Alfresco 3 Cookbook

Chapter 1. Getting Started

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

Setting up a database for Alfresco
Installing Alfresco on Windows
Installing Alfresco on Linux
Running Alfresco for the first time
Using Alfresco explorer
Knowing about Alfresco stores
Understanding default space hierarchy

Alfresco products

Alfresco offers several integrated products and services in the ECM suite.

The core component in the architecture of Alfresco is the Repository. The Alfresco repository is a collection of services and components. These interact with the Alfresco storage that consists of the contents and indexes stored in binary format, the RDBMS to store the transaction data, tasks and business process information, audit statistics, user and group records, and so on.

On top of the Repository, the Content Platform serves as the podium of all content management operations. Alfresco Content Platform is one of the most scalable Java Content Repository (JCR). The Content Repository API for Java (JCR) is a specification for Java application APIs to access the repositories in a standard and unified manner. The REST-based lightweight mash up architecture enables Rapid Application Development and other applications to integrate with the content repository easily.

Note

REST, stands for Representational State Transfer, it is a software architecture which client programs and server services can interact with on any standard protocol such as HTTP.

A RESTful web service or RESTful web API is a collection of resources with three well-defined aspects.

A base URL of the service.

The Internet media type of the data supported and returned by the service, such as JSON, XML, HTML, and so on.

The set of operations supported by the service using HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and so on.

We will explore how Alfresco APIs can be exposed as RESTful services in later chapters.

Using the flexible Content Platform, several products and services have been exposed such as the Web Client (Alfresco Explorer), Collaboration (Share), and Web Content Management system.

Alfresco Explorer

Earlier called Alfresco Web Client, this application is developed using Java Server Faces (JSF). Using Alfresco Explorer, you can explore the full repository of the current installation of Alfresco and perform most of the activities. In future, this application can be phased out in favor of Alfresco Share. However, Explorer has very wide capabilities for managing the repository and can be considered as a system administrator tool.

Note

Java Server Faces (JSF) is an MVC structured web application framework based on Java. It is created to simplify the development of web-based user interfaces.

For more information on JSF, please see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaee/javaserverfaces-139869.html.

If you are using Alfresco with Tomcat, you can invoke the web client in your web browser by the URL http://localhost:8080/alfresco, or if you are using Alfresco with JBoss, use the URL http://localhost:8080/portal.

We are here assuming that the Alfresco server is running in your local machine and the web server is running on port 8080—this is the default port where the Tomcat or JBoss servers run, unless you manually change the ports.

A few operations for which you can use the Alfresco Explorer are:

Browsing the repository
Managing (uploading, creating, updating, deleting) the contents (see Chapter 2)
Managing (creating, updating, deleting) the users and groups (see Chapter 3)
Managing the users' permissions (see Chapter 3)
Setting up rules (see Chapter 4)
Running several actions (see Chapter 4)
Starting or executing a workflow (see Chapter 11)
Performing on a task assigned to you (see Chapter 11)
Managing the content categorization (see Chapter 2)
Export/Import contents
Managing various scripts and templates in the system

We will be discussing how to install and run Alfresco in the next few sections of this chapter.

Alfresco Share

Share is the Web 2.0 collaboration-based platform providing content management capabilities with simple user interfaces. It provides users with tools for searching and browsing the content, displays thumbnails, and onscreen flash previews of standard documents, enables collaboration between a community of users by various Web 2.0 collaboration tools such as Wikis, Blogs, and Discussion Forums.

Share provides highly-collaborative content management-controlled around sites and activities. End users can easily create collaborative sites for projects, departments, locations, or organization branches. They can invite users to collaborate and participate on contents, approve and publish contents using rich content modeling and lifecycle management of the underlying repository.

The Share application is accessible at http://localhost:8080/share.

All users have their private dashboard available in the Share platform. A dashboard is a collection of dashlets—a dashlet is a miniature view of an application or of functionality or some information. For example, the Tasks dashlet shows all the pending tasks of the current users with information and controls to manage each of the tasks.

User calendar
User's tasks
User's workspaces, sites, and site activities
User's documents
RSS feed

Share enables a collaborative environment in an organization where the participation and involvement of the users happens around sites. A site can be viewed as a community or group of users, a department, a branch, or a location of an organization. The most common usage of site can be project, for example, when you start a new project, you start a site, invite the members into the site, collaborate amongst yourselves, and produce knowledge and content.

