Hopefully a basic question.

[razail]

Ive been playing with a stand along installation of Alfresco on an Ubuntu machine.  I really think this could be a great answer for many of our information management woes.  I have some basic questions I cannot seem to find the answers to.  I am not sure alfresco can do what I thing I need it to.   If I have alfresco running on a server, can alfresco be plugged into an existing network file share resource, and act as the gateway to it?   This file share resource is on a different machine all together.

Thank you for your time.

[mrogers]

Yes just change the location of the "dir.root" property in alfresco.global.properties to point to a shared drive.    

If you are moving an existing repository remember to copy the existing contents of your document store.

[razail]

I reinstalled Ubuntu from scratch and I have a working version of Alfresco running now.  Ubuntu 9.10 and Alfresco 3.2r2.

We currently use a large shared drive to store all our documents, basic old school network shared drive.  Since another department is supporting that shared drive resource I wanted a way to "plug" alfresco into that space and have those files show up through alfresco. 
I tried modifying the dir.root, that did not work and crashed alfresco. 

My current plan is to make a permanent mapping to the shared drive in Ubuntu and then try to modify the dir.root variable to that location.    Does this sound like it will work?

I also am wondering how the permissions will be passed through? 

Will alfresco have to authenticate each user to the shared resource?

Sorry for all the questions, thank you for your time.