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

[iblanco]

The Desktop Sync Tool seems a great start point, I'm looking forward for it to reach a non beta state.

Jeff you say is CMIS based but some log messages talk about Webdav connections, so is ti Webdav or CMIS based ?

Will the source code be available for patching ? And is there a bug tracker ?

[jpotts]

Yes, someone else pointed out that webdav is being used as well. It is unclear to me how much, if any, of the tool is based on CMIS because I haven't looked at the source code. But my original understanding was that it was at least partially based on CMIS. But, again, I don't have first-hand knowledge of the technical specifics at this point.

Yes, the source code should be available, just like all of our source code. I have sent an inquiry into Engineering to see if there's an ETA on that.

Yes, there is a bug tracker. http://issues.alfresco.com. Use the "Alfresco" project and the "Desktop Sync" component.

Jeff

[mkieboom]

Hi Jeff,


My first impression is definitely great!
Very interesting for employees to sync specific folders like product data, customer data etc.
When will the production version be released?

Although I agree with the comments mentioned by: Nicolas Raoul
3) Is it possible to checkout several folders of the same site?
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.

Besides that, I was able to delete a local folder which was created by an admin user. The folder was not deleted from Alfresco and did show up after syncing again.
However in my opinion this is pretty scary!

Kind regards,


Marcel Kieboom

[nicolasraoul]

Hi Marcel,

I believe that not much can be done to enforce Alfresco permissions on the local filesystem.
Alfresco Desktop Sync could set these files/folders to read-only mode, but that would not prevent a playful user from changing them.

Cheers!
Nicolas

[mkieboom]

Hi Nicolas,


Thanks for your reply.
Ok thats pity, than I just need to educate my colleagues about using this tool when its released.

Kind regards,


Marcel

[102020]

Also since I haven't seen it mentioned yet (and there is still not linux distrib yet). Why not install Wine on your linux distro then install the Windows version, works (not that it's the best answer, it IS an option).

[rays]

An interesting development. Thanks for making a preview available.

Is there any expectation that we will be able to sync with the Repository content folders at some point?  i.e. Not only folders in Share Site Document Libraries, as currently?

Or is Alfresco's expectation that we must move our entire repository structure into a Share Site Document Library before this tool can work for us and our current content structure?

[mtw999]

Hello,

Is there any schedule/timeline for an official release of Desktop Sync? What is in link is version Desktop Sync Client 0.8.6 and I see there is a 0.9.6 version in SourceForge but I have not seen anything indicating there is a non-preview release.

Thanks,

Mike