Alfresco Enterprise 3.0—An overview

Alfresco Enterprise 3.0 is built on the Alfresco Surf platform. This platform enables you to build dynamic, REST-oriented web applications and collaborative web sites. . The Surf platform is designed to work in a number of different web environments. It includes content-oriented components designed around the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library and Adobe Flash for dynamic uploads and the preview of content and other information. These new user interface components make it much simpler for users to develop new collaborative web applications. It is also designed so that it can work as a Web Part in Microsoft SharePoint Portal.

Alfresco Network

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 Knowledge Base: This is a repository of certified solutions, recommendations, and best practices for building with and configuring Alfresco's Enterprise product.

• Alfresco Call Tracking: This supports the creation and tracking of support tickets through to resolution.

• Documents and Downloads: This provides full access to Enterprise-certified product releases and their associated documentation.

• Extensions / Add-on Library: This provides access to officially certified and supported extensions and add-ons that can be plugged into your existing Alfresco Repository or Alfresco Surf presentation layer.

• Enhanced Support Experience: This provides live interaction with support engineers, document lockers, and also provides integrated call tracking history.

• Heartbeat and Monitoring: These provide remote support for the Alfresco Repository in order to monitor the heartbeat and health of the system, collect log files, and provide a quicker resolution turnaround.

• Enterprise News Feeds: These provide access to all of the latest updates, consolidated into feeds around product, support, and community news.

Alfresco Web Studio

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

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

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.

Alfresco Repository Public API

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:

• A RESTful API for remotely connecting to the Repository (as used by Alfresco Share.)

• A Javascript API for developing extensions to the Repository (as used in Web Scripts, Actions etc.)

Alfresco Draft CMIS Implementation

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:.

• Being a write once, run-anywhere application

• Integrating multiple repositories

• Supporting business processes across repositories

• Requiring users to learn only one UI for all repositories

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.

Microsoft SharePoint Protocol support

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.