Share normally offers four types of sites—Collaboration Site, Meeting Workspace, Document Workspace, and Record Management Site. While Collaborative Site is the default type of site created in Share, Document Workspace is usually created via MS Office®.

Similar to user dashboard, each site also has a dashboard with dashlets such as:

Site calendar
Site profile and colleagues
Recently modified documents
Image preview
Site wiki
Site links
RSS feed

Collaboration Site is preconfigured with a set of default pages. Each page offers different collaboration tools around the site.

Document library
Wiki
Blog
Calendar
Links
Discussion forums
Members
Data lists

Setting up a database for Alfresco

Alfresco uses Hibernate as the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer. Thus, it is capable of plugging into any of the popular relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, and so on.

In this book, we will be demonstrating examples using the MySQL database.

Getting ready

In order to set up your MySQL database for Alfresco, you would need a MySQL database server and an optional MySQL client. A MySQL client could be handy if you are working on Windows.

1. To install the MySQL Server, download the MySQL Server Community Version from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/.
Note
The listed setups are available in the form of Microsoft Installers (.MSI files). If you do not require Documentations and Development Components (in our case, for running Alfresco in a Developer Machine, we do not need these), you can download the installers without the essentials. Choose the installer that suits you and download.
If you are running a 64-bit Operating System environment, you can download the 64-bit version of the server from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mirror.php?id=390238#mirrors. Otherwise, go for a 32-bit installation from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mirror.php?id=390237#mirrors
2. Choose one mirror, download, and save the installer in a suitable location on your computer.
3. Run the installer and choose Typical in installation types.
4. After completion of the installation, start configuring the server and choose Detailed Configuration.
5. Select Developer Machine and choose Multifunctional database.
6. For the next steps in INNODB tablespace settings, Concurrent connections settings, TCP/IP port settings, default character set, windows service configuration, accept the default options and settings provided.
7. Give the root password as you like, however, it is advisable not to use a blank password.
8. Click Next>, your MySQL server will be configured.
9. Clicking Finish will close the setup wizard and MySQL server is installed.
10. Install MySQL Clients. You can use any of the clients available for MySQL. However, in our example, we will be using the MySQL Workbench.

Note

Note that the MySQL Workbench requires .NET Framework 3.5 to be installed in the machine, in case it is not, there is your machine; you can use MySQL GUI tools or SQLYog. The following are some of the clients available for MySQL:

MySQL Workbench

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/

GUI tools for MySQL 5.0

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html

SQLYog

http://www.webyog.com/en/downloads.php

MySQL client applications are not mandatory for Alfresco server setup. However, it is sometimes handy to get a client application of the database server in order to view, create, and configure the database and the database users. In case you do not have any client application installed, you can still use the MySQL server command prompt from your localhost.

How to do it...

After you have installed the server and the client application, let's create a database for Alfresco. By default, Alfresco stack uses the name 'Alfresco' for MySQL database as well as for the username and password. Though you can change these settings, we will go with these default settings for now.

1. Open MySQL Workbench and connect to the MySQL Server; we are assuming here that the MySQL server is running on your local machine.
2. We now need to create a database for Alfresco. After establishing the connection, open the connection to invoke the workbench SQL editor.
3. Create a new schema named alfresco in the localhost server with UTF-8 encoding and UTF-8-default collation
Note
Using UTF-8 encoding and collation is recommended by Alfresco.
4. After creating the database, create a user alfresco with the password alfresco. For that, you need to create a Server Instance for our localhost MySQL server.
5. In the server administration panel, create a new user named alfresco and with the password alfresco.

With this, we have set up a blank database for our Alfresco server and created a user. We will now give permissions to this user for using the database schema.

Alfresco's Tomcat bundle contains database creation, user creation script, and grant right script on that database under "<<ALFRESCO_INSTALLATION_DIR>>\extras\databases\mysql\db_setup.sql". This allows the creation of a database with a single click only.

How it works...

In the previous steps, we have created a blank database for Alfresco and created a user and granted it permissions to manage the database. Now when Alfresco Tomcat or JBoss bundle runs for the first time, it will create all the database objects (tables, and so on) automatically.

The Alfresco bundle uses MySQL as the database by default, thus you don't have to perform any changes for that.

We have created a database with the name alfresco. We have also created a user with the name alfresco with the same password. This is because the default setting of Alfresco bundle is configured in this way. Thus, you don't have to change any settings in the default bundle.

