Installing Alfresco (3.x, 4.x) on (32bit) Ubuntu

Recently I got into a twitter discussion about installing Alfresco Community on 32bit Ubuntu. Alfresco only provides 64bit installers these days (all-in-one), and the Tomcat distribution is no more. Since Alfresco is a Java app, the app doesn’t matter. It is Java and the helper applications needed, that need to be 32/64bit.

This blog will show you step by step how to install Alfresco and the helper apps on 32bit Ubuntu 11.10 (server). It will use OpenJDK (since it is the default in Ubuntu 11.10), LibreOffice (default in Ubuntu repositories) and MySQL (because I am more familiar with than Postgress). On the way we will install ImageMagick, Pdf2swf and FFmpeg.

Alfresco Business Reporting released

A while ago I wanted insight in how our Alfresco Share repository was used. ‘Ad-hoc reporting’ and ‘(always changing) management reporting’ is not Alfresco’s strongest feature. There is a need for reporting in a way a business user understands, using their tools of choice. The Alfresco Business Reporting project delivers the missing link. It extracts Alfresco business objects (like documents, folders, datalists, links, discussions) into plain SQL tables. The total set of properties for each object, including your custom aspects, show up as columns in your table. And you, the business, can use your reporting tool of choice, to generate fancy reports. No need for IT consultants to configure Alfresco for every change or additional report. Once the synchronization is configured, you can define as much reports as you like, answering your (or your management’s) questions immediately.

Review of ‘Alfresco 3 Cookbook’ by Snig Bhaumik

Recently, I was approached by Packt publishing if I would be interested in reviewing the Alfresco 3 Cookbook - quick answers to common problems. I like to cook, so I agreed. In short; I expected to cook, stirr and fry, but got a thorough guided tour through the ingredients and the kitchen.

The Cookbook is a great book if you’re a starter on Alfresco. I see many people start out with Alfresco and get overwhelmed with the possibilities. – This is their book.

It takes you by the hand and let you install Alfresco and the supporting tools needed. Almost all features of the Alfresco Explorer interface as well as many of Alfresco Share are described. I cannot help but having a glance at Munwar Shariff’s Alfresco Content Management Implementation book, also on my shelf.  There are some similarities. Next to the ‘picks and clicks’, the Cookbook also describes the first steps in configuration, the datamodel, JavaScript API (Sample chapter!), Webscrips, Freemarker and JBPM Workflow, configuring fileservers and using the Sharepoint protocol. For a starter book, it covers it all, and you can follow the guides. For a brief overview of the contents in sections, see this great review, and this one from Dick Weisinger (FormTek) is valid as well.

Ephesoft – Your content in the cloud

Recently I noticed a tweet questioning if capture software should run in the cloud. I expected that the answer contains more nuance than would fit in (two times) 140 characters, but I gave it a try anyway.

Chuck Romano‘s  initial blog was triggered by his ‘discovery’ of  Ephesoft. I ended up in a twiscussion, and Chuck (Global360, Open Text these days)  announced this (series of?) blogs. I know the ‘solutions’ described in this blog  are (over) simplified, but this doesn’t harm my point. It does keep this blog at a’decent’ size.

Instantiate Space Template on creation of Alfresco Site

We could already create custom Share Site definitions (dashboard definitions actually), but in the past one could not determine by the Site object what ‘type’ of Site was initiated. I filed an enhancement request (May 2010), and recently I noted that it has been implemented (already for a while probably, 3.3 or 3.4). Now this property exists (st:sitePreset) we can use it to instantiate a RUP folder structure for a RUP site, and a Prince2 folder structure for a Prince2 site, and so forth. This blog describes my findings and solutions to instantiate a Space Template into the documentLibrary of a Share Site.

(How) Is your Alfresco repository being used?

In a recent post I just discovered this “Alfresco generate reports with JasperReports” project. It seemed to fit my needs for reporting against Alfresco and Share, and I was very happy and exited. However… It appeared to be too complex to use.

