Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation: How to customize, use, and administer this powerful, Open Source Java-based Enterprise CMS

Enterprise customers can reduce costs, minimize business risks, and gain a competitive advantage by adopting the right open source based business software solutions. Based on publicly-available pricing from a range of vendors, a white paper from Alfresco shows how it is possible to save, in the first year of implementation (based on a 1,000 user configuration) up to 89 percent of the cost of SharePoint purchases, and up to 96 percent of the cost of other ECM solutions, by using Alfresco's open source ECM. You can reduce the cost of software solution acquisition, deployment, and maintenance by bringing the community into the development, support, and service process.

Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management. It couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. The open source model allows Alfresco to use the best-of-breed open source technologies. It also allows contributions from the open source community to get higher-quality software produced more quickly, and at a much lower cost.

The following diagram provides an overview of the Alfresco content repository and its integration with external systems such as Virtual File Systems, Web Applications, Knowledge Portals, and Web Services.

A content repository is a server or a set of services that is used to store, search, access, and control content. The content repository provides these services to specialist content applications such as document management systems, web content management systems, image storage and retrieval systems, records management, and other applications that require the storage and retrieval of large amounts of content. The repositories provide content services such as content storage or import, content classification, security on content objects, control through content check-in and check-out, and content query services to the content applications.

What distinguishes content management from other typical database applications is the level of control exercised over individual content objects, and the ability to search content. Access to these services requires wrapping the calls in security to prevent unauthorized access or changes to content or its metadata. The finer the granularity of this security and the complexity of its relationship with other objects such as people and folders requires a more sophisticated mechanism than that provided by traditional database security.

The complex requirements of these services imply that much of the business logic of the content repository can be as large as, or larger than, the database itself. Almost all of the content repository vendors provide proprietary service interfaces to encapsulate the breadth of functionality required. Despite having tried over the last ten years to standardize these interfaces, it is only over the last two years that any progress has been made. In 2005, the Java community adopted the JSR-170 standard interface, and Alfresco's content repository is based on this standard.

The single most important aspect of any ECM system is the underlying architecture. Alfresco supports pluggable aspect-oriented architecture out of the box by leveraging open source standards and components such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, CMIS, JSR 168, JSR 170, and JSE6.

The architecture is based on open standards. Hence the applications built using Alfresco can be deployed on any environment, such as Windows, Linux, Mac, and so on. It can use any relational database, such as MySQL, Oracle, and so on. The scalable architecture can run on various application servers, such as JBoss Application Server, Apache Tomcat, and so on. It can work with any browser, such as, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and so on. Also, it can integrate with any portal such as JBoss Portal, Liferay Portal, and so on.

In any enterprise, the amount of content that you will manage will keep on increasing. In some organizations such as media, pharmaceutical, healthcare, and so on, the content increases exponentially every year. Hence, scalability is a critical issue when evaluating ECM solutions.

Due to its modular and light-weight architecture, Alfresco is highly scalable. Alfresco provides horizontal scalability by having each tier in the architecture deployed on multiple servers. Similarly, Alfresco can scale up vertically by supporting partitioning and load-balancing in multi-server environments.

Alfresco server can scale up information by using complex search, structure, and classification of information. Alfresco server can scale up activities by using complex information per activity with dynamic views and full object-level security.

Open standards protect enterprise investment, promote innovation, and make it easier for IT departments to support the software. By adopting open standards for their ECM requirements, enterprises can lower the risk of incompatibilities with existing technologies. Enterprise application integration becomes easier with open standards.

Alfresco is completely built on the following open standards:

If your enterprise has a global business model, it is very important for you to provide content in multiple languages. Most enterprises look beyond their geographic borders for new markets. The majority of web users speak little or no English. Hence, ECM systems should be designed with globalization in mind.

Alfresco out of the box supports several major languages, including Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish.

Protecting unauthorized access to content is a key requirement for enterprises. This is true for corporate web sites, intranets, extranets, front office, and back office applications.

A nice thing about Alfresco is that permissions can be applied at a space (folder) level, or can be set for each individual content item. Out of the box, Alfresco supports a relational database-based membership system, and also supports external identity management systems such as LDAP, NTLM, Kerberos, and Active Directory.

Library services are required if you want to manage, leverage, modify, and control the content in an ECM system. Alfresco provides library services such as Check-in and Check-out, version control, auditing information, and content streaming.

Using Alfresco, you can define the library services to be executed automatically, based on 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, again based on business rules.

Alfresco provides additional intelligence on the content by adding metadata (data about data), business rules, security rules, and collaboration rules dynamically, by using aspect-oriented programming. Alfresco also provides features such as content metadata extractors, content transformers, translations, and auto categorization, to make the content intelligent.

Business process automation increases productivity, reduces costs, streamlines processes, and shortens operation cycles. Alfresco includes JBoss Business Process Manager (JBPM) as a business process management and automation solution. This helps to manage the document life cycle by providing security and audit trails capabilities.

Alfresco provides open standards based protocols for integrating with external applications. Some of the application integration examples are mentioned in this book in Chapter 9. Alfresco can be used either as an embedded repository, or as an external content repository. Because it is open source, you can re-use the integration components for your business applications, thereby saving time and money.

Alfresco, now integrates with applications such as Facebook, ViewOne Pro, and iGoogle, and gadgets such as iPhone.

Quark Publishing System 8 and Alfresco are working together towards bringing web-based storage and collaboration for Quark assets. Alfresco integration with Joomla! is a perfect example of how cooperation between open source projects can yield innovative solutions more rapidly than a proprietary model.

