About the Book

How to customize, use, and administer this powerful, Open Source Java-based Enterprise CMS

• Manage your business documents with version control, library services, content organization, and advanced search.
• Create collaborative web sites using document libraries, wikis, blogs, forums, calendars, discussions, and social tagging.
• Integrate with external applications such as Liferay Portal, Adobe Flex, iPhone, iGoogle, and Facebook.
• Automate your business process with the advanced workflow concepts of Alfresco 3.
• Fully revised and updated for version 3.0, covering Alfresco Surf and more.

Alfresco 3.0 has generated a lot of curiosity with its new content management features. Users have been waiting for a book that covers these concepts along with the security, dashboards, and configuration features of Alfresco 3.

Alfresco 3 includes Alfresco Surf, a new N-Tier Architecture, which delivers scalability and accommodates more users on existing hardware resources. This new release also includes a draft implementation of the CMIS specification, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Protocol support. The new multi-tenancy features enable Alfresco ECM to be configured as a single-instance multi-tenant environment.

This well-crafted and easy-to-use book is a complete guide to implementing enterprise content management in your business using Alfresco 3. It covers the enhanced document management, a new web-based collaborative application called Alfresco Share, and various integration options with external applications.

Alfresco 3 offers true Enterprise Content Management (ECM) by providing an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, and Interwoven. It is the most popular Java-based CMS with over 1.5 million downloads, 50,000 live sites, 74,000 community members, and with more than 150 application extensions in forge. This book guides you through creating smart, collaborative content repositories and shows how to use Alfresco 3 to create more elegant document sharing, better collaborative working, and reliable automated workflow processes.

The book also explains how administrators can set up Alfresco 3 for multiple business units as a single-instance multi-tenant environment. Business users can leverage Alfresco Share, a new built-in web-based collaborative content management application bundled with Alfresco repository. It simplifies capturing, sharing, and retrieval of information across virtual teams.

This book shows you how to unleash the power of Alfresco 3 to create collaborative working systems in your enterprise

What you will learn from this book?

• Working with users and membership accounts, including LDAP integration and single sign-on
• Using Alfresco 3 as a smart document repository; working with automatic version tracking and control, and accessing the repository from the Web, shared network folders, FTP, or Microsoft office tools.
• Making content easy to find using search, content categorization, and metadata.
• Automating document management tasks with business rules and complete workflows.
• Working together using Alfresco's collaboration and syndication features to create effective working groups.
• Customizing the user interface, creating your own dashboard layouts; presenting content in custom ways relevant to your business.
• Integrating external applications such as Liferay Portal, iPhone, Face Book, iGoogle, Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Flex, and Ffmpeg video transcoder with Alfresco.
• Setting up a single instance multi-tenant system, configuring Alfresco as an in-bound email server, and setting up an audit trail.

Approach
Munwar Shariff is an experienced software trainer for CIGNEX Technologies Inc. He has trained many users, administrators, and developers in Alfresco and many other CMS systems. This book distils the hands-on approach of his training courses into a concise, practical book. The emphasis is on getting up and running fast and discovering the scope and power of Alfresco 3 incrementally through practical examples.

Who this book is written for?

This book is designed for system administrators, experienced users, and business owners who want to install and use Alfresco in their teams or businesses. Because Alfresco is free, many teams can install and experiment with its ECM features without any upfront cost, often without management approval. The book assumes a degree of technical confidence but does not require specialist system administration or developer skills to get a basic system up and running.

Alfresco is particularly suitable for IT consultants who want or need to set up a flexible enterprise content management system for their clients, be that for demonstration, development, or as a mission-critical platform. This book gets you to that result quickly and effectively.

Though this book is not a developer guide, various examples in the book will help developers to extend Alfresco functionality and to integrate Alfresco with external systems.

About the Author
Amita Bhandari is a consultant at CIGNEX. As a senior developer, she has rolled out numerous Alfresco deployments world-wide. She has extensive experience in implementing Enterprise Web Applications using J2EE technologies such as JSP, Servlets, EJB, and MVC Frameworks.

She has worked with clients in media and gaming, healthcare, and e-governance. She has trained many students in Java and advanced Java technologies. She holds a Masters in Computer Applications from Rajasthan University, India.

Munwar Shariff is the CTO and VP of Business Development at CIGNEX. CIGNEX is the leading provider of open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions for businesses and government agencies.

He has worked as the chief architect and manager of engineering teams for 15 years in the areas of system software, Internet applications and mobile commerce applications for customers in the United States, Japan, Germany, and India.

He is an expert in Content Management Systems (CMS). Since co-founding CIGNEX in late 2000, he has successfully delivered more than 50 CMS applications using various open source technologies. He has written a number of articles on open source CMS, he is an experienced trainer, and a frequent speaker at conferences related to this topic.

Munwar earned his MS in Digital Electronics and Advanced Communications from REC Surathkal, India. Munwar is the co-author of the book on Plone Open Source Content Management System called Plone Live.

Pallika Majumdar is a consultant at CIGNEX Technologies. She is very experienced in Java/J2EE domain including frameworks such as Struts, Spring, Hibernate, Web services, and Web scripts.

She has worked on various CMS applications for customers in United States, Hong Kong, and India. She has implemented Alfresco for clients across verticals like Media, Healthcare, Hi-Tech, and Communications. Pallika earned her Masters in Computer Application degree from Gujarat University, India.

Vinita Choudhary is a senior consultant at CIGNEX. She has extensive experience in working in a variety of environments with cross-functional, multi-cultural teams.

She has re-organized existing documentation repositories, written guidelines for document creation, filing and change control, written reference material for software developers, and published the same. She is involved in providing pre-sales support to the sales team and has worked on process streamlining for the company and various documentation aspects.

Table Of Content

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Alfresco
• Chapter 2: Installing Alfresco
• Chapter 3: Getting Started with Alfresco
• Chapter 4: Implementing Membership and Security
• Chapter 5: Implementing Document Management
• Chapter 6: Implementing Business Rules
• Chapter 7: Extending the Alfresco Content Model
• Chapter 8: Implementing Workflow
• Chapter 9: Integrating External Applications with Alfresco
• Chapter 10: Advanced Collaboration Using Alfresco Share
• Chapter 11: Customizing the User Interface
• Chapter 12: Search
• Chapter 13: Implementing Imaging and Forms Processing
• Chapter 14: Administering and Maintaining the System
• Index