Generalized Questions on Alfresco

[donor3]

Hello,

I have been put on a project to seek out and understand the tools Alfresco offers.
Recently, I was asked some pointed questions which I did not have the answer.
I am hoping to find answers or direction with this post.

1) If a document is uploaded for review, can the original document remain untouched or unmarked while comments and reviews are made to the document?

2) Will PowerPoint and Excel documents open up natively within Alfreso.

3) If I am working on a document within Alfresco and the Alfresco application crashes, would the document I had been working on save locally to my computer system so that I can go back and upload to Alfresco again?

4) If there any kind of polling system?

5) I work within an administrative hierarchy, like most companies. Let's say that you have a layout that looks something like this:
Center > Office > Division > Branch1/Branch2/Branch3
Is there a way that I can set up a site that incorporates all 6 of these working areas? Or would I have to make 6 individual sites and set permissions accordingly?

I appreciate any help with these questions, thank you.

[jpotts]

1) If a document is uploaded for review, can the original document remain untouched or unmarked while comments and reviews are made to the document?

Comments made in the Alfresco UI do not affect the document. Comments go into the metadata on the object stored in the repository, not on the file itself.

2) Will PowerPoint and Excel documents open up natively within Alfresco.

They can be viewed in a viewer that renders in the browser. Or if you click "download" the file is downloaded to the end-user's machine and the native application that user has configured to edit the file will open up and allow edits. You cannot edit PowerPoint and Excel documents "within" Alfresco.

3) If I am working on a document within Alfresco and the Alfresco application crashes, would the document I had been working on save locally to my computer system so that I can go back and upload to Alfresco again?

You cannot edit most documents within Alfresco. Documents like PowerPoint, Excel, and Word are edited either on the user's desktop using Microsoft Office or in some other application, like Google Docs. Alfresco is a repository that helps you manage, secure, and find your documents. It doesn't really help you edit those documents. An exception to this is plain text files which can be edited in your browser.

4) Is there any kind of polling system?

There is a community supported Add-On called Site Poll Dashlet that provides simple polling capability.

5) I work within an administrative hierarchy, like most companies. Let's say that you have a layout that looks something like this:
Center > Office > Division > Branch1/Branch2/Branch3
Is there a way that I can set up a site that incorporates all 6 of these working areas? Or would I have to make 6 individual sites and set permissions accordingly?

How you structure your repository is completely up to you. The repository stores folders. Folders contain folders and files.

When you log in to Alfresco Share, you'll see a Dashboard and a link that lets you create "Sites". You could have one Site for everything or you could have a Site for each Division and for each Branch. The web site you navigate to is the same, regardless. But within that you can set up multiple Alfresco Share Sites to group your teams in whatever way makes the most sense.

Jeff

[donor3]

Hello Jeff,

I appreciate your response, your answers were very helpful.

However, for the third question, I was not entirely clear.
I figured that you would you be able to at least work on text-based documents.
But those were the ones that I was referring to. Say there was a couple of reviewers working on a document and Alfresco crashed. Would that work be lost, or would that text-document be saved either in the cloud or on their local computer system?

Thank you for your help.

[jpotts]

If you are editing a text document "inline", the changes, as you are typing them, only exist in the browser much like the text I am typing in this forum post right now. If the Alfresco server crashed while an author was editing a text file in this manner, the Alfresco server would have no knowledge of those changes and no way to save them for the user. If the server comes back up before the user closes their browser page, depending on the server configuration and the browser configuration, the crash may actually go unnoticed by the user. They would click Save and the changes would be persisted. However, if the user closed their browser window, the changes would be lost most likely be lost.

This is different than how, say, Google Docs works, where changes are nearly continuously saved to the server.

If you like how Google Docs works, we do have an integration with Google Docs. You can check documents out from Alfresco to Google Docs, edit them there, and then save them back to your Alfresco repository.

Jeff