topic Re: Sharing edits among users and sandboxes in Alfresco Archive

Sharing edits among users and sandboxes

jack_jin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:48:04 GMT

I'd like to thank you for reading my long post ahead of time. Hopefully it'll help the community solve the issue of file sharing across sandboxes. Any suggestions is highly welcome and I'll try to answer any questions to the best of my ability.What we have - We've built a custom in-context editing

Re: Sharing edits among users and sandboxes

mrogers — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:41:52 GMT

We at Alfresco like the idea of shared sandboxes and were seriously discussing implementing them for 3.1 However there were concerned about the sychnronisation issues which is why we paused from rushing ahead and implemementing them.

If you are a manager you can already peek in someone else's sandbox so that may be a solution and you are right that you can use workflow.

Copying files in AVM is probably not a good idea, its kind of going against the grain of what it is. AVM supports the concept of layers so another approach may be a "shared" layer.

Re: Sharing edits among users and sandboxes

laura_ — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:40:59 GMT

Hmm.. unless I'm missing a simple workaround, this sounds like a pretty big problem for a big WCM environment? Because based on what I'm experiencing, here's how this plays out in real life:

Alice checks out a piece of web content, she edits it, and checks it back in when she's finished. She does NOT want it to get published to Staging (i.e. the live site) yet, so she does not send it through a workflow. Instead she just checks it in and considers it good for now.

Bob wants to make an update the same piece of content later. But when he checks out the content, he does NOT see Alice's updates. Instead, he can only grab a copy of what's currently on the live site. He cannot access or even see Alice's updates.

This basically means that whenever a user finishes editing any piece of content, it MUST go to the live site – as nobody else can work on or even see it. Is it correct this is the way Alfresco is designed to work? Because in most WCM environments, content needs to be touched by plenty of different people before being pushed to the live site. And all we really need is the ability for someone to edit a piece of content and have it saved as a Draft/WIP version that can be viewed on the "Draft" version of the website by others.

So unless I'm missing something obvious, I'm guessing some other people out must be hitting this, too? In case anyone's curious, here's what I've tried to do to work around it:
1. Put all possible "editors" into the next step of the workflow – Self-explanatory, but not really practical
2. Create a shared sandbox that "draft" content gets checked into – Unfortunately, it sounds shared sandboxes like this isn't possible
3. Create a "layer" per the above post – Is there any documentation about this? I don't see "layer" mentioned in any of the API docs (e.g. I searched the JavaScript docs for it and didn't find anything)
4. Others?

I could really use some help here….

Re: Sharing edits among users and sandboxes

pyppe — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:26:58 GMT

Hi.

We're struggling with the same problem as Laura_. We'd like users to be able to commit their changes into a common sandbox, where all users could see/modify the changes, WITHOUT the changes going into production yet. The problem of staging sandbox is, that once the changes are in there, you cannot select which of the changes will go into production (well, you can select which snapshot, but you cannot which resources).

Do you guys at the Alfresco have any kind of solution/approach of addressing this problem?

Thanks!

- Pyppe

Re: Sharing edits among users and sandboxes

tommorris — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:56:53 GMT

Hi there,

Under the hood the staging sandbox is a just another sandbox like any other and there's nothing to stop you from using the alfresco API to submit change-lists between sandboxes that aren't the nominated 'staging' sanbox, so you could introduce an intermediate sandbox. That way the sky's the limit, but this would require some careful coding.

I think there may be other out-of-the-box workaround techniques that you could use, but perhaps none exactly like what you're after:

1) Create a new user and then give other users access to this shared sandbox, to work on directly as a collaborative space. All authorised user can preview this sandbox, and preview URLs to the virtualised application super-imposed upon these files.

2) Submit files through a workflow. By default, a temporary intermediate sandbox is created for the submitted changelist. (Note: this sandbox appears as a layer ontop of the staging sandbox not the submitter's sandbox). The address of this sandbox can be shared by multiple user who have access to make changes, incidentally. If the workflow task is a pooled-task instead of a single-user task (which is very achievable), then users of the group that was declared by the workflow definition as the recipient, need not take-ownership of the task (to retain visibility to the group), but instead work on the task directly.

With these techniques orchestrating 'who works on what and when' and 'who can decide to submit and when' is tricky and requires business process rules.

Apart from serious efforts with the Alfresco API, we've had success using technique '2'.

Tom
http://www.ixxus.com