Default configurations are mentioned under "ALF_HOME>>\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco-global.properties". If needed, you can change this setting as per the database configuration.

Installing Alfresco on Windows

There are two methods to install Alfresco on a Windows platform.

Using the Alfresco packaged installer
Deploying the Tomcat or JBoss bundle

The first approach will install Alfresco in Windows along with JDK (optionally), create the Alfresco database automatically, and can configure and start Alfresco as a Windows Service. It will inject the relevant shortcuts in your Start Menu just like any other application installed in your machine. You can start/stop the server using the Start Menu option or a Windows Service. This is a fully-automated and smooth approach to install Alfresco.

The second approach is more manual. You will have the downloaded Tomcat or JBoss bundle of Alfresco. Manually configure a few things, and you are ready to go. However, you cannot have Alfresco as a service in Windows very easily, in this case, and won't have the Start Menu shortcuts ready for you. But in this case, as a developer and explorer of Alfresco, you can have a number of Alfresco bundles deployed and running on your machine.

In this book, we will demonstrate the second option, as the first one is very straightforward and you will find lots of documentation around that. We will also use the Tomcat bundle of Alfresco and not the JBoss one.

Getting ready

1. Download the Alfresco community edition from the Alfresco download site. http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Community_Edition_file_list_3.3
2. In Individual Components and Custom Installs section, download the Alfresco-community-tomcat-3.3.zip file. Or you can directly use the URL http://process.alfresco.com/ccdl/?file=release/community/build-2765/alfresco-community-tomcat-3.3.zip and use standard download.
3. You will need the following prerequisite programs already installed on your machine—
- WinZIP or WinRAR
- JDK 1.6.x
- MySQL database server
4. Once these programs are installed and after downloading the Alfresco Tomcat bundle, we are ready to go.

How to do it...

Carry out the following steps to install the Alfresco Tomcat bundle on your machine.

1. Download the ZIP archive from the preceding URL.
2. Unzip the archive in a folder in your system. Say the folder you have unzipped the archive into is c:\Alfresco. These are the root level files in the unzipped folder.
3. You need to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to make the Tomcat server understand where your JDK or JRE is installed.
- Open System Properties by right-clicking on the My Computer icon on your desktop.
- Open the Advanced tab.
- Click on Environment Variables.
- Check whether the JAVA_HOME environment variable is already set or not.
  1. i. If not, create a new System Variable named JAVA_HOME and put the value of the variable to the directory where JDK or JRE is installed.
  2. ii. For example, if your JDK is installed in the c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_14 directory, the value of JAVA_HOME should be the same.
    If the JAVA_HOME variable is already defined, validate whether it contains the correct value.
4. You also need to check whether Java runtimes are properly added in your windows PATH.
1. a. Open System Properties by right-clicking on the My Computer icon on your desktop.
2. b. Open the Advanced tab.
3. c. Click on Environment Variables.
  1. iii. Open the PATH environment variable
  2. iv. Check whether it is having the JDK binary folder value inserted into it. The value inserted should be %JAVA_HOME%\bin
5. Assuming that you have properly created a database named Alfresco in your local MySQL server, and created a user with the name Alfresco (as in the previous recipe), you can start your Tomcat server now. Run the alf_start.bat file and the Tomcat server should have started.

How it works...

The first time the AlfrescoTomcat server starts, the web application files (.WAR files) are exploded in the tomcat\webapps folder.

Similarly, the deployer also populates the MySQL database, and creates the required database objects (tables, and so on) into it.

Alfresco uses some third-party tools and applications for several purposes. When the Tomcat server starts, Alfresco connects with these applications and performs the necessary actions later on, as required.

Open Office is used by Alfresco in order to convert or transform documents into the portable document format (PDF).
ImageMagick converter is used to generate thumbnail images of documents.
PDF2SWF tool is used to convert PDF documents into flash movies.

ImageMagick and PDF2SWF binaries come with the downloaded Tomcat bundle of Alfresco, thus you do not have to install and configure these separately. However, you may have to install Open Office in your machine separately.

There's more...

Sometimes you may need to configure the JAVA_OPTS variable as well, in case you are facing any memory issues while running the application—memory issues like Java Heap Space, Perm Gen error, and so on.

For setting up JAVA_OPTS, you have to follow the same procedure as in setting up the JAVA_HOME variable in your environment variable list.

There is no fixed value for JAVA_OPTS, it depends on your application load. However, in a standard developer machine, it should be something like

-Xms256m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m

in a machine having 2 to 4 GB of physical memory.

