topic Re: Using Alfresco together with LifeRay/Jackrabbit CMIS support in Alfresco Archive

Using Alfresco together with LifeRay/Jackrabbit CMIS support

kidahl — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:14:06 GMT

Hi, I need some advice on how/if the CMIS standard changes the way we could use Alfresco together with Liferay/Jackrabbit.The goal of my client is to have Alfresco as a primary CMS source. I am working on a Liferay Portal project that has a lot of "out of the box" collaboration functionality based o

Re: Using Alfresco together with LifeRay/Jackrabbit CMIS support

paolomoz — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:11:24 GMT

Hi,
Regarding the following:

–I am interested in how this could solve our issues in practice.
—Can we use the "out of the box" Liferay portlets storing content in JackRabbit and then seamlessly access this information from Alfresco as well?
—Can we search in Alfresco, and it will return and display hits from JackRabbit using CMIS?
—Can for example one Alfresco document refer/link to a document available through CMIS and show it to an Alfresco user?

I have to add some more details on the Jackrabbir CMIS implementation. It is a great initiative inside the Jackrabbit project and unforstunately it is not usable yet. Sure, it promises, as CMIS does, to solve all the three points that you mention.
What you should figure out is how to build your interface; CMIS will be able to provide a common layer of comunication between the two repositories, then you have to manage those contents.

To summarize, CMIS could be one of the best solutions, but you have to evaluate your effort from an higher perspective and see if you want to build an interface for this.
Hope this helps,

Re: Using Alfresco together with LifeRay/Jackrabbit CMIS support

kidahl — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:58:50 GMT

Hi paolomoz, thank you very much for your reply, and sorry for my late follow-op (i've been away).

So if I understand correctly, I will not be able to "register" a Jackrabbit CMIS source in Alfresco, and then access its content as if it was stored locally in Alfresco using existing Alfresco functionality.

However, I will be able to access LifeRay Jackrabbit content and display it in the separate Alfresco server if I write custom code for it on the Alfresco side. In my view this would put CMIS on the same architecture abstraction level as SQL.

This would still be an important improvement, as this remote access would not be possible without the JackRabbit CMIS support, right?

To make it clearer what kind of scenarios I was considering:
-We use Liferay/Jackrabbit to store content, but configure JackRabbit to actually store contents using CMIS on the Alfresco Server, completely transparent to the LifeRay portlets still using JSR 170 (transparent remote storage).
-We create custom portlets that use JSR 170 against JackRabbit, but the contents are actually retrieved from Alfresco (transparent remote access)
-Other "enterprise" clients only access Alfresco as a single content repository, even when content actually are stored across many repositories (aggregation).

Any thoughts are appreciated.
-Karl Ivar