figuring out how to do that without losing version history. The size of the export ACP files also tends to give the importer trouble (out of memory), although I think we’re closing in on that problem by splitting the export/import into smaller chunks.

If you are interested in reporting integration, and several clients mention reporting as a requirement, you should check out the Alfresco Forge. I saw a project in there the other day around reporting integration although I have not yet played with it.

A user-friendly workflow console is a much-needed piece of functionality. Alfresco has heard this feedback before but you should repeat your specific needs to them. The API’s are there and I think something simple could be done that would yield a lot of benefits. Like just showing a list of the outstanding tasks with maybe the task start date and who the task is waiting on would be a good start.

Thanks for reading.

Hi,

We have created a solution to generate the Alfresco configuration from models. The goal is to simplify the use of Alfresco. This simplification is, for us, a real need and more particularly with the workflow. We have tried to write your workflow definition (of your tutorial) with our tools. We can have more information here :
http://www.bluexml.com/wiki/index.php/Alfresco_Advanced_Workflows

Our solution can use class diagram, use case diagram, security diagram and process diagram.

I want to thank you for all your work. Your tutorial are very interesting and complete.

Thanks again.

I want to thank you for your works. I get basic Alfresco as a admin or user but as a developer I know nothing. With all your articles I grab an outline of Alfresco programming models.
Have you got any experience in Alfresco integration. Forum integration, blog integration, portal integration or anything similar…
Thanks again.

@Le Van,

Thanks for reading. I’m glad you found the articles helpful. My company, Optaros, has done a significant amount of the kind of work you are asking about. For example, check out the demo of Endeca’s EDeN community solution at http://www.bostonconferencing.com/flash/eden/demo.html. We built that using Alfresco, Liferay Portal, and WordPress. The main integration with Alfresco was with Liferay. We used the Alfresco Web Services API in this particular case, but web scripts are also an option.

Hope that helps,

Jeff

Hi.

I’m new to Alfresco and I need to understand it and customize it in just a couple of weeks. I find your articles really useful. I’m looking forward to an article about custom meta-data extraction.

Keep up the good work.