can Alfresco do this?

[topcat]

hi, 

i am looking for a solution that will do this:

take a template (pdf, text file, etc), pull data from a database and populate certain sections of the template with the data in order to create a document.

would Alfresco be a good solution for this use case?

thank you much

[mrogers]

No, this is not what Alfresco is or does.

[steve123]

Hi,

I was about to install Alfresco just to test this use case… with a MS Word .doc template, because I seem not to find other information about this.
So is it true also for Mircosoft Word .doc or .dot templates that you aren't able to pull data from Alfrecso and put it into the word template in fields of a form or serial letter?

Would appreciate an answer very much.

[mrogers]

Yes you can extract data from a word document and put it into alfresco metadata and also inject properties from alfresco into a word template like you are trying to do.

What you can't do is pull in information from an arbitary database, for that you need a database reporting tool.

[loftux]

Hi,
There is a forge project for this http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/metadatawriter/
It can write metadata back to properties, but it cannot write into the actual body of the file. MS proprietary formats stops this from happening.
So you would have to link fields in your document to the properties. Then you would have to write a macro that refreshes the fields when the document is opened, because ms word does not (or sometimes, and different behaviour between versions).

Peter Löfgren

[rvdlinde]

Yes you can … also inject properties from alfresco into a word template like you are trying to do.

How do you do that?

Rich

[sersor]

Is it possible to assign different rights on different document library folders for different users or groups and how should I do this? I am using the latest version of Community Edition (downloaded just a week ago).
I have one department that is updating document in one folder of the document library and has a right to read documents in other 10 folders of other departments. And I have another department that is managing it owns folder (adding new files, deleting files, updating), but has just reader access to other 10 folders that belong to other departments.
sorry for too much text

[norgan]

Hi Sersor

Is it possible to assign different rights on different document library folders for different users or groups and how should I do this?

in Alfresco Explorer, you can choose from the provided roles to assign access rights to spaces and content via the "more details / manage users" .
Roles are :

• Manager (do it all)


• Coeditor (create own and edit all)


• contributor (create (and edit) own stuff)


• Editor (edit other stuff)


• consumer (read)

In Alfresco Share, the Editor is dropped, but you still can assign roles & access rights to folders in documentlibraries. What is not so easily done is mixing roles between explorer & share and cross-site access in share. Here, you have to do some testing, if it can do what you want.

If that is not enough, you can finetune the model to introduce your personal rolesets, since above mentioned roles are agregation of microroles, allowing for all kinds of rolemixes.

I hope that helped. Norgan

[s_lizard23]

Yes you can … also inject properties from alfresco into a word template like you are trying to do.

How do you do that?

Rich

I'd like to know this too - how can I create a Word template with a field (for example in the footer) that would show the document's version number, last modification date and user?