Rich Client Interface (Desktop Application) for Alfresco?

[turgayz]

Hi,
Is there any plan/interest for a rich client interface (desktop application) for Alfresco? For example, a rich client built on Eclipse RCP.

Do you know if other ECM products (Documentum, FileNet…) have a rich client interface? If so, is it an advantage for them?

The Alfresco web client interface is very easy to use, but is there any use case you can think of, for which it would be better to have a rich client?

[mfeldstein]

A single-user, offline version of Alfresco with sync capabilities would work too. I don't see why it's an either/or solution. An existing client that is integrated with Jackrabbit and supports RMI strikes me as low-hanging fruit, but maybe it wouldn't be too difficult to get Alfresco running on a desktop (or even a USB key drive).

[unknown-user]

hmmm… complete on a usb stick… nice idea. You come into the office, do not have to boot up your laptop to synchronize, grab a usb stick from the rack, go out, to customers all day, manipulate documents there, come back into the office and stick the usb stick back into the rack. Everything is syncd then, including the application itself.

hmm… this would be great for insurance companies with their assessors.

Ronald

[mfeldstein]

I have JBoss and MySQL running on a key drive right now. I wouldn't exactly call the performance "snappy", but it works well enough.

Now. If you added to your Alfresco key drive the ability to provision it with software updates remotely, you'd really have something.

[grantcc]

A rich-client that can function offline and allows delayed synchronization with the content management system would be a huge leg-up in making Alfresco the ECM solution.

The ideal of always-on, speedy, & seamlessly available networks isn't quite here even with todays 3G and WiFi technology. Reception is never 100% nor is access instantaneous. Login-in often requires the cumbersome process of re-establishing a corporate VPN connection, etc.

All this adds up to a prohibitive usability barrier. People would rather resort to using unstructured/uncontrolled local storage than have to always work out of a "network drive" of an ECM. If (e.g. by using briefcase) users can access files but not seamless submit meta-data changes (e.g. versions, ownership, etc.) they will also fail to adopt the ECM. Unfortunately, network effects in ECM's are critical so high adoption rates is critical.

In my organization (an sizable professional services firm), the lack of offline availability has already been identified as the reason that Outlook is still our de facto ECM solution!

[tajensen72]

So I'm new in the developer community (like BRAND new , but this is exactly the kind of project I would be interested in doing.  Tell me, how would I go about moving something like this forward? 

Travis