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.