Installing Alfresco on Linux

You can install Alfresco in the Linux platform with these two methods:

Using the Alfresco packaged installer
Deploying the Tomcat or JBoss bundle

The first approach will install Alfresco in Linux along with JDK (optionally). It will create the Alfresco database automatically and is often capable of configuring and starting Alfresco as a Linux init script.

The second approach is more manual. You will have the downloaded Tomcat or JBoss bundle of Alfresco. Manually configure a few things and you are ready to go.

As in the case of windows, in this book, we will demonstrate the second option. And, we will also use the Tomcat bundle of Alfresco, not the JBoss one.

Getting ready

1. Download the Alfresco community edition from the Alfresco download site. http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Community_Edition_file_list_3.3.
2. In Individual Components and Custom Installs section, download the Alfresco-community-tomcat-3.3.tar.gz file. Or you can directly use this URL http://process.alfresco.com/ccdl/?file=release/community/build-2765/alfresco-community-tomcat-3.3.tar.gz and use standard download.
3. You will need the following prerequisite programs already installed in your machine:
- JDK 1.6.x
- MySQL database server
4. Once these programs are installed and after downloading the Alfresco Tomcat bundle, we are ready to go.

How to do it...

Carry out the following steps to install the Alfresco Tomcat bundle on your machine.

1. Download the compressed archive from the above URL.
2. Untar the bundle and move it to a suitable location, say /usr/local/Alfresco
```
# tar -zxf Alfresco-xxx.tar.gz
# mv Alfresco-xxx /user/local/
```
3. You need to give proper permission to the moved folder.
```
# chmod -R 755 /usr/local/Alfresco-xxx
```
4. You need to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to make the Tomcat server understand where your JDK or JRE is installed.
5. Check whether the JAVA_HOME environment variable is already set or not.
```
# echo $JAVA_HOME
```
6. If the JAVA_HOME variable is already defined, validate whether it is containing the correct value.

7. If not, create a new file named java.sh under the /etc/profile.d directory and set the JAVA_HOME variable with the value to the directory where JDK or JRE is installed.

# touch /etc/profile.d/java.sh
# chmod 755 /etc/profile.d/java.sh
# echo "JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk1.6.x" >> /etc/profile.d/ java.sh
# source /etc/profile.d/java.sh

8. You also need to check whether Java runtimes are properly added in your PATH variable.
```
# echo $PATH
```

9. If not, set the PATH variable to the value of the bin directory of the desired JDK package.

# echo "PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/jdk1.6.x/bin" >> /etc/profile.d/ java.sh
# source /etc/profile.d/java.sh

10. Assuming that you have properly created a database named Alfresco in your local MySQL server, and created a user with the name Alfresco (as in previous recipe), you can start your Tomcat server now. Run the startup.sh file and the Tomcat server should have started.
```
# cd /usr/local/Alfresco/tomcat-6.0.18/bin
# ./startup.sh
```

11. You can check out the log file for any unexpected error.

# tail -f /usr/local/Alfresco/tomcat-6.0.18/logs/catalina.out

How it works...

The first time the Alfresco Tomcat server starts, the web application files (.WAR files) are exploded in the tomcat\webapps folder.

Similarly, the deployer also populates the MySQL database and creates the required database objects (tables, and so on ) into it.

Open Office is used by Alfresco in order to convert or transform documents into the portable document format (PDF).
ImageMagick converter is used to generate thumbnail images of documents.
PDF2SWF tool is used to convert PDF documents into flash movies.

There's more...

Sometimes you may need to configure the JAVA_OPTS variable as well, in case you are facing any memory issues while running the application—memory issues like Java Heap Space, Perm Gen error, and so on.

For setting up JAVA_OPTS, you have to follow the same procedure as in setting up the JAVA_HOME variable in your environment variable list.

There is no ideal and fixed value for JAVA_OPTS; it depends on your application load. However, in a standard developer machine, it should be something like

-Xms256m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m

in a machine having 2 to 4 GB of physical memory.

Running Alfresco for the first time

Alfresco comes with mainly two pre-packaged products (or applications)—the Web Client (or Alfresco Explorer) and Alfresco Share.

Here we will explore how to invoke these applications in your web browser.

Getting ready

Run the Alfresco Server. Go to C:\Alfresco (remember, this is the location we assume our Tomcat stack to be deployed from).

