3.2 - Is Flash / SWF really required?

[gewb]

For Community 3.2 the installation doc says Flash player and SWF Tools are "required" (page 16).

As Flash / SWF / Adobe AIR (which embeds Flash) are unacceptable security risks they are strictly prohibited on workstations and servers. Can 3.2 install and run properly (albeit with reduced "capabilities") without Flash / SWF?

Regards,
GEWB

[mikeh]

For clients, Flash is required for multi-file upload in Share. If Flash is not detected, it will fallback to an HTML uploader (or you can use webdav, ftp, etc.)  You'll also not get any document previews on the details page.

For the server, pdf2swf (which doesn't itself require any Flash runtime) is used to transform content, as the name would suggest, from pdf to swf for the document previewer. If you've banned Flash from the clients, there's no point installing and configuring it.

Thanks,
Mike

[gewb]

Hello Mike -

Thanks for your quick reply!

For clients, Flash is required for multi-file upload in Share. If Flash is not detected, it will fallback to an HTML uploader (or you can use webdav, ftp, etc.)  You'll also not get any document previews on the details page.

As I suspected and is acceptable.

For the server, pdf2swf (which doesn't itself require any Flash runtime) is used to transform content, as the name would suggest, from pdf to swf for the document previewer. If you've banned Flash from the clients, there's no point installing and configuring it.

By "it" do you mean only the pdf2swf or do you mean all of Alfresco 3.2? If only pdf2swf, does the installer add it automatically or is there a selection during the install to deselect pdf2swf? If it gets installed, how would I remove it?

(Sorry for the simple questions but I haven't found the answers in the documentation.)

Regards,
GEWB

[mikeh]

I'm not sure what the installer does - it's not my area. However, I suspect it probably does install pdf2swf yes. Just search for and remove it by name. You might end up with a log file full of errors or warnings, but you can safely ignore these.

Out of interest, what's your position on allowing ImageMagick and OpenOffice on the server?

Thanks,
Mike

[gewb]

Hello Mike -

Thanks for your quick reply (again)!

I'm not sure what the installer does - it's not my area. However, I suspect it probably does install pdf2swf yes. Just search for and remove it by name. You might end up with a log file full of errors or warnings, but you can safely ignore these.

Out of interest, what's your position on allowing ImageMagick and OpenOffice on the server?

I'll ignor the log entries.   :roll:

I need to investigate ImageMagick. OOo is already installed (I personally have been using it since the first public release).

Regards,
GEWB