Integrating WCM with an existing site

[new_to_alfresco]

Hi All,

I am a complete newbie to Alfresco actually doing a POC for my firm, looking for someone to point me in the right direction.

I need  to figure out how alfresco WCM can be used to manage some of the content our brand sites use.

Following is a breef discription of what I would like to achieve:

Our existing websites have sections where we maintain a lot of PDf, Doc's, images etc, this is currently being handled from withing the applications itself (causing a lot of duplication and a nightmare to maintain).
What we would like to achieve is to have the contents manged  by Alfresco and dish them out to some of our brand sites, for example:
When a user on xyz.com asks for a particular resourse he is dished out the requested resourse through alfresco.

I have successfully installed Alfresco + WCM extension on a Linux box

I would appreciate if i can be pointed in the right direction.

Thanks

[pmonks]

Depending on a number of factors, this may be satisfiable by a simple Alfresco DM installation rather than Alfresco WCM.  To help determine this, take a stab at answering these questions:

1. Do you need to support sandboxed content production (where changes, including edits, do not propagate to the site until they're explicitly marked as being ready for publication)?


2. Do you need a full version history, including deleted items?  Do you need to be able to easily and quickly rollback the site to a previous version?


3. Do the authoring and delivery environments need to be decoupled (eg. for fault tolerance / high availability, to separate R/W authoring transactions from read/mostly delivery transactions, etc.)?


4. Is the front end web site high volume (say, more than 100s of requests per second)?

If you answered no to all of these questions, then Alfresco DM is probably the path of least resistance - with this model you'd simply manage your content in DM spaces and extend your webapp to query and retrieve content from that same Alfresco instance via Web Scripts - http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Scripts.

On the other hand if you answered yes to any of these questions, then Alfresco WCM is likely to be a more appropriate choice.  In this model you'd create a Web Project to represent your site, configuring deployment (either an FSR or ASR - http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Category:WCM_Deployment) to deploy approved content out to your webapp (which may also need to be extended to support querying and retrieval of that content from an ASR, assuming you need the capabilities an ASR offers).

Now obviously there's a lot more detail to this, but I think answering this first question of DM vs WCM is important since the resulting architecture is quite different in these two approaches.

Cheers,
Peter

[new_to_alfresco]

Thanks for replying.

Let me put my understanding forward.

1) If i need to just manage documents I can go in for a Document Mangement extension
2) If along with managing documents i decide to mange my brand site i should go in for WCM.

In both scenarios i will be using web scripts to access "documents"

Is that correct ?

Thanks

[pmonks]

Web Scripts are (in general) the best way to programmatically access all content in Alfresco from some other system, no matter where it's stored (DM or WCM).

As for selecting whether DM or WCM is the most appropriate repository for a given use case, it's better to try to answer those questions I asked earlier and decide based on those capabilities.  Both repositories have equally good support for the physical storage of files (regardless of what types those files are), the differences are more in the additional services that Alfresco provides above the raw "filesystem" layer.  At some point the two repositories will be harmonised and the differences won't be apparent, but for now DM is stronger on the transformation / metadata extraction side, and WCM is stronger on the sandboxed content production, versioning, workflow and deployment front.

Cheers,
Peter