Fast, Easy Installation
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Fast, Easy Installation
Assuming you have a machine ready to go and set up with appropriate
application and database servers, installing Alfresco can be completed in an
hour or two. For my evaluation I ran Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2r on top of
GlassFish version 3 and MySQL 5.1. GlassFish provided the Apache Tomcat servlet
container for application services. The Alfresco installer assumes that Tomcat
is using TCP port 8080.
If you choose to use another port (as I did), you must change references
to the Tomcat service in a few configuration files to access significant parts
of the Alfresco system. This wasn't documented very well, but it was easily
solved after a conversation with one of Alfresco's support engineers.
Once the installation was complete, I set myself some typical
administration tasks, such as user creation and installing sample content, and
familiarized myself with the browser-based Alfresco Explorer management
interface. This is a powerful tool for manipulating the underpinnings of the
system: It allows access to content libraries, site definition and content
tags, and other functions that organizations often want to manage centrally.
How you want to administer and authenticate Alfresco
users is a decision best made early in the deployment. It's possible to pass
much of the work of user definition and authentication up to a corporate
directory service, with some adjustments to the system configuration and
limitations imposed by the directory service used. That is probably the best
way to go in large deployments, but for instances of up to a few score users,
Alfresco's internal user management tools are likely to suffice.
In either case, Alfresco permits a fine degree of
control over a user's access to the system's features and the individual sites
and workspaces of the CMS. Users are assigned roles according to their
responsibilities for content creation and management, and their authority to
make changes to the environment. Site managers have complete control over their
sites, while the roles of collaborator, contributor and consumer provide
diminishing levels of ability to modify content.
Arranging Dashboards
Most of the day-to-day user interaction takes place
through Alfresco Share, another browser-based interface designed around the
now-ubiquitous dashboard paradigm. Users have the option to arrange dashboard
tools (or "dashlets") according to their needs. Alfresco provides canned
dashlets for calendaring and task managemen,t as well as for content management
and manipulation.
The company makes its Surf view composition framework
available for the design of custom dashlets on top of Spring. The code for Surf
was released to the SpringSource community site last fall, although
documentation for the Surf APIs is still "coming soon."
Content in an Alfresco CMS is managed by sites within the organization. The basic collaboration
site dashboard displays recent activity on the site, recently modified
documents, a list of site members and their roles, and other related features
including blog and wiki components.
Typically, you start a collaboration site in Alfresco
by using the wiki tool to create an introduction and explanation of the site,
followed by adding content to the document library, and then inviting site
members from inside and/or outside the organization.
As an alternative to Alfresco's browser-based
interface, users with Microsoft Office 2007 can access collaboration sites as
if they were SharePoint team sites. However, there are some limits to this, as
Alfresco doesn't support the full range of SharePoint's features. Alerts,
custom metadata, subsites and tasks are among the missing functions.
