Is Alfresco Appropriate for this?

[meecect]

Hi,
   I'm looking to build an application that would use aspects of content management and collaboration and am leaning toward using Alfresco.  Essentially, I want to build an online repository of digital voice recordings.  The tool would be used by various remote researchers to upload, playback, and analyse the data.  It will be necessary to 'tag' the data for later use in searching, and the categories of tags need to be extensible, so that attribute types can be added at a later date.  For example, researchers may need to input where the recording was made, the age of the subjects, the languages used, etc.

Additionally, I would like to give the ability for the data to be transcribed via the web interface.  That is, the voice content should be streamable through an embedded control and allow the researcher to manually transcribe the audio into another embedded control.  This transcribed data will be saved and versioned back into the repository and associated with the original audio.

Audio data, tags or text transcriptions need to be restricted to individual researchers, groups of designated researchers, or available to the general public.

Workflow should be configurable so that uploaded audio is 'flagged'  in a 'to-be-transcribed' state so that it can be picked up by people designated for transcription.

Ideally the repository needs to be accessible via webdav or cifs.

Opensource preferred.

Is Alfresco up to this task?  Is it an adequate foundation on which to build the features above that it lacks?  Are there any fundamental limitations you see that would be potential roadblocks to deliver the funcionality described above?  Any other products that you would recommend?

Thanks in advance for your time,

[davidc]

Is Alfresco up to this task?

Yes, it is.

Alfresco has excellent support for defining custom properties which may be attached to documents/content either at creation time or later.  Any of these properties may be searched on.  Content can also be associated to other content.

Content streaming is supported, so voice recordings may be streamed into any html embeddable player.

Through rules and actions, it is possible to setup worflows that can perform all sorts of content management processes.  So, it's possible to flag uploaded content and notify users.

Sophisticated security and access control (up to individual documents) is provided.  Permissions may be assigned to individuals or groups.  I'm not sure if you require access control to the property level; this is not supported.

WebDav, FTP and CIFS are all supported.

[meecect]

Thanks for the quick reply.  I have installed alfresco and have tested a few things out.  Overall, I am very impressed with the maturity and functionality of the product.

As an initial test, I was able to upload via the web client a sample mp3 file.  The content appeared correctly and when I clicked details, I saw some of the properties.  If I clicked the 'view in browser' option, a new window popped up with an embedded control and playback worked flawlessly.

Now I'd like to take the next step, or be pointed to some doco helping me take that step. How do I make the content 'display' in the same window?  Or how can I customize the window that the content displays in?

Ideally the content and editing tools should appear in the main portal interface, but the requiremnet would be to have a window with playback controls at the top and editable text box for transcription entry below.

I assume this is like 'inline editable' as it is possible to do this type of manipulation with html files.  Is there a way to create an inline editable component that would give the ability for playback and transcription entry like this?

[gavinc]

Hi,

We are putting a lot of effort into making the web client more customizable in 1.3.

Being able to add/change pages in wizards is one of the use cases we are covering. This is what it sounds like you need to do. Currently, this will mean changing our JSPs and more than likely wizard beans to add the functionality you need.

To view the content in the same window you will need to change browse.jsp, look for the following code:

<a:actionLink value="#{r.name}" href="#{r.url}" target="new" />‍

and remove the target="new" part and the content should appear in the same window.

[enomaly]

We've actually been doing a lot of work with alfresco and video / audio assets and have found the system extremely flexible and easy to use.