Plan for federated repositories?

[joechavez]

What's the plan for federated repositories? Is it in any roadmap at all?

[pmonks]

What, precisely, do you mean by "federated repositories"?

Some possible interpretations:

• Geographically distributed clustering (ie. all nodes act as though they are a single logical system).  Obviously there are many variations on this theme regarding where content is stored and how and when it gets replicated or moved across the cluster.


• Replication between independent Alfresco instances (ie. with a clear "master / slave" relationship) - has been custom implemented a couple of times (that I'm aware of)


• Bi-directional synchronisation of content between independent Alfresco instances (implies conflict detection & resolution features - the tough part!  :wink


• Federated search across multiple independent Alfresco instances (already available via OpenSearch)


• … something else? …

Cheers,
Peter

[joechavez]

We have deployed one enterprise in one department, and were planning to deploy more in other department, for a total of probably 5 servers. We were looking for ways to allow users on one to server to do a search that spans across all servers in the company.

You mentioned Opensearch, but we don't seem to able to make it work across two servers. One enterprise, and one community version.

Anyways, it's put on hold now, given the future direction of Alfresco. We look at the v3.0 functionalities, and there's no way to migrate our current repository to one that is favored by the current development direction. So, deployment in other departments is on hold, and this search issue is on not the agenda anymore.

Thanks any way.

joe

[mikeh]

Hi

We look at the v3.0 functionalities, and there's no way to migrate our current repository to one that is favored by the current development direction.

We made the change to have the v3.0 Sites root in the main SpacesStore - is this the problem you're referring to?

Thanks,
Mike

[itbeb]

We are using Enterprise 2.2 with support. We have a very real issue in that we have 3 campuses that are geographically distributed and quite far away from each other. We also have real infrastructure issues in that the network speeds between campuses are very slow. We want our users to have similar response experiences on all 3 campuses. Clients at all campuses may need to access some documents on other campuses, workflows may run over campuses as well as discussion forums. Statistically 60% of all documents will be created and be accessed by clients on the main campus (say campus 1), 20% of documents will be created and accessed only by clients on campus 2, 10% on campus 3 and 10% of all documents will need to be accessed by clients on all 3 campuses. Does anybody have ideas on the architecture for this installation? We would really appreciate any help … we are also willing to fly a architect out to assist us if necessary.

Regards
Elsabé Botha
North-West University
South Africa

[pmonks]

A light weight federation (eg. via OpenSearch - http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/OpenSearch) is likely to be the best option in this case.  While there have been various discussions (including this one) about adding more sophisticated geographical distribution capabilities to Alfresco, the technical hurdles are significant and I'm not aware of any customised solutions that have attempted this (at least not with full R/W capabilities across all of the content and all of the Alfresco instances - as mentioned previously I have heard of some master / slave replication based implementations, but that's a far simpler scenario).

Cheers,
Peter

[itbeb]

Thanks Peter!

At the moment we may go the master/ slave way with read only capabilities on the two remote campuses … still figuring it out … will let you all know what we accomplish!

[rivarola]

Hi,

On http://www.alfresco.com home page we can read this product description :

Clustered, federated and replicated

Is there something new on federated repositories in 3.0 ?