I try to be as little indispensible as possible. If someone from ‘the business’ is in need of reporting, I try to give access to a tool that suits his/her needs. If they need to create or modify a report, they should not be dependent of me, or anyone else capable of doing Alfresco Magic. Being build op Open Standards and proven technologies does not mean everybody is capable of doing everything with it

My view on reporting is:

1. ‘The business’ should be able to create/maintain reports.
2. The reporting environment should support Aspects. If one adds a type with some additional properties, the reporting environment should be able to deal with it, without manual reconfiguring.

Know the usage of your Alfresco repository

it happens now and then an organization puts a DMS in place, and starts working. Usually they don’t have a clear view on how their system is used. I work for just such an organization; lets start working and formalize afterwards. Therefore I got this idea to create a reporting add-on. The main idea is to use an existing easy-to-use reporting tool to configure the reports, based on Alfresco data. the resulting reports should be stored in Alfresco. There is of course the Birt extension in the Alfresco Forge, but lets face it, I cannot give Eclipse to the report-maintaining guys.

Yesterday night I found this “Alfresco generate reports with JasperReports” project on Google Code (with a pointer in the Alfresco Forge). This does exactly what I initially had in mind. One can create XML feeds in Alfresco. Use the XML feed, combined with  a JasperReports report definition, and store the output in Alfresco again. And all this using Alfresco server-side scripting, which means you can easily schedule the reports to be generated at night, and that you can include logic like sequentially execute all reports existing in a given Space. (Think of adding a report-definition aspect to the JasperReport definition  object in Alfresco containing the name/link to the xml data feed…) All I have to do is come up with a clever set of XML feeds to source the reports! I am working on this idea to frequently update my XML feed (stored as a document in Alfresco).

Ephesoft CMIS Export plugin using Alfresco’s Aspects

Ephesoft is a great tool to process scanned pages, construct documents again (no separator pages anymore), gather metadata, and read barcodes and line items. Next to that it is build on a wide diversity of open standards. CMIS is one of them, and it is a perfect standard to use to get the document and metadata as a whole to a content management system of choice (as I described before). The major document management solutions implemented this open industry standard in their latest releases. The ‘biggest’ downside is the CMIS standard is bound to Document Types being transfered. Alfresco is focused on the concept of an Aspect, a bundle of metadata and behavior that one could assign to any object. Alfresco has created an CMIS extension that supports these Aspects. This blog post describes how to use this extension to allow Ephesoft to export Alfresco Aspects using CMIS.

Executing named scripts as System in Alfresco

Sometimes you are assigned to a running project, and wonder why some design decisions have been made. I am facing rule-triggered scripts trying to change permissions on a folder structure, that travels the repository (folder based routing alike). And in this project there is (of course) no time/budget to decently solve this. This results in a system where no one should change any permission because it results in a failing system. (The folder structure has nodes with -very- limited permissions for most users, therefore coordinators cannot modify them). These scripts need to run as System of course. There are quite a bunch of these, and a simple, quick solution has my preference (it’s my own time right?).

This blog describes how I tweaked the class responsible for executing scripts in Alfresco. A set of scripts can be named that will be executed as System user, therefore eliminating my issues with permissions. All other scripts will be run as before, having the context of the user invoking them. It is a follow up on my ‘Sudo for Scripts in Alfresco‘ post, originated from the discussion with Fabio Strozzi.

Alfresco Log Browser

I recently delivered a training where users needed to learn their system for functional maintenance. There always is a vague boundary where functional ends, and where technical starts. Log files do provide good clue’s what a problem can be. But then you need to contact a tech-guy and get a zip with all kind of stuff, taking too long. Web based would be so easy…

In this post you will find a Log Browser based on Alfresco Explorer. A JSP file you can include in the jsp/admin folder of your %Tomcat%/webapps/alfresco. Usually you will find your alfresco.log’s in the ALF_HOME, I happen to have some Alfresco’s running as Windows service, and they log into %Tomcat%/logs.