Central Alfresco Repository

[skorde]

Hi
We have following request from our business and we would like to implement this with the help of Alfresco CMS.
"We are planning to create central Hub for storing all our work across the location. All our data is presently stored on the network G drive. This drive is specific to each location and consequently data stored on G drive in Mumbai is not available to Delhi and vice-versa. We are now looking to have a central repository of all our data at one location which may be accessed from any location, even abroad."
We have following constrain while implement this solution
1) Performance should be as good as local drive
2) Easily available across all location like local map drive.
3) Data should be up to date across all locations

My question is How do Alfresco help us to archive this?

Thanks in Advance

[norgan]

Hello Sudhir,
you can easily centralize your data in an alfresco installation. Mapping the G drivelettter to Alfresco can be the same for everyone, of a different space for different people - as you like it.

The performance access, however, is a tricky part. The bandwith and latency of your connection are the prime factor here and CIFS is a very talkative protocol. You could ease that burden a bit by moving th webdav, but then you face other problems
* only http mapping in WinXP, https is only possible with 3rdparty tools or with Windows Vista
* checkin/checkout is not available via webdav except when using Alfresco share & Microsoft Office 2007 (via sharepoint protocol)

You might be able to solve that by setting up multiple Alfresco instances and start replicating as master-master replicaitons, but how well Alfresoc supports this, I do not know. Would be interesting to know, so if you find out something, post it here please.

The question is - do you really need full simultanious access to all data, or is a big part of data locationspecific or can stand waiting for overnight-replication.  If so, you could introduce local Alfresco systems with "mapped share sites" on a central system for teams, who need realtime access. You will have to implement something like that yourself however. Think of it as an siteproxy for "sites" in share, which you could use to integrate remote sites into a local share server.

I hope that helped a bit.

Norgan
Norgan

[skorde]

Hi Norgan

Can you please brief about  "mapped share sites" since I don't understand the meaning of following line.

If so, you could introduce local Alfresco systems with "mapped share sites" on a central system for teams, who need realtime access

[norgan]

I mean something like an iframe in a standard webpage. Basically resulting in 10 local "sites" in share and for instance 2 "remote" sites, and when the user changes to the remote sites, he is working on the remote alfresco without noticing (well except for performance maybe). 

Only, that this is a bit more complex than a simple iframe in terms of SSO, userrights, searchability, Backlinks to the local Alfresco etc. That would simply mean that you introduce a custom pagetype in share, which reference remote datasources instead of the local repository. would be something new, I think and the community would be thrilled, if you develope it and donate it

Norgan