What is Alfresco?

Alfresco Community Edition is an open source software platform for Enterprise Content Management. Enterprise content management is a "means of organizing and storing an organization's documents, and other content, that relate to the organization's processes." To paraphrase Frank, our goal in setting up an Alfresco instance is to do away with the use of email for collaboration other than for emergencies and for communications that you will never need again for the life of the project. Alfresco provides a central place for master documents (reports, manuscripts, grant applications), data, code, data dictionaries, discussions around topics, discussions around files, and more. It allows the statistician to efficiently analyze datasets on the server without copying the data to their local machine.

Company is headquartered in the United Kingdom. The Alfresco company's web site is at http://www.alfresco.com/.

We have a wiki topic for Alfresco notes and suggestions at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/AlfrescoNotes. Right now the topic is a mixture of implementation and management notes and user notes. I plan to make a couple of Alfresco topics and separate information appropriately.

Alfresco documentation and videos

Alfresco's web site has a pretty good collection of documentation and videos about the software. There are a number of versions of the Alfresco software so watch out for content that is not applciable to our verison. We are running "Alfresco Community". You can find links to the documentation and videos at http://docs.alfresco.com/community/concepts/welcome-infocenter_community.html.

Demonstration:

  • URL: http://biostats.mc.vanderbilt.edu:8080/share/
  • Alfresco Sample Sites
  • Log on
  • landng after login is personal dashboard
  • Search for the site you want. Once you visited a site you won't have to search for it again.
  • Click on the site wanted. might have to "join" or might already be a member of the site
  • You are dropped into the site's Dashboard. Dashboards can be configured many different ways we'll look at that in a minute.
  • This site has a:
    • site profile
    • a dashlet for site data lists
    • web links associated with the project
    • Site Activities
    • Site Calendar

  • Let's look at the Document Library
    • There are a number of files that have already been uploaded to this site or project
    • can look at files already there (Images)
    • a related image (license) credentials for example
    • the Titans team picture
    • video
    • documents
    • and so on...

  • create a new folder
    • call it "design documents"
    • upload a new files to the new folder
    • files from flashdrive
    • show correlation comic
    • show obscure linux commands docx

  • Since I manage this site I can Customize the dashboard
    • Change the layout
    • add or remove dashlets ("widgets")
    • example remove calendar
    • add site notices dashlet
    • Maybe that notice should be more visible!

  • Let's say I want to invite site participants
    • Can go to "Site Members" and click the "Invite People" button or click on the Person Plus icon
    • If the user is already has an account can search and then invite
    • if not a member of the site, use the "...Add External Users" section...
    • an email will be sent to the address supplied that has a username and initial password and instructions for logging on and joining the site in question
    • UNLESS the person has a vanderbilt vunetid/epassword credentials
      • Get them to log on FIRST
      • then use the invite users dialog to invite them using their vunetid
  • Here is what an invitation email looks like...
  • Dialog for creating a site of your own...

Other ways to interact with the Alfresco repository

Mounting Alfresco repository just like any other shared folder

Linux Users: http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/AlfrescoNotes#webdav

Windows users: http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/AlfrescoNotes/mapalfrescoshare.pdf

Mac Users: ???

ftp: http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/AlfrescoNotes#ftp

Other collaboration tools

Example share point site: https://profiles.vanderbilt.edu/personal/dalep/PSproject/SitePages/Home.aspx

This topic: Main > TWikiUsers > DalePlummer > AlfrescoPresentationNotes
Topic revision: revision 1
 
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