Alfresco Enterprise 4 – an overview
Alfresco Enterprise 4.0 is built on the Alfresco Surf platform. This platform enables you to build dynamic, REST-oriented web applications and collaborative websites. 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 previewing of content and other information. The new user interface components make it much simpler for users to develop new collaborative web applications. It is also enabled to work as a Web Part in Microsoft SharePoint Portal.
Alfresco Share
Alfresco Share delivers out of the box, collaborative content management. Alfresco Share simplifies capturing, sharing, and retrieval of information across virtual teams, boosts productivity, and reduces network bandwidth requirements and e-mail volumes between project team members.
Alfresco 4 releases include many enhancements to Share such as improved user experience and advanced management tools. Share now also supports plug-in extension modules to extend, replace, or remove components within Share without changing the OOTB code.
Alfresco Repository Public API
The Repository Public API provides content and collaboration services for customizing and developing Alfresco applications. Introduced with Labs 3b, it offers services such as site management, site activities, tagging, commenting, thumbnails, blogs, wikis, and forums to support social collaboration. These new REST APIs are based upon 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, and so on)
Alfresco 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 CMIS technical draft specification has been developed jointly by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP. The CMIS implementation will benefit by:
- Write once, run anywhere application
- Integrate multiple repositories
- Business process across repositories
- Learn one UI for all repositories
Alfresco Version 4.0 includes enhanced CMIS features such as the following:
- Consolidated AtomPub and Web Services impl. behind OpenCMIS Server
- Access to OpenCMIS Client API within Repository (in-process)
- Single-Sign On support with CMIS
- .NET OpenCMIS Client API (via Apache Chemistry)
For more information on Alfresco and CMIS, please see cmis.alfresco.com.
Microsoft SharePoint Protocol support
Alfresco is now the first ECM to offer Microsoft Office SharePoint Protocol support. Available at a lower cost and with no additional client installation, it is remarkable. It also allows choice for hardware, database, operating system, application server, and portal products.
Social content publishing
Social content publishing is a new feature added in Alfresco 4.0 release to allow you to publish content from Alfresco to social platforms. The current out of the box support is for the following social platforms:
- Flickr
- SlideShare
- YouTube
Solr search
Many improvements were made to the search service in Alfresco from 4.0 release onwards. Alfresco provides Solr as an alternative to previous in-transaction, Lucene-based indexing and search. Solr can be deployed and scaled on a separate tier.
Activiti workflow for Business Process Management (BPM)
Prior to the 4.0 release, Alfresco used JBoss JBPM as the workflow engine. The 4.0 releases now include the full integration of the Activiti engine into the repository. A new installation of 4.0 will also include JBPM, but it will be disabled by default. This is to support backward compatibility.
iPad and Android usability improvements
Alfresco 4.2 releases include mobile usability improvements for the share interface. For example, the editor for content creation, wiki, blogs, and forums is more users friendly. Features such as HTML5 drag-n-drop (in supported HTML5 browsers), and multi-file selection in the standard file upload dialog are supported.
