Multiple File Document in Alfresco

[othni]

We are a document scanning service bureau in Puerto Rico.

I am interested in Alfresco but still not sure about a way to manage scanned documents (TIF images) within Alfresco.

When the document is scanned, there is one file (TIF) for each page. So, a single document (logical) is composed by several TIF files.

I need a way to import these images to Alfresco but they must be treated as one logical document.

Also need to import index information.

Is this possible?

[paulhh]

Hi

There are a couple of approaches, but both need some content modelling:

- use an image tool to add all the tif pages into a single tif file and add it to Alfresco with index data (you can have multiple content properties on a single object, e.g. one for the image and one for the indexable data).  You could probably also come up with a process in Alfresco that will build a single tif file from multiple files using the ImageMagick library.

- create an abstract content type that acts like a folder that contains all the pages as children.  Then add the indexable data as metadata on this object.  It is probably easiest to create it as a subtype of folder if you want to easily see the separate pages without doing much more work for the UI.  You could also do the same as above, create a new image content based on all the pages and attach it as a content property on the new type.

Or, to get a more specific UI experience, model the abstract type as a subtype of content, then add specific child-associations to it - then extend the UI to do whatever special behaviour you want.

Basically, it comes down to what you actually want the behaviour to be - there may be quite simple solutions that exploit some of the existing model elements in conjunction with presentation templates to do custom UI views.  No XML or Java coding needed. 

It may be worth trying to find an Alfresco partner that can help if it needs to be commercial strength.

Cheers
Paul.

[tajensen72]

Frankly (and probably heretically), imaging solutions such as EMC's Applicaiton Xtender, are highly commoditized and quite inexpensive.  You would probably be better of licensing a product or looking for an open source product that does that specifically. 

Document imaging has some specific needs around ingestion that many ECM platforms were never designed to handle.  I've just barely started looking into Alfresco, so I can't say whether its architecture would handle it or not, but from the previous comment, you are looking at a lot of work to build a commoditized piece of software (content modeling, UI, scanner interaction, etc).

Travis