Alfresco integrates with Kofax Ascent Capture and offers customers access to a comprehensive production capture solution, including automatic document classification, data extraction, and validation for both Internet-based distributed capture or centralized environments.

Alfresco integrates with an open source J2EE-based leading portal framework called Liferay. The Alfresco-Liferay bundle is an out of the box solution that provides an excellent portal-based ECM solution.

Drupal, a free and open source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS) written in the PHP programming language, can also be integrated with Alfresco to yield effective solutions.

Alfresco integrates with external identity management systems such as LDAP and Active Directory, and supports centralized security and single sign-on.

Alfresco Enterprise subscription customers are provided with access to Alfresco Network. Alfresco Network provides an easy-to-navigate portal frontend through which customers can access enhanced Enterprise features, including the following:

Alfresco Web Studio is a visual, drag-and-drop, designer for building web sites using the Alfresco Surf platform. It features graphical overlays that facilitate the building of your web site's pages, navigation structure, templates, and presentation layout. Web components snap into your site's pages through simple drag-and-drop interactions. Using Alfresco Web Studio, you can quickly create custom web sites while leveraging the strengths of the Alfresco Web Content Management runtime and repository.

Alfresco Web Studio is available for Surf designers who want to build Surf applications by using a visual, drag-and-drop designer. By using Alfresco Web Studio, application designers are able to browse a library of Alfresco Web Components and visually assemble their web experience.

This puts the full-breadth of Alfresco Collaboration, Document Management, and Web Content Management functionality at their fingertips. It also opens the doors for Web Component provisioning from other open source and open standards vendors (that is, Google Gadgets and so on).

Alfresco Share delivers out of the box, collaborative content management. Alfresco Share simplifies the capturing, sharing, and retrieval of information across virtual teams, boosts productivity, and reduces network bandwidth requirements and email volumes between project team members.

Alfresco Share is built on Alfresco's innovative ECM repository. Additionally, Alfresco Share introduces a new, simplified, easy-to-use and easy-to-adopt knowledge worker UI. The current JSF client will still be available and unchanged, but, the migration to the new UI will be paced by the community and by the community's self-migration to the new UI infrastructure and user experience.

Now, you can share content in a document library and also have access to that content via thumbnails. You can upload project content in bulk and let others choose content via thumbnails and view content in a Flash viewer—allowing users to view content regardless of the originating application or product version (for example, Microsoft Office 2007). It is also possible to search rich metadata for document properties and tags. The content can be tagged, and access to the tags can be shared. Social tags can also be shared and filtered. Discussions can be created on sites, documents or even topics, and the content can also be provided via an RSS feed.

Alfresco Surf is the presentation tier technology utilized by Alfresco for its entire 3.x product suite.

Alfresco Surf works hand-in-hand with Alfresco Web Content Management, and provides virtualized content retrieval, preview, and test support for user sandboxes and web projects. Applications built with Alfresco Surf can be deployed from Alfresco Web Project spaces to production servers while taking full advantage of Alfresco WCM's Enterprise class features.

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. These new REST APIs are based on ATOM Publishing. The Repository Public API has two forms:

The Alfresco Enterprise 3.0 release includes a Draft CMIS Implementation. The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification defines a domain model and a set of API bindings that can be used by applications to work with one or more Enterprise Content Management repositories or systems. The Alfresco Draft CMIS Implementation includes: CMIS REST API binding, CMIS Web Services API binding, CMIS query language, Apache Abdera CMIS Extension, and CMIS REST API Binding Test Harness. The CMIS implementation will provide the following benefits:.

The CMIS technical draft specification (v0.5), announced on September 10th 2008, has been developed jointly by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP.

Alfresco was the first ECM to offer Microsoft Office SharePoint Protocol support. 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.

Using Alfresco, you can implement document management solutions such as Enterprise Document Management, Digital Asset Management, and Contracts Management.

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.

Digital 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.

Whether 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.

Key features include:

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 5015.2 Records Management standards. Alfresco provides file plan templates for numbering, classification, disposition, and other metadata-driven population of records. Disposition includes the transfer of records and/or the ultimate destruction of the 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 full-text searchable.

Key features include:

Using Alfresco, you can implement web content management solutions with a scalable content repository, a web 2.0 AJAX-based user interface, flexible workflow, multi-language support, and a robust search engine.

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.

Alfresco supports a wide range of protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, web services, XML-RPC, FTP, and RMI for the exchange of content with external systems. 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.

Alfresco leverages the existing infrastructure for membership such as LDAP, Active Directory, and Relational databases. 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.

A robust, full-text search engine lets you search your web content (HTML, PDF, MS-Word, PowerPoint slides, and so on) based on your security access permissions. Advanced search features enable you to search web content based on its metadata and keyword values.

Key features include:

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.

Interfaces such as Common Internet File System (CIFS) and WebDAV allow each team member or department to map the folder on the server as a local network drive. 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.

Key features include:

Most ECM systems do not consider search to be an important part of Enterprise Content Management. 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:

Alfresco's web site (http://www.alfresco.com) has a list of customer case studies. Going through these case studies will help you understand the type of applications that you could develop using Alfresco.

Alfresco spent the summer of 2008 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 700 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:

For every new release, you will receive free, upgraded software. You might have to take care of your specific customization to upgrade to the latest version of the software. It is important to follow best practices while implementing Alfresco, so that upgrades are easier and less expensive to handle.