Newbie Questions on importing existing content and others

[rfinney]

All,

Very new  to Alfresco so apologies up front.  I think I've searched the forums and wiki and have not found what I'm looking for.  I'm running 2.0 on a linux server.  I have 2 questions.

1)  I'm getting ready to install Alfresco onto a production server, that already has a large amount of content in various formats and locations.  How do I make  Alfresco aware of all the existing content and "import" it into Alfresco without duplicating the content?

2) When I do a search on content that I've uploaded, I get a number of files with a ".dir" extension.  For example filename.pdf.dir.  There is no content when the file is opened.  Is this an error?

Sorry for the basic questions.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[andries]

Answer to Question 1: Please take a look at this http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=7092&highlight= forum thread as well. So copy your existing content to Alfresco using either CIFS/Webdav/ftp. During copy there are duplicates. Using Windows Explorer, you can "move" files to Alfresco-cifs (under the hood this is "copy-delete").

Question 2: ??