Early preview release of Alfresco Desktop Sync

[jpotts]

An early preview release of Alfresco Desktop Sync is now available. You can find the installers here.

Alfresco Desktop Sync can synchronize files between your desktop and Alfresco Cloud, Alfresco Community, and Alfresco Enterprise.

Syncing with on-premise Alfresco installations has been tested with Alfresco 4, but this release may also work with Alfresco 3.4.

This is early preview software–we want you to try it out and let us know what you think! As it is preview, data loss could occur. It should not be used for production or critical data.

Only Windows and Mac OS X apps are provided right now. The OS X Desktop Sync is not currently a signed application, so to use it on Mountain Lion you must enable unsigned applications to run or start it by using the Open context menu.

Jeff

[oshadha]

Great…! 

[iwkse]

It's a pity some users are leaved out.
I hope to see a jar soon to be able to give a feedback too.
Regards

[jpotts]

I know, I understand. Alfresco is fairly heterogeneous when it comes to desktops (although we're Apple heavy) so even internally there are some Linux folks who won't be able to play with the Desktop Sync app yet (at least without a virtual machine).

Although we are predominantly deployed to Linux on the server, as you can imagine most people are running something else on the desktop. We had to start somewhere so we chose the desktop most commonly used by our customers.

If you are looking to sync with Alfresco Cloud and you are not on Mac or Windows you might take a look at Good Sync. It uses a completely different approach (Good Sync is WebDAV based versus Alfresco Desktop Sync which is CMIS based), but I know some people have been happy with Good Sync.

Jeff

[iwkse]

Hi Jeff,
personally I don't understand the real problem.
Isn't Java portable and platform-independent?
Regards

[ahunt]

Have a look at the 'Linux version' topic - there are steps there to gt it to work.
I have it running on Fedora just fine.

[iwkse]

Thank you,
I found this topic yesterday.
The sources are not yet available, but should be as they wrote also for a matter of license.
I managed to compile and run the desktop sync available on sourceforge but that's not same
sources as I guess they applied changes.
As soon as they release the source I can provide a jar file if they don't do it before I do.
I understand Alfresco have to care about the majority but in such case, releasing a platform-independent
package wouldn't have caused any pain.
Regards

[ahunt]

The steps I mentioned include extracting the jar from the .dmg file

[iwkse]

Exactly, but it requires further tweaking because of dependencies.

[nicolasraoul]

Very nice!
I just tried Alfresco Desktop Sync, it is great!
A few questions:

1) I am a bit surprised that only starred repositories appear, I guess the reasoning is that repositories that are not starred have a lower probability of containing documents that people want to sync?

2) Does synchronization happen at regular intervals, or just when users press "Sync now"?
I have not seen automatic synchronization happen, but maybe I just did not wait long enough.

3) Is it possible to checkout several folders of the same site?

4) Where are internal files (settings/database) stored?

5) Did you find any trick to not save credentials on the local side? I guess it is impossible to not have them, unfortunately…

6) As laptops are easily stolen, have you thought about optionally including a software like TrueCrypt, and save documents in an encrypted form?
The user would have to re-enter the password at every reboot.

7) Is there a bug tracker? I would like to report a small problem with Japanese characters:

[img]http://imageshack.us/a/img841/9789/alfrescodesktopsynctofu.png[/img]

Thanks a lot!
Nicolas Raoul