Wait until you see the server start-up confirmation message appears.

How to do it...

1. Open your favorite web browser.
2. To open Alfresco Explorer, type the URL http://localhost:8080/alfresco. The login screen will appear. By default, an administrator user comes with the Alfresco bundle with the username admin and the password admin.
3. After login, clicking on Company Home at top-left corner invokes the Alfresco Explorer screen, showing all available spaces in your repository.
4. To open Alfresco Share, type the URL http://localhost:8080/share. The login screen will appear. By default, an administrator user comes with the Alfresco bundle with the username admin and the password admin.
5. After login, the user dashboard will appear.

There's more

Let's go under the hood to understand the components of Alfresco Explorer.

Once you log in, you will be presented with your Dashboard in the explorer. The explorer web application window has mainly seven sections.

After logging in, click on Company Home to navigate to the root folder of the repository.

Note

1. Alfresco accumulates all contents, user information, and process information in several preconfigured stores. Thus, the Alfresco Store is the logical storage space of all contents uploaded in the repository.
2. Some of the important stores in the default configured bundle of Alfresco.
1. 1. workspace://SpacesStore
  This is the main logical storage space where all contents and files are stored. The Alfresco Explorer application enables users to browse through this store only. In a general sense, when we call the Alfresco repository, we mostly refer to this store's contents only. Thus, in the later chapters, when we will talk about contents and spaces, we would refer to the contents of this store.
2. 2. user://AlfrescoUserStore
  Stores information about the users registered in the Alfresco stack.
3. 3. workspace://lightWeightVersionStore
  version2Alfresco, being an ECMS, can handle and manage multiple versions of a document. It enables users to check-in, check-out a document, see different versions of a document, and view the history of versions of a document. The lightWeightVersionStorev2 contains the archived versions of all versioned documents; that means all documents with the cm:versionable aspect. In other words, this store stocks up all versions of the contents of workspace://SpacesStore.
4. 4. archive://SpacesStore
  This store is the trash can of workspace://SpacesStore. Means the contents that are deleted or removed from any of the repository spaces land up in this store as archive. However, once an item is removed from this store, that one is permanently lost.
5. 5. system://system
  This store is very small and contains software information.
3. All contents and files are stored in folders, in Alfresco language, these folders are called spaces. Company Home is itself a space, inside which all other spaces and contents are stored. Under one space, there can be any number of subspaces, subspaces then contain a number of other subspaces and this hierarchy goes on. Each of these spaces can store contents, documents, or other files.
4. By default, Alfresco workspace://SpacesStore store comes with Company Home and inside Company Home, four spaces are configured.
- Data Dictionary
- Guest Home
- Sites
- User Homes

Toolbar

The toolbar at the top section of the explorer window provides links to various spaces and functionalities of Alfresco.

Company Home: Link to open the repository home space.
My Home: Link to open your (current logged in user's) home space.
Guest Home: Link to open the home space of non-logged in users.
My Alfresco: Link to navigate to your dashboard (current logged in user's dashboard).
Admin Console: Link to open the Administrative Console of Alfresco. This link is only available to Alfresco Administrators.
User Profile: Link to open the interface for changing your details, password, preferences.
Toggle Sidebar: Show / Hide the left navigation sidebar. Hiding the sidebar is often useful when your contents are large in number and you need more space in the screen to view more content at a time.
Logout: Link to logout from the Alfresco explorer. In parenthesis, it shows the current username.
Search: Simple and advanced search panel. This is the single and centralized search panel where you can hunt for any content available in the repository.

Sidebar

Sidebar is the left side panel for browsing the repository spaces, managing yourself, performing OpenSearch, or browsing contents by categories.

Navigator: This panel helps you to navigate through the repository by the available repository spaces.
Shelf: Shelf is sort of your mantelpiece where your clipboard is maintained, recent spaces you have navigated are listed, and shortcuts you have created are preserved.
OpenSearch: OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in simple formats suitable for content syndication and aggregation. Alfresco can act as an OpenSearch provider and can expose its search engines via OpenSearch.
Category Browser: One of most required and sought after features of an Enterprise Content Management system is the ability to classify or categorize content by custom taxonomy. Alfresco repository has a powerful categorization engine by which you can classify any document or space. This panel enables you to browse the contents by categories.

Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb is the routing trail of spaces you have navigated through.

It shows the trace of spaces you have browsed or navigated. Each of these spaces is hyperlinked, enabling you to open any particular space with one click.

