Content Management Appliance

This appliance bundles a browser-based content management system with workflow and Web content management capabilities

Saturday, March 01, 2008

The browser-based system called Alfresco allows access to the documents through Windows share as well as WebDav. Alfresco showcases a number of features like smart faces, automatic metadata extraction (from MS Word files), content versioning, and an advanced content search. Its Web content mgmt capabilities allow you to use the content created in Alfresco to be used in a website based on any language or technology-Net, Java, or PHP. The content authors can preview their Web pages in a sandbox and upon approval (facilitated through a workflow), can publish the content to the production site.

Start up Alfresco
Start the appliance as explained in the article 'Installation & Implementation.' Login as root. Change to the directory /var/alfresco and start Alfresco as:
cd /var/alfresco
./alfresco.sh start

Fire up a Web browser (IE or Firefox) from one of the machines on your network and type in the URL-http://:8080/alfresco/. Substitute with the IP address you assigned to the appliance. Click on 'Login (guest).' You will be redirected to the login page. Here, login as admin with the password as admin. Upon login as admin, click on the 'Administration Console' icon. It allows you to manage users, groups, document categories, etc. For an in-depth on document mgmt refer to the article 'Document Mgmt System' at http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/linux/2007/107031013.asp

Web Content Management (WCM)
Using a simple example, we go through a quick overview of how WCM works in Alfresco. Let us assume that your website hosts articles, each of which has a title, subtitle, byline, date, content (the body of the article). In WCM, each content item (like article in this case) needs to be defined through an XSD (XML Schema Definition) file. The XSD for the articles will look something as follows:

xmlns:pr="http://www.alfresco.org/alfresco/pr"
targetNamespace="http://www.alfresco.org/alfresco/pr"
elementFormDefault="qualified">

Save the above content as article.xsd on your desktop. This XSD will be rendered as a Web page using XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations). Below is the XSLT to render article.xsd:

On the administration console, click on Manage System Users>Create User and follow the wizard. By default, each user will have full access to its 'Home Space' (home directory)

To add documents to a space, click on Company Home>Reports>Add Content. Click on browse and select the document to upload

xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:pr="http://www.alfresco.org/alfresco/pr"
xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/02/xpath-functions"
exclude-result-prefixes="xhtml">
doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"/>

Save the above file as article.xsl on your desktop. WCM allows to preview the website in a sandbox (test server), which need to be set up and run. Let us assume that the IP address of the virtual appliance is 192.168.3.74. Open the file named alfresco-virtserver.properties found in the directory /var/alfresco/virtual-tomcat/conf and change the value of alfresco.virtserver.domain to 192-168-3-74.ip.alfrescodemo.net. Save the file. Change to /var/alfresco directory and start sandbox server as: ./virtual_alf.sh start

Also make sure that the appliance is able to access the Internet. This is required because the sandbox server uses a domain name server sitting at ip.alfrescodemo.net. For more on this, refer to the URL http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Configuring_the_Virtualization_Server.

To create new spaces (directories), click on 'Company Home' (left). Click on Create>Create Space (right). Type in the name of the space (say Reports) and click on 'Create Space'	To assign users who can access a space (say Reports), click on Company Home>Reports>More Action>Manage Space Users>Invite

Create a website
Click on Company Home>Web Projects>Create Web Project. Type in any Name and 'DNS Name' for the website. For 'Deploy To,' type in localhost. Click on Next. Now click on 'Create Web Form.' Browse and select the file article.xsd. In the subsequent screen click on 'Add to list.' Next for 'Configure Workflow,' click on 'No not now.' Click on Next and then on Finish. On the page titled 'Configure Web Content Forms,' click on 'Add to list' button for Web form named article. Click on 'Web Form Details.' For the 'Output path pattern' type in /${webapp}/{$name}.xml. Click on OK. Keep clicking on Next, accepting the defaults and finally click on the Finish button. We are set to generate and publish the article or content pages.

Publish the content
On the page title ',' click on the arrow icon beside 'Web Forms.' Click on 'Create Content.' Type in article1 (say) for Name. Click on Next and fill in the article title, subtitle etc. Click on Finish. On subsequent page, click on the arrow icon beside 'Modified Items.' This will reveal two files: article1.html and article2.html. You can click on the preview icon (eye like icon) beside the article1.html to preview it. The preview is shown in the user's (who is currently logged in) sandbox. That is, the content itself has not gone live. Create more content/articles following the same steps. To make the content live, mark (using the checkbox) the files under 'Modified Items' and click on 'Submit Selected.' Type in any Name and Description for 'Submission Info' and click on OK. The content is now promoted to the staging sandbox. To make the content live, click on arrow icon beside 'Recent Snapshots' and then on the Deploy icon (the icon with a globe and green arrow). Click OK on the 'Deploy Snapshot' page.

After this step, the content will be available on a share named ///avm/sitelive. Here is the IP address of the appliance. Browse through the share to find the article.html file. This share can then be mounted on a Windows Web server (by mapping a network drive) or on a Linux Web server (using Samba mount) to make the article files accessible. While setting up the Web project, we skipped setting up users and workflow. The former will allow a team of users with different permissions (authoring, editing, approving, deploying) to contribute to the site development. The latter will allow content submissions to go live following a set approval process. These aspects of WCM are well explained in the document-http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/ sourceforge/alfresco/WCM2_1-Product-Evaluation-Guide.pdf.

For more on Alfresco refer to the forums and Wiki at www.alfresco.com.

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