Microsoft Groove with Alfresco

[srevill]

Hi. We're evaluating Alfresco for use in our organisation and one thing which we currently use is Microsoft Groove. In a nutshell, this means we can have a complete copy of (or the most important subset of) our document repository stored locally on all our laptops/machines. If we're on a flight or otherwise offline, we can still work on documents and quickly get the repository back in sync when we're next online.

How would we either integrate this with Alfresco or achieve the same objectives using only Alfresco? What I'd certainly want to avoid is having to manually remember every document you've edited during your offline sojourn in order to manually submit them into the Alfresco system.

All help and advice very welcome!

[stevereiner]

FlexSpaces+AIR has some offlining capability:

Tools/Make Available Offline menu: will offline files with multiple selection supported after a confirm prompt
1.local parent folders with the same names as repository parent folders along with  copies of the files will be created in the users documents/my documents folder (example on a vista in c:/Users/<username>/Documents/FlexSpaces/Company Home/…./ filename1, filename2, etc.   (also supports offlining wcm files into Documents/FlexSpaces/AVM/)
2. currently not deep in one use of this menu (selected folders will be recreated not their contents)

Tools / Offline Upload  menu: (single select) will update selected file from the offline area after a confirm prompt
(having sync command menu to make this a less manual process could be added in the future)

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=14382
http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/flexspaces/

Steve Reiner
http://www.integratedsemantics.org
http://www.integratedsemantics.com

[stevereiner]

Thinking about this more:
You might also be able to use Groove with Alfresco CIFS since it makes Alfresco seem like part of the file system

[srevill]

(CIFS) I initially thought the same thing but Groove says "The folder cannot be synchronized because it resides on a remote drive".

So would I be right in thinking there's no simple way to keep local copies of a directory structure to work on offline and sync only the files that have changed into an Alfresco shared drive?

Perhaps a bog-standard OSS sync tool might do the job - if anyone knows of a good 'un I could test?

Off for more googling…

[srevill]

Following up my own post, maybe the answer is to have a local copy of the whole directory structure, forget about Groove and use a tool such as Synchromat to keep the stuff in the Alfresco CIFS shared drive in sync with the local copy.

Hmmm. RTFM - the Alfresco help does say you can use something such as Microsoft Briefcase to keep the contents of the Alfresco shared drive in sync.  :idea:

[jvveen]

Would that bypass all typical ECM functions of Alfresco like versioning, check-out/check-in etc?

Because that could cause some interesting conflicts when collaboration on the same folder with a larger group of colleagues.