Alfresco questions to start a new project

[dgildeh]

Hi,

I am an IT Consultant. My experiance is with FileNet, but I am looking at setting up Alfresco for a small company because I think it will suit their needs. Like any good IT consultant I have promised the world, and now I'm looking at how I'm going to deliver!

I have a few questions which I'm hoping can be answered asap so that I can fine tune my proposal around Alfresco. The questions are:

1. Where are documents stored? I can't see any blobs in the MySQL database and I can't find a directory (I'm running on Windows 2003, Tomcat 5, MySQL 5) on the system with the files I've uploaded.

2. I noticed that the out of the box example file (tutorial PDF) is indexed on the search with its contents as well. I need to index the contents of emails saved in message format, can the search do that and if not how hard will it be to write an extension to add the contents of saved emails to the searches? Also, when I tried to put a simple text document in Alfresco, I couldn't search on the content of that either. Do I need to add an aspect etc.?

3. I think Alfresco is a great system and if point 2 can be addressed will give my potential client what they need. However I'm a bit worred by the lack of online help, and I'm sure it will be raised. If you click on help, there are still several TO DO pages and there is no clear description of all the different settings like what does it meen to add Dublin Core aspect to a document, all the other actions etc.?

4. I am using Alfresco 1.2. In the tutorial, when I setup users for a space, there is an "all" in the list of roles. However, I don't have that in my list of roles, I just have Editor, Collaborator etc. Do I need to set up something to get that? Also, where can I find a description of what all the roles are for (again, back to help file issue!)

5. Finally, Guest access, I can't delete the guest user (keeps coming up with message saying user not found when I confirm delete), and I'm afraid to try deleting the guest space. Can I remove guest access to the system, as the client is not interested in this.

I'm sure I will have more questions, but I appreciate any help anyone can give to me on this, hopefully before next week when I will speak to the potential client again. Are there any other good sites/groups out there that support Alfresco and perhaps provide better development help?

Thanks,

David

[turgayz]

Hi,
I'll try to answer the ones I know:

1. Where are documents stored? I can't see any blobs in the MySQL database and I can't find a directory (I'm running on Windows 2003, Tomcat 5, MySQL 5) on the system with the files I've uploaded.

The documents are stored on the file system, in a directory called "alf_data". This is set in a configuration file, must be repository.properties, I don't have the code with me right now.

2. I noticed that the out of the box example file (tutorial PDF) is indexed on the search with its contents as well. I need to index the contents of emails saved in message format, can the search do that and if not how hard will it be to write an extension to add the contents of saved emails to the searches? Also, when I tried to put a simple text document in Alfresco, I couldn't search on the content of that either. Do I need to add an aspect etc.?

Do you need to index past e-mails, or do you want to index new e-mails as they arrive? For the latter, you might find the e-mail listener extension useful : http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/email-listener/ You can extend it to suit your requirements.
For the text document search, the doc should have been indexed right after you have added it to Alfresco, you don't have to do anything special.
HTH,