Starting from scratch

[invantix]

I am at a company that has no internal web site, ECM, or WCM.  I am looking at setting up a few things.

1. ECM and records management using alfresco for Quality, Engineering, HR…
2. An intranet site where individual departments are responsible for content.

After some research, I like what alfresco has to offer.  I was able to get it up and running and integrated with Active Directory. I also like some things that Lifray offers for building an internal web site. The question is, what is the best way to use these two together?

I have not tried the Alfresco WCM module, does that provide the same features as liferay?

I have tried some things on my machine and am now getting ready to start with a nice new clean slate server.

If I decide to use lifreray should I install them both into one tomcat instance? Should I install liferay first and drop the alfresco war into that VM?
I would like integrate both with Active Directory with single sign on between them. As I said I was able to intgrate Alfresco with AD but are there any issues with getting them both integrated together?

Any other suggestions would be welcome.  Like I said I am starting with a clean server and no content so I would like to set up the best framework for my user community as possible.  If this is not easy to use I'll never get these people to contribute.

Thanks,

Chris Hanneman

[rdanner]

I am at a company that has no internal web site, ECM, or WCM.  I am looking at setting up a few things.

1. ECM and records management using alfresco for Quality, Engineering, HR…
2. An intranet site where individual departments are responsible for content.

After some research, I like what alfresco has to offer.  I was able to get it up and running and integrated with Active Directory. I also like some things that Lifray offers for building an internal web site. The question is, what is the best way to use these two together?

I have not tried the Alfresco WCM module, does that provide the same features as liferay?

I have tried some things on my machine and am now getting ready to start with a nice new clean slate server.

If I decide to use lifreray should I install them both into one tomcat instance? Should I install liferay first and drop the alfresco war into that VM?
I would like integrate both with Active Directory with single sign on between them. As I said I was able to intgrate Alfresco with AD but are there any issues with getting them both integrated together?

Any other suggestions would be welcome.  Like I said I am starting with a clean server and no content so I would like to set up the best framework for my user community as possible.  If this is not easy to use I'll never get these people to contribute.

Thanks,

Chris Hanneman

WCM and Liferay do not really offer the same functionality.  There is some overlap in what the two products do but all in all:

Alfresco does not offer portal technology
Liferay does not offer the range of content management that Alfresco does (it supports a rudimentary content repository)

Liferay and Alfresco can be used together, and there are a bunch of ways this can be made to happen.  The latest release Alfresco has webscripts and combined with the latest release of Liferay (which can portalize webscripts)  a lot of the power of Alfresco can be leveraged as a portlet in Liferay with relative ease.

Security is one of the areas that things start to get interesting and its a place I would say keep your eyes on.

You can also use the entire Alfresco web app (DM) as a portlet.  This has been available from almost the beginning. 

Hope that helps

[invantix]

Liferay and Alfresco can be used together, and there are a bunch of ways this can be made to happen.  The latest release Alfresco has webscripts and combined with the latest release of Liferay (which can portalize webscripts)  a lot of the power of Alfresco can be leveraged as a portlet in Liferay with relative ease.

Hope that helps

I think the combination will work great here. 
Are there pros and cons for running in the same VM/Tomcat instance vs seperate?

Thanks,
Chris

[rdanner]

Liferay and Alfresco can be used together, and there are a bunch of ways this can be made to happen.  The latest release Alfresco has webscripts and combined with the latest release of Liferay (which can portalize webscripts)  a lot of the power of Alfresco can be leveraged as a portlet in Liferay with relative ease.

Hope that helps

I think the combination will work great here. 
Are there pros and cons for running in the same VM/Tomcat instance vs seperate?

Thanks,
Chris

I believe there are currently constraints that require you to run in the same container with respect to the Web Scripts portlet and Web Scripts.  (I know that sounds odd) – it might even be wrong, but I think there are a few gotchas related to security that require you to run the scripts "in Process"

Other than that… 

Cons in my mind are
related to complexity and resource consumption.  Running more then one JVM requires more memory and adds more moving parts and more configuration management. You are incurring additional overhead related to communication between the two JVMS. 

Pros:
It means you can easily move the repository back to its own layer at a later point for scaling, upgrades can happen independently.

It depends on what you need and how you think you will grow.  There are a number of topologies that work.

We run Alfresco under Liferay as an XML repository.  It is in process and we connect to it via JNDI.