Now that the configuration is done, the next step is to create a blue print for your application. The blue-print is nothing but a skeleton application in Alfresco, without actual content. This includes the security framework, the folder structure within the Alfresco repository, the categories for taxonomy, the workflow and the business rules, and so on.
Throughout this book, we will build an intranet for your enterprise, where each department has its own space, document management and security, and business rules. All departments will be able to collaborate on creating an effective enterprise knowledge management portal.
This example-solution is extended in all the chapters. Therefore, reading the chapters in the correct sequence would help you to understand the features of Alfresco in a systematic manner. While reading each chapter, you will understand the concepts of Alfresco, and at the same time you will be developing the solution. Although the extended sample is related to an enterprise intranet, it is introduced in such a way that you would learn all the features of Alfresco.
Let us name our enterprise as Have Fun Corporation, which has the following groups of people:
- Administrator: Manages membership, groups, categories, security, business rules, workflow, and templates
- Executive: Has the highest authority over the content and manages approvals
- HR: Manages corporate policy documents
- Corporate Communications: Manages external PR, internal news releases, and syndication
- Marketing: Manages the web site, company brochures, marketing campaign projects, and digital assets
- Sales: Manages presentations, contracts, documents, and reports
- Finance: Manages account documents, scanned invoices and checks, and notifications
- Engineering: Collaborates on engineering projects, workflow, XML documents, and presentation templates
Following are the high level features you are going to implement as a part of solution:
- Security and Access Control: Give de-centralized control to each department to manage their own content and yet share it with others.
- Document Management including version control, Check-in and Check-out, Categorization, notifications, bulk upload, Advanced Search,and so on. Every group will use these features.
- Space templates for engineering projects and marketing projects: Each engineering project will follow a standard structure, workflow, and security rules. Similarly, each marketing project will follow specific workflow, transformation, and publishing rules.
- Content transformations: For marketing and sales material.
- Imaging Solution: The Finance group will use this feature to handle scanned invoices and checks.
- Presentation templates including dashboard views: The corporate communication groups will use this to display news and the latest PR files, finance groups will use these to have thumbnail views of scanned checks, and engineering groups will use these templates to display XML documents.
- Automated Business Rules: Each group uses these in a specific manner. For example: The HR group might send an email notification to a specific group when a document is updated, the sales group will automatically convert a PPT to Flash, the finance group will trigger an approval process whenever a scanned check gets into the system, and so on.