Alfresco 4.0d: View the same content in multiple Share sites

[melanie]

Hi,

I'm currently setting up Alfresco for a small company (4.0d, Community), we don't have a lot of development resources so we need to mainly use and out of the box solution w/ some custom content types created using the Designer Add-On: https://becpg.fr/redmine/projects/designer/wiki/Designer

In our company, there are legal, property and finance departments. Our clients require the services of one or more departments. Staff from each department should only be able to view content that relates to their department.  I would like to set up our client folders like this:

All clients folder

- Single Client - basic information with read permission for all staff

- Legal folder - read/write permissions for legal staff
- Finance folder - read/write permissions for finance staff
- Property folder - read/write permissions for property staff

This person: https://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=43161 describes a similar requirement, which would also work for us.

Ideally however, I would like to organise our Alfresco Share to have separate Sites for legal, finance and property.  That way we can use features like forums and wikis for staff to collaborate more effectively.  Is there a way to set it up so that the repository uses the structure I outlined above, but when our staff log into Share, they don't see a big overarching 'Clients' site or folder, but instead see Legal, Marketing or Finance Sites?  So the apparent structure for legal staff would be:

Legal Site

All Legal Clients

- Client (Only show clients that are 'active' for Legal)

- Legal Documents Folder
- Client (Only show clients that are 'active' for Legal)

- Legal Documents Folder

I there a way to do this without duplicating content? I would really like to be able to achieve something similar to this as I think it would dramatically improve how intuitive the interface is for our staff and hence the uptake of Alfresco, given not everyone has strong IT skills.

I hope this explains my question clearly, please ask for clarification if necessary.

Thanks!

Melanie

[afaust]

Hello,

as far as I understand your use case, this is possible in Alfresco. Depending on some details and your available skill set, it might not be a trivial thing to do, but doable.

Content and folders in Alfresco are multi-filable - they can be contained in different places within the Repository structure. Using this, you can establish a global directory of client folders, but have the specific sub-folders (legal, finance etc.) of each client reside within the individual special sites, while linking them into the global client folder. Your global directory and specific sites would need to be readable by all staff, but within the specific sites, you can restrict the write access to the staff of that department only.

In order for this to be usable / intuitive, you need to ensure that when a client is created in the global directory, the special sub-folders are automatically created in the relevant sites and linked into the client folder. If you need to provide a similar organisational structure (all clients - client X - documents) within the site, you will have to duplicate that structure (I image it will have minimal metadata and only serve in an organisational capacity) for each site (as part of the automatic creating / linking) - no duplication of actual content should be necessary.

A small bit of Java / JavaScript development and XML configuration is required to achieve this properly (should fit into a hundred lines or less as a rough estimate).

Regards
Axel

[melanie]

Hi Axel,

Thanks very much for your response, I appreciate you taking the time.  Would you be able to point me in the direction of any documentation that could help me achieve this?  Particularly anything about how to set up multi-filing would be great, once I have that I think I could work out the automation part.

Thanks,

Melanie

[loftux]

Start with these presentations, they are still very valid/informative
http://www.slideshare.net/JM.Pascal/alfresco-in-few-points-node-tutorial-521030
http://www.slideshare.net/JM.Pascal/alfresco-in-few-points-nodeservice-tutorial

Once you understand the "everything is a node" it should be straightforward to automate this.
For example, adding a node to a secondary parent in javascript
myNode.addNode(myNodeToGetSecondParent); //maybe describe it the other way around, myNode gets a new child.
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/4.0_JavaScript_API#Modifying_and_Creating_API

Note that permission will be inherited from primary parent only, so you may need to add specific permission for the node to actually be visible. Also important to understand is that if you delete the primary parent association, it will be deleted for all secondary parent associations as well, compared to deleting a secondary will not remove the node completely, just that association.

[melanie]

Thanks heaps!  I will get reading and post back here with what I come up with.

Cheers,

Melanie