AS400 ERP and Alfresco 3

[jlabuelo]

Good Afternoon all

We have a customer that is using IBM AS400 ERP software and needs an ECM plataform to store their physical invoices. They have asked me if I knew if AS400 could be integrated with Alfresco so they could keep the scanned copyies in Alfresco (just as a document repository) and related them with the data in AS400.

Do you know if this is possible? If so has anyone already done it or tried to do it?… Our first thougth was to think about an integration with WebSercices between Alfresco and AS400, but we dont know if that sounds reasonable.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks

[mrogers]

Yes its entirely possible.   I'd suggest using Web Scripts rather than Web Services, but you have the choice of both.

You can also probably run Alfresco on OS/400 although that's not a common choice of platform.

[jlabuelo]

Hi there

Thanks for the answer, will review the Web Scripts documentation again. Is there any example or document you know that I could review for this integration?

Thanks a lot again

[rliu]

I have written Java, RPG, COBOL, and CL programs for iSeries (formerly, AS\400). Though, a pretty expensive server, hence less in popularity, I'd imagine that it can be done.

You'll most likely have to do the following:
1. You would have to setup an LPAR on the iSeries to run JBoss or Tomcat.
2. Locate the JDBC Driver
3. Configure and deploy Alfresco WAR(s)to the application server.

That being said, it's a pretty expensive non-conventional stack. CPU processing is pretty costly on iSeries. If UDB on iSeries is a requirement, I would consider clustering a couple Linux boxes pointing to UDB on iSeries. Scaling this implementation horizontally is a cheaper solution than scaling an iSeries vertically.

Please update this post as I would love to hear what the implementation strategy is.

[jlabuelo]

Hi Rliu

Thanks a lot for the post. I see that you say you have experience with RPG and ISeries. We have our administrative tool built in RPG v3 on a iSeries 5250 (Command environment). We would like to use Alfresco as a ECM system for the RPG tool, so we can add, retreive and remove documents from alfresco based in the metadata of the document.

Lets say that from RPG we would like to send some id fields to alfresco and get the document and show it in a browser in the pc of the user.

I also agree with you that we would  prefer having an external linux box running Alfresco connected to the iSeries machine

Could you please give me some directions on how we should:

a) Call Alfresco from RPG to get/add/remove the documents?

b) How do you see the link creation between the Linux Alfresco box and the iSeries Server?

We have thought about using WebScripts and WebServices… but dont know if that makes much sense with RPG?

What do you think?

Thanks a lot in advance !!