Public Facing RM with access restrictions?

[tomdavidson]

Hello, I am trying to but together a hi level direction for a project in which Alfresco will play a role. I do not have as much experience with Alfresco but I am hopping I can get get started in the right direction rather than find it along the way. The first part of the project is add value to some content assets (PDFs of property records) through indexing and organizing. The second part is to expose the PDFs to end users. This access would only be fore users and use ACL with a weekly or month cap to the number accessed. End users need to search the PDF's data and flip through the ordered PDFs.

I think I have the first part of ingesting and workflow, etc understood, but I am not so sure about the second part. I like the File Plan feature of RM to organize the assets in to collections, but I am missing the rest of the  equation. I have thought of using Drupal and CMIS to provide end user access to the assets, but I am hopping Alfresco has more out of the box functionality. Can some one point in a right direction?

thanks and regards, tom

[jpotts]

Hi and welcome to the Alfresco Community.

Sounds like you've got ingestion and organization figured out. Although I note you mentioned Records Management to help you organize your stuff. I think unless you plan to do things like retention periods, legal holds, and other Records Management specific functionality, you may want to not use the Records Management module and just use straight Alfresco. If you do need to treat your documents like legal records then go for it. I just don't want to see you adding additional code/modules unnecessarily.

Next, you are asking how to expose certain documents to end-users without using the Alfresco web client. Drupal is certainly one option and many people (including Alfresco corporate) take that approach. There is really no limit to what you can use. Here's a little example I put together using a Python web application framework called Pyramid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9nV3uUb0Hw&feature=g-upl

Of course the devil is in the details. And one detail you point out is that you'd like to limit access to certain documents based on a quota. That is something you'll have to develop yourself–there is nothing like that out-of-the-box. So you'll have to track hits either in the front-end application that you write or in the repository. Then the front-end will have to determine whether it is okay for someone to see a requested doc based on the hit count. If it is okay, show the document, otherwise, redirect to an error page or something.

Jeff