Category archives: Alfresco

Building the community.

LibreOffice and Alfresco

Written by on April 19, 2013 in Alfresco, Tech.

The CMIS browser in version 4 of LibreOffice is a great example of what we at Alfresco hoped people would do with this standard. It makes it very easy to access your content in Alfresco (or any other CMIS compliant repository) and take advantage of content management features like check-ins and metadata.

I want to share two recent tutorials that explain how to set up and use the functionality:

I ...

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200 Add-ons and Counting

Written by on Oct. 8, 2012 in Alfresco, Tech.

The Alfresco Add-ons directory is about eight months old, and has recently crossed the significant milestone of having 200 entries all related to Alfresco version 3.4 and newer. We have tried to monitor the site and remove duplicate entries as well as non-useful add-ons, so we are very proud of the quality of the projects that have been listed.

The Alfresco community has done an amazing job at producing helpful add-ons that can enhance most Alfresco deployments. Some of these add-ons, due to their quality and general usefulness, have been accepted into or re-implemented in core Alfresco (I started ...

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Recent Alfresco Community Meet-ups

Written by on Sept. 28, 2012 in Alfresco, Tech.

Recent Alfresco Community Meet-ups

Alfresco enthusiasts all over the world enjoyed socializing and learning at Alfresco meet-ups in recent months. Here is a brief look at a few of the meet-ups that happened between June and September 2012.

Veteran meet-up organizer Amy Currans from Tribloom organized the San Francisco Bay Area meet-up where Luis Sala presented a cross-platform mobile app for Alfresco using Ember.js and Alf.js. They enjoyed meeting together even though Luis didn't bring as much beer as in times past. As a veteran meet-up organizer, Amy also attended the LA  meet-up hosted by the web development team at the ...

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Announcing Alfresco Add-ons

Written by on Jan. 17, 2012 in Alfresco, Tech.

Last summer I changed roles at Alfresco and moved from technical sales to technical marketing. It has been a lot of fun to own a technology project again. My main focus since that time has been to replace the Alfresco Developer Forge with a new Add-ons Directory located here:

http://addons.alfresco.com

As of this writing, there are more than 70 add-ons listed!

I posted a few months ago to the Alfresco Forums about our plans to replace Forge. The system hasn’t received proper care and feeding, is increasingly hard to defend against spammers and mal-doers, and there ...

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Alfresco Tips from DevCon

Written by on Dec. 5, 2011 in Alfresco, Just Trying to Help, Tech.

As before, Alfresco DevCon 2011 was a great experience. Events were held in both San Diego and London, and I was able to see different presentations at each event. Unfortunately for me, only about half of the presentations were the same between the two events. That means that even after attending both events I still missed a lot of sessions I was excited to see.

This post is to document some of the best tips that I picked up at DevCon (well, at least the best easy-to-blog-about tips). I apologize that I neglected to keep track of which session provided ...

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The Content Management Tool

Written by on Aug. 26, 2011 in Alfresco, Just Trying to Help, Tech.

YCombinator’s Hacker News recently linked to an interesting post entitled “What every computer science major should know”.

I think it’s a pretty good list, but like others I have seen, it has a hole around the knowledge domain of Content Management, Content Modeling, and Information Architecture.

There are some core tools that every software engineer needs in their toolbox: a programming language, a scripting language, a database, source control, build management, bug tracking, project management skills, and more. If you aren’t already aware of the tools that exist to solve these common problems, you will end up ...

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Getting Started with Freenode IRC

Written by on July 8, 2011 in Alfresco, Just Trying to Help, Tech.

I worked as a one-man shop for an extended period of time. Though it was fun to wear a lot of hats, I really missed having a team of people to collaborate with. To cope, I learned to rely on the IRC community at Freenode. Freenode is a great place to bounce ideas off of intelligent people, get help when stuck on a problem, or simply to connect to other human beings. It is fun to give help, and it is a relief to receive it. Since joining Alfresco, I have had a team of brilliant people to work with ...

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Maintaining Alfresco Index Health

Written by on June 28, 2011 in Alfresco, Just Trying to Help, Tech.

Alfresco uses Lucene to provide services for indexing and searching metadata and content. Though Lucene is a reliable subsystem for most of our customers, if Alfresco trouble does occur, the Lucene index is often involved. A customer asked me today for advice on maintaining the health of Alfresco indexes. After getting some ideas from support, I decided to document the advice for the larger community.

The live Lucene indexes can not be backed up without corruption, so Alfresco is configured to dump a snapshot of the indexes each night. This index backup can then be included in your Alfresco backup ...

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Alfresco Content Formats

Written by on June 22, 2011 in Alfresco, Just Trying to Help, Tech.

Alfresco is format-agnostic. It will store any bytes you hand it, and along with storage you get powerful functionality such as permission enforcement, categorization, versioning, automation rules, workflow, check-in / check-out, metadata, and meta-data search (among other capabilities). In addition to these core content-agnostic capabilities, Alfresco will also examine the MIME type to see if additional operations can be performed such as full content indexing, thumbnailing, transformation, automated metadata extraction, and content preview in Alfresco Share.

I am regularly asked to provide a list of formats for which Alfresco supports these extra capabilities. Unfortunately, such a list depends on the underlying ...

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Alfreco Content Modeling Tips

Written by on June 3, 2011 in Alfresco, Just Trying to Help, Tech.

Here are some tips for building custom content models in Alfresco:

Keep Properties in Custom Aspects

Alfresco provides developers with powerful tools for modeling content and automating functionality. Aspects are one of the biggest. Because Java developers are familiar with method annotations, most quickly comprehend how aspects allow a developer to cross-cut the content model and group custom properties into a bundle. However, aspects have the additional property that they can be added or removed programmatically. This makes aspects more flexible than traditional content types which cannot be removed once applied to an asset.

For this reason, aspects can help ...

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