Thursday, August 4, 2011

Alfresco 3 Cookbook: what it covers?


Chapter 1, Getting Started
Chapter introducing alfresco with brief demonstration of the alfresco Explorer application. Get alfresco downloaded and installed in your machine, and finally be acquainted with the default distribution and architecture of alfresco.

Chapter 2, Creating and Organizing Contents
Understand how to use alfresco as the Content Management System, how to upload or create contents, how to apply tagging or categorization of content, understand content metadata, use the document versioning capability of alfresco.

Chapter 3, Securing and Searching Contents
Be familiar with another important aspect of the Content Management System – Security. Understand how to secure your contents and folders. How to create users and user groups – and assign permissions for who can do what. You will also know about the search capabilities offered by alfresco, how to search contents and how search works in alfresco.

Chapter 4, Rules – the Smart Spaces
Learn how to make your alfresco repository dynamic, how to implement your business requirements that works automatically in the repository. You will understand how to create and apply rules in the repository; you will also be familiar with different actions that can be performed via a rule.

Chapter 5, Administering Alfresco
Chapter with recipes for administering alfresco, demonstrating how to manage users, user groups, create taxonomies, manage content categories. You will also be aware of how to use the alfresco Node Browser to view and search contents stored in the repository. You will also know how to manage your alfresco explore r dashboard.

Chapter 6, Customizing Alfresco Web Client
Alfresco offers customization of the Web Client application via a number of XML configuration files. This chapter elaborates various recipes for changing the view and appearance of the web client, customizing the application as per your requirements etc.

Chapter 7, Alfresco Content Model
Designing and modelling the content properties and architecture is one of the important requirements in a Content Management System. Alfresco offers pretty much dynamic capabilities for designing the content models. Using these recipes you will be able to understand the core architecture of alfresco content models, create your own custom content models, use your custom models in the alfresco explorer application.

Chapter 8, Alfresco JavaScript API
Alfresco offers the repository functionalities in form of JavaScript APIs. In this chapter you will understand the API structure and available features offered. Several example recipes would help you implement various functionalities. You will also learn how to write and execute scripts, how to debug scripts written using the APIs.

Chapter 9, Freemarker Templates
Freemarker Template is the presentation layer technology used in alfresco applications. The recipes of this chapter would help you understand the technologies and model behind the Freemarker templates in alfresco. Several template examples are included for commonly used functions such as displaying folder contents, showing workflow tasks, showing contents recursively, displaying content properties and details etc.

Chapter 10, Web Scripts
Alfresco Web Scripts provide RESTful APIs of the repository services and functions. The chapter elaborates all related concepts, knowledge and how-to recipes that would help you writing, deploying, debugging, using web scripts. You will also know the usage of default web scripts library that come with alfresco. Several sample web scripts are included, for example sending emails using templates, searching and displaying documents etc.

Chapter 11, Working with Workflows
Workflow implementation is one of the major requirements in a Content Management System in a business. This chapter would help you understand alfresco business process engine in detail. You will understand how the workflows are implemented in alfresco repository along with various components of the workflow engine. Several detailed examples and recipes are included to guide you create custom workflows, custom task models, specific resource bundles, customizing the web client to render the custom tasks and workflows properly. You will also be able to use the alfresco workflow console interface which is useful for debugging the task execution within the BPM engine.

Chapter 12, Integrating with MS Outlook and MS Office
Alfresco can be used from several other applications and interfaces. Being a content management system it is quite important to have the alfresco repository accessibility from some popular content authoring applications such as Microsoft Office. This chapter helps you integrate the alfresco repository with MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Recipes are also included for communicating with repository directly from any standard email client application such as MS Outlook.

Chapter 13, Configuring Alfresco E-mail and File Servers
The alfresco repository can act has file servers as well and you can expose the repository using several other standard protocols such as FTP, CIFS, WebDAV etc. These recipes are step-by-step guide to configure these protocols and using the content repository from different systems. From this chapter you will also be able to use alfresco as email server, and emails sent to some specific address will be landed directly into the repository.

Chapter 14, Building Alfresco
Until now you have used Alfresco as the binary bundle provided and downloaded. Now you can compile and build alfresco source code also. Recipes in this chapter will guide you to get the source from alfresco source code repository, compile and build the source code. You can modify Alfresco source code as your will; of course as per Alfresco license, you should contribute your changes back to alfresco community.