topic Re: Lotus Notes like application in Alfresco Archive

Lotus Notes like application

zokstuzla — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:39:18 GMT

Hello all, Is it possible to build Lotus Notes like application on Alfresco platform ? I would like to have system where every document has to be connected to the client or company, meaning I have to have some register of clients and companies. Then I would like to have different views of the docume

Re: Lotus Notes like application

mrogers — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:20:18 GMT

I've not seen the equivalent of Notes' views in Alfresco.    However there's are view templates to control which properties are shown. And there's categorisation and tagging.   But the alfresco interface tends to be search driven rather than having a set of pre-defined "views" like Notes.

The second thing that is always tricky, regardless of system, is to pull in keyword data from outside the system.   Some sort of ETL solution would probably be required.    But the idea is to take a copy of the keyword data and put it into Alfresco or Notes.

However now onto some of the things that you can do
You can build an application front end in the technology of your choice and use Alfresco as a "back end".

You could model your types for clients and companies and create associations between the documents and the clients and companies.    You can make this as complicated as you like or as simple as a folder for each client or company.

You also have extensive metadata and security capabilities in alfresco.

Your first point of call is to understand Alfresco.    Then you need to decide whether you need to write your own UI to supplement those provided by Alfresco.

Re: Lotus Notes like application

zokstuzla — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:28:32 GMT

Thank you for this valuable information.

Just one more question - what would be technology or your choice for writing front end application, using Alfresco as back end ?

Best Regards,
Zoran

Re: Lotus Notes like application

mrogers — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:00:24 GMT

I'm a server-side developer so don't often get let loose on UI design. In fact the Alfresco UI team very politely told me to stop touching their code yesterday.

It rather depends upon your requirements and what technologies it needs to fit into.

I'm presuming you want some sort of browser based application then.

I'd certainly try the Alfresco Surf framework which looks like it has great potential for something much bigger than even Alfresco.

I like JSF (although not the way Alfresco has used it).

And I'd possibly use Visual Studio as well.

Re: Lotus Notes like application

norgan — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:01:07 GMT

Did you just mention <whisper>Alfresco Surf, JSF and Visual Studio </whisper> in one post ? *shudder* You are a brave man, But I guessed that already for touching the UI as server-gui 😉

But Zoran, walk through the "content model" tutorials (and some others) by Jeff Potts, you will see that a lot of what you mention is built into Alfresco and even Alfresco Explorer already. With custom modells, custom views and Javascript / Freemarker, you can do amazing things already.

Added to that - you can attach email services to alfresco, allowing a space to "receive" content via a dedicated email address. So together with the repository, LDAP user management, rules, workflows and skype/yahoo presence awareness you are at eye level with a notes db ( + sametime) already.

But then, you have CIFS & Webdav access plus locking, versioning and tagging, which takes you beyond a bit the standard notes DB, I think.

What you dont get, is user certificates, signing & encrypting, master2master replication, distributed databases, offline-storage and archive functions. For that, you would have to start coding.

Last but not least - check out the Webscripting & Flex clients (search for Opsoro, Docasu and Flex Spaces) as proofs of concept, what can be done with other approaches. You might find something to your liking there as well - cool stuff is in there.

Norgan