Current space information

This panel shows details of the current space you are in or the functionality you are using. For example, if you have opened the InfoAxon space, it will display information about the space InfoAxon. The right side of this panel shows the number of rules configured in this space.

Actions Links

On the right side of the Space information panel, links for actions that can be performed on the current space are provided.

Add Content enables you to upload a new file in the current space.
Create Options facilitates you to create new content items and create new spaces.
More Actions supplies several tasks that can be performed over the current space.
View Options offers at most four choices to view the contents of the current space
Details View displays contents along with details of each one—much like windows explorer details view.
Icon View shows contents with the content icon along with minimal information about the file.
Browse View renders only the filename, title, and action icons for the content.
Custom View exhibits the freemarker template you have associated with the space.

Sub-spaces panel

Panel shows all subspaces of the current space. You can set the number of items to show in a page. However, this setting will be applicable for the current session only, meaning if your session is expired or you are logged out, this setting will be reset.

There is a pagination control set also provided by which you can navigate through several pages.

Content items panel

This panel renders the content items (documents, files, and so on) created or uploaded in the current space. As seen previously, you can set the number of items to show in a page. However, this setting will be applicable for the current session only, means as before if your session is expired or you are logged out, this setting will be reset.

There is a pagination control set also provided by which you can navigate through several pages.

Footer

The footer section of the explorer page displays copyrights, license, warranty, and other information about Alfresco. This panel stays read-only unless you fiddle with some of Alfresco explorer's JSP pages and JAVA classes.

Subhash Chandran Sep 18, 2011

I am a fan of the Cookbook format. It is a quick way to learn a subject / product and helps us to get hands on immediately. Alfresco especially, being a complex product with diverse features is learned quickly in this format. There is also a tendency for authors to misuse this format by missing out concepts behind the quick hands on steps. I would like to congratulate the author, Snig Bhaumik, for making excellent use of this format without sacrificing the conceptual information.The book covers version 3.3 of Alfresco. Topics covered include installation, content organization, Alfresco Explorer (for old timers: new name of Web Client), Search, Rules, Web Scripts and Workflows. Among the third-party product-integration covered are MS Outlook and MS Office. There is also a dedicated chapter on configuring Alfresco to send and receive emails, and exposing Alfresco contents using other protocols like FTP and CIFS. As you see, the book covers quite some features of the product. The author uses relevant screenshots and numbered steps to explain configuration and development. Also, the examples chosen by the author are simple and explain the topic in surprisingly concise manner. There is also a section on building Alfresco, which I found to be an odd inclusion in this book: the book did not cover anything about Java-based development, and I found this to be irrelevant to the context of the book.To those who has not seen the TOC of the book, the scope of this book does not cover:=> Alfresco Share: The book has a section on Share. The author also informs the reader about the possibility of Share replacing Alfresco Explorer in future. Personally, for this one reason, I would have loved to know more about Share. If there is a future edition of this book, I would love to see extensive coverage of this module.=> Alfresco Web Content Management (WCM): There seems to be some uncertainity about WCM. And the book does not cover this topic.=> Java based extensions: The book does a good job of explaining Web Scripts and Workflows, but does not explain extending them with Java---the examples are with JavaScript.=> The Workflow chapter does a very good job of explaining jBPM based Workflow. But there is no mention of Activiti, and new preferred Workflow engine for Alfresco.Some of these omissions I agree with author not being in the scope of the book (like Java-based-extension and WCM), but I would have loved to more coverage of Share.Now to the editorial drawbacks (which mires most of the Packt books I have read). There are couple of places where it is mentioned that Web Client is now named Alfresco Explorer, but we have a chapter whose name has Web Client. In page 133, a section is full of annotations the author had made for filling in content later (with text like "please give reference to future workflow section here"). Hope Packt does some improvement in this area.Overall, I gave this book a rating of 4 stars. The book really succeeds in explaining the concepts it covers very effectively. I would say, this book along with the bit dated Alfresco Developer Guide is among the best books on Alfresco. I also sincerely hope that the author keeps updating the book along with new versions of Alfresco.

