topic Re: IMAP: large number of folders not working in Alfresco Archive

IMAP: large number of folders not working

s_turner — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:45:12 GMT

Hi,I'm trying to get the IMAP service working for a Share site with roughly 160,000 documents in 250,000 folders without much success. My folder structure under Document Library has 7 levels of folders starting with 1 folder at the top level, 10 below that, 36 below below each of those with many und

Re: IMAP: large number of folders not working

mrogers — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:56:04 GMT

Yes the problem is the IMAP protocol itself which is not designed for huge numbers of mailboxes.

To be fair its an email protocol so its not really designed for a content repository.

Are you mounting your entire repository over IMAP? It will probably be better to mount just parts of your repo.

Re: IMAP: large number of folders not working

s_turner — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:45:09 GMT

Thanks for your quick reply. I suspected that might be the case.

Unfortunately the Outlook integration is needed by back office staff who require access to the full set of "active" folders, (the subfolder with 10,000 documents in 25,000 folders), so mounting smaller subsets of this I don't think is workable.

Thinking about it, since most of what they need to do is upload documents to Alfresco I'm wondering if we could make use of the inbound email server. I assume I could add the Email Alias aspect to a folder when I create it via web services and set the alias property to something unique?

Users could then just email their documents into the repository. Do you know if there would be a performance issue with having so many email aliases defined in the repository, i.e. depending on what level subfolder we add the aspect could result in several thousand aliases? I'm thinking of when an incoming email is processed. Obviously Alfresco needs to find the folder to add it to via these aliases - hopefully it's fairly quick query on the DB to find out.

Re: IMAP: large number of folders not working

mrogers — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:16:00 GMT

Yes you could use email. Or for back office, how about ftp?

Re: IMAP: large number of folders not working

s_turner — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:42:21 GMT

I'm not sure they're up to using FTP software, I think they're more used to shuffling around pieces of paper.

I guess I should also investigate CIFS as this would provide drag and drop from Windows Explorer.

Thanks for your help.