Migrating existing content into Alfresco
by Vinita Choudhary, Pallika Majumdar, Munwar Shariff, Amita Bhandari
Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation
- Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation
- Table of Contents
- Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation
- Credits
- About the Author
- About the Co-Authors
- Acknowledgements
- About the Reviewers
- Preface
- 1. Introduction to Alfresco
- 2. Installing Alfresco
- Installing Alfresco
- Out of the box installation architecture
- Choosing the right installation option
- Installing on Microsoft Windows
- Full installation
- Installation of the Alfresco Tomcat bundle
- Installation of other Alfresco Components
- Installation folder structure
- Starting and stopping Alfresco as a console application
- Configuring Alfresco as a Windows service
- Installing on Linux
- Installing extensions with AMP Install
- Summary
- Installing Alfresco
- 3. Getting Started with Alfresco
- Introduction to Alfresco Explorer
- Getting started with content creation
- My Alfresco dashboards
- Start with basic configuration
- Extend Alfresco configuration
- Install the enterprise license file
- Change the default administrator password
- Configure the content store
- Configure the relational database
- Configure the email service and email server
- Configure the log files
- Configure the Alfresco virtual file system
- Configure the default logos
- Customize the look and feel using CSS
- Configure multilanguage support
- Creating a blue print for your application
- Summary
- 4. Implementing Membership and Security
- 5. Implementing Document Management
- Managing spaces
- Managing content
- Library services
- Categorizing content
- Managing multilingual content
- Using network drives to manage content
- Microsoft Office 2003 add-ins
- Recovering deleted content
- The Data Dictionary and space templates
- Discussions on spaces and documents
- RSS syndication
- Migrating existing content into Alfresco
- Summary
- 6. Implementing Business Rules
- 7. Extending the Alfresco Content Model
- Custom configuration
- Custom aspect
- Constraints
- Advanced property sheet configuration
- Custom content type
- When do you need a custom content type
- Steps to add a custom content type
- Define the custom content type
- Extend the content model with the custom content type
- Configure the web client for the custom content type
- Add custom content type
- Create a Press Release as HTML content
- Create business rules targeting the custom content type
- Custom associations
- Dynamic models
- Summary
- 8. Implementing Workflow
- Introduction to the Alfresco workflow process
- Simple Workflow
- Advanced workflows
- Workflow user interactions
- Out of the box features
- Creating custom advanced workflows
- Track the status of this workflow through a customized dashlet
- Out of the box features of the workflow task list's dashboards
- Integration with rules
- Summary
- 9. Integrating External Applications with Alfresco
- The Alfresco content platform
- Web Scripts
- Various application integration examples
- Integrating with Liferay
- Integrating with Drupal
- Integrating with Joomla!
- Integrating with Adobe Flex
- Email integration: MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, Novell, and Thunderbird
- Integrating with iPhone
- Integrating with iGoogle
- Integrating with FFMPEG video transcoder
- Integrating with ViewOnePro image viewer
- Integrating with the Facebook social network application
- CMIS
- Summary
- 10. Advanced Collaboration Using Alfresco Share
- Alfresco Share
- My Dashboard
- My Profile
- Sites
- People
- Using your personal dashboard
- Using a site
- Customize a site
- Customizing a site's dashboard
- Editing the site details
- Configuring the site dashboard RSS feed
- Configuring the Wiki site dashlet
- Subscribing to an RSS feed
- Tagging site content
- Selecting a page
- The Wiki page
- The Document Library page
- Accessing the Document Library page
- Browsing the library
- Creating a folder structure
- Adding items to the library
- Working with individual library items
- Viewing an item
- Add a comment to a library item
- Editing a library item comment
- Deleting a library item comment
- Editing an item
- Downloading an item
- Upload updated content
- Deleting an item
- Editing item details
- Copying an item
- Moving an item
- Assigning workflow to an item
- Managing permissions for an item
- Working with multiple library items
- The Calendar page
- The Blog page
- The Discussions page
- Managing site users
- Benefits of using Alfresco Share
- SharePoint protocol support with Alfresco Enterprise 3.0
- Alfresco Share
- 11. Customizing the User Interface
- Configuring Alfresco Explorer
- Configuring views
- User configurable dashboards
- Using a FreeMarker dashlet from the repository
- Customizing Alfresco Share
- Presentation templates
- Configure custom webscripts
- Configure custom dashlets
- Configure custom components in Alfresco Share
- Rich user interface using Flex
- Customizing JSP Client
- Various user interface options
- Summary
- Configuring Alfresco Explorer
- 12. Search
- 13. Implementing Imaging and Forms Processing
- 14. Administering and Maintaining the System
- Index
If you want your Enterprise Content Management initiative to be successful, then you need to make sure that you can move your existing content into the new system. Most enterprises will have content in the form of files (on local or shared hard disks), email attachments, faxes (for example, invoices), and scanned images. It is very important to move the content to a centralized and highly scalable content repository such as Alfresco.
Alfresco is a powerful Content Management System for the enterprise, and supports various ways of migrating existing content in the enterprise.
You can drag-and-drop (bulk upload) content from your local hard disks to the Alfresco server by using options such as CIFS, FTP, or WebDAV. Refer to the Use network drives to manage content section in this chapter, for details of how to move content from your hard disk to the Alfresco server.
The problem with this approach is that you will have to manually update the metadata (properties) of the content.
Alfresco provides a very rich web services API. By using this, you can transfer your files, as well as their metadata, to the Alfresco server.
Alfresco also provides RESTful Web Services (known as Web Scripts). By using these, you can easily migrate content to the Alfresco server. RESTful Web Script is a very suitable and flexible solution for integrating Alfresco with any other application, and will most likely be the best solution among all of the available options. More information about Web Scripts is provided in Chapter 9.
With the web services approach, the content, along with the properties, associations, and security settings, can be migrated efficiently.
The ACP Generator project provides a tool for bulk uploading content into any Alfresco repository. It reads custom content models, as well as a comma-separated values (CSV) list of required property and category values for each content item, and then creates an ACP file.
The syntax is as follows:
acpGeneratr arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4 arg5
Where:
Arg1: The path and filename of the custom model to be used.
Arg2: The path to the directory where the content to be imported is
located
Arg3: The destination path
Arg4: The content type we're dealing with
Arg5: The csv file of property valuesExample:
acpGeneratr "D:PIERACPGeneratrsampleModel.xml"
ACPGeneratrcontent ..ACPGeneratr estDestDir dm:gqa
"D:PIERACPGeneratrfaqlist.csv"This will create the defined destination folder, and within it, a folder with all of the content and the required xml file. All you need to do is zip it into an ACP file, and import it to Alfresco. More details about this tool are provided on the Alfresco Forge site, at http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/acpgeneratr/.
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