Comments on: Alfresco User Interface: What are my options?

By: jpotts

jpotts — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:53:18 +0000

Ivano,

I haven’t looked at that particular style of integration in a long time. Honestly, I would avoid it if possible. Running Alfresco and Liferay in the same JVM is not the best idea. Alfresco’s direction with portal integration is to use Spring Web Scripts from within a portlet to make remote calls to the Alfresco repository.

You might have better luck in the forums.

Jeff

By: Ivano

Ivano — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:20:43 +0000

I Jeff, as you teach there are many method to integrate Alfresco web client into Liferay portal framework, but in fact the most natural (Alfresco as a 168 portlet) is not usable at all!!

I’m using Liferay Portal 5.1.2 and Alfresco ECM 3.2r2 deployed as portlets, using Tomcat 5.5.26.

Tomcat, Liferay and Alfresco starts up ok, no errors. 6 Alfresco portlets are deployed onto liferay (registered successfully).

But there is a big problem: You can’t add/upload content in Alfresco’s folders.

You can add the Alfresco client portlet to a portal page, but when you try to ‘add a content’ – you get the error:
([org.alfresco.web.ui.common.Utils] A system error happened during the operation: null
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.alfresco.repo.content.filestore.FileContentReader.(FileContentReader.java:123))

This is a problem since a long time, also using previous Alfresco version.

Please, could you help on this?
Thank you in advance!

Ivano

By: Is Alfresco Surf a portal alternative ? | blogs.contentreich.de

Is Alfresco Surf a portal alternative ? | blogs.contentreich.de — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:17:34 +0000

[...] Content-management can really cause headaches when you have a portal participating in the game (Our Experiences). Jeff Potts summarizes a few approaches integrating Alfresco (w/o Surf) with a portal in his blog. [...]

By: Flex for Enterprise 3.0 » Blog Archive » Liferay portlet for FlexSpaces

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:03:57 +0000

[...] Haven’t tried using SSO approaches yet: 1. Rivet Logic STAr (Secure Token Authentication rivet amp for Alfresco) used with AWPr 2. Jonas Yuan / Cignex LDAP ADS and SSO CAS and also blog post on a combined install 3. Sourcesense Alfresco OpenSSO integration Other references 1. Luis Sala’s portlet dev wiki page and blog 2. Jeff Pott’s blog [...]

By: jpotts

jpotts — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:05:27 +0000

Yes, customizing Share is an option. I consider that to be Option 2, but I agree that when you start with Share it is different than writing a Surf app from scratch because your components already have pages where they can live.

I do caution people, though, not to abuse the tool. It would be easy to take Share and make so many customizations to it you’ve taken it down a far different path than it was originally intended. What you have then is effectively your own fork of Share that may be difficult to maintain going forward.

We’ve done some significant Share customizations and there some things to watch out for. If you are going the Share route, you might want to read this summary:

http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2009/04/22/976

By: Coffman

Coffman — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:58:57 +0000

As usual, excelent article …
What about creating sites on Alfresco Share and develop dashlets for especific functionallity ? I think it’s a nice approach . It’s not like option 2, and you can use the Share UI.

By: George

George — Mon, 04 May 2009 06:18:37 +0000

Thanks for the high level overview. It pretty much sums up the conclusions we’ve reached after weeks of investigating.

We have a requirement for a fairly simple Intranet – allow users to manage a few documents and some of the web content on the site. Collaboration is not required just yet but there is a very good likelihood it will be required in the near future.

Share provides most of the components we require bar rules which are needed for some simple workflows. The approach we are leaning towards is using Share as the platform but providing our own customised templates and re-using as many of the OOTB webscripts we can.

Adminstration tasks can still be administered through the Explorer interface. There is no requirement for users to be empowered to the hilt. All required rules etc will be predefined. Thus it is simply a case of executing them via RESTful services.

Given that we’re fairly new to the Alfresco products, are there any obscure pit falls that need to be avoided in taking such an approach?

PS – Thanks for all your blogs, tutorials and book. The Alfresco documentation is not as complete as we’d like it so every web resource has been gold.

By: jpotts

jpotts — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:45:31 +0000

Daniel,

I poked around on your framework and it is clearly not ready for mere mortals like me. I got the base RepoModule working fine. The trouble was trying to follow your “first component” example. I left you a post in your forum with some of the problems I had.

Maybe at some point in the future I’ll get a chance to keep hacking at it, but for now I’m on to other things.

Jeff

By: Daniel Gradecak

Daniel Gradecak — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:00:48 +0000

There are some workflow application that we have built on top of Jibe, but at this moment we do not provide a workflow module for the “default” Alfresco workflows.

By: jpotts

jpotts — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:55:27 +0000

I saw in one of the screencasts a “Task Browsing” tab. Is that for workflow task management? I would think workflow and permissions would be two critical pieces to get in. Rules to a lesser extent, but from the screencasts it looks like you’re already pretty close there.

I’m going to take a deeper look and I’ll let you know if I’ve got other questions.

Thanks again.

Jeff