Amazon Verified review

Johnny Gee Oct 01, 2011

If you are a first time Alfresco developer and have not read many books on Alfresco, Snig's cookbook is an excellent reference. If you have read other Alfresco books, about half the material will be familiar and is what you would typically find in Alfresco tutorial. If you have already implemented several Alfresco applications, go directly to the workflow chapter; you probably already know the solutions/sample code presented in the rest of the cookbook.The other reviews about this book cover the technical details. I would like to high-light Snig's writing style of "providing minimum theory...maximum action". Snig approach to presenting problems to solve and solutions/sample code to solve involves the following:1) Getting Ready (intro to the problem)2) How to do it (instructions/solution overview)3) How it works (technical explanation of the solution)4) There's more (optional supplemental info).Sample code is great for users who are not interested in learning to build Alfresco solutions. Snig's "How it works" section presents the secret sauce on what the sample code does and how it solves the problem. I strongly believe that explaining how to solve the problem is more valuable than the actual solution itself. Snig does a good job of explaining the solutions he presents throughout the book.I would recommend this book to someone who was asked to start building a prototype tomorrow. If you are planning to learn Alfresco as profession, there are other books about Alfresco that cover the theory in more detail.

Darryl Staflund Aug 27, 2011

Alfresco 3 Cookbook (Packt, 2011) is the latest in a series of books on Alfresco ECM that Packt Publishing has released since 2008. Snig Bhaumik, the Technical Director of InfoAxon Technologies Ltd., wrote the book to give software developers wanting to work with Alfresco a comprehensive selection of development recipes covering everything from installing Alfresco in Windows and Linux to compiling Alfresco from source code. The book comes in at 380 pages (and fourteen chapters) and can be purchased in paper and electronic format (PDF and ePub) online or in stores.Chapters One through Five explain how to download and install the Community Edition of Alfresco and then use Alfresco Explorer to create and organize, secure and search, and ultimately administer content placed in the repository. Chapter Four is especially rewarding, providing not only a conceptual introduction to Rules, but also a rich catalog of the actions and conditions that go into the making of them. Chapter Five is also valuable for its explanations on how to use the Content Packager to import and export content to and from the repository, and how on to use the Node Browser to retrieve information about content.Chapters Six through Eleven get into Alfresco development. It starts off with a discussion on how to customize the appearance and display of Alfresco Explorer (Chapter Six) and then delves into the creation of content models, a topic at the heart of Content Management (Chapter Seven.) The Alfresco Javascript, Freemarker, and WebScript APIs are covered in Chapters Eight through Ten, respectively, and Chapter Eleven introduces workflow automation using JBoss jBPM, a workflow engine that comes embedded with Alfresco. In all these chapters, the author makes sure to explain how to deploy solutions to the Alfresco server, and how to integrate these solutions with the Alfresco Explorer interface.Chapters Twelve and Thirteen cover a number of different ways in which Alfresco integrates with end-user applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office as well as email and file servers. Chapter Fourteen completes the book with a description on how to checkout and build the Alfresco Community Edition from Alfresco's public SVN repository.Like other Alfresco books that have come out in the last three years, some of its information is dated due to ongoing development of the product. As of Alfresco Community 3.4e, PostgreSQL replaces MySQL as the default database, and iBatis replaces Hibernate as the default ORM. And in the upcoming Alfresco Community 4.0 release, Activiti is being touted as the embedded workflow engine of choice ahead of JBoss jBPM. Although substantial, most developers will take these changes in stride.I have a single request that I would like address to the Quality Assurance team at Packt Publishing - please take the time needed to address the grammatical shortcomings of your books. Oftentimes when I buy a book from Packt Publishing, I find more than just a few grammatical errors in the book. Don't get me wrong - the books that Packt publishes are helpful to developers and deserve to be published. But Packt has the responsibility of working with their authors to address these issues before they go to press. No one likes to buy a book with grammatical errors in it.So this, in a nutshell, is Alfresco 3 Cookbook. It makes a good developer companion alongside other books like Alfresco Developer Guide (Packt, 2008), Alfresco 3 Business Solutions (Packt, 2011), and Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Wrox, 2010.)But there is more to Alfresco than what has been covered in this book. So I heartily recommend that the author consider publishing an advanced Alfresco cookbook on topics such as the use of Alfresco Policies to implement business rules, the use of Alfresco's Auditing framework to implement history beyond that of document versioning and workflow, release management strategies using Alfresco Modules, and, of course, the upcoming Activiti and Solr integrations. Such a book would be a very welcome contribution. Alfresco 3 Cookbook (Packt, 2011) is a good book and I recommend it to anyone learning to work with Alfresco.

Alfresco 3 Cookbook: Over 70 recipes for implementing the most important functionalities of Alfresco

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