When to use /Alfresco and /Share?

[anuvatec]

I've been playing with Alfresco for a couple of days and I think I'm starting to get it now (sorry I'm not really familiar with Sharepoint). The only thing that confuses me is the two sites. In what scenarios am I (system admin) suppose to use the /Alfresco site and the /Share site? When are the users/employees suppose to use those sites?

TIA

P.S. - In case you were wondering we're a group of friends (I'm the IT guy obviously) developing a phone app and trying to use Alfresco to manage our documents (of course we'll use git/svn for the programming stuff). We were using Google Docs and email/ftp for non Office docs but its getting messy.

[mikeh]

It depends on a number of factors: Share is the newer, much more AJAX-y client with support for URL bookmarking, etc. but not all the Explorer (/alfresco) client functionality has been ported across yet - notably custom workflow, rules and advanced search. Share can be deployed on a separate app server to the Repository (also at /alfresco) whereas the Explorer client is tightly bound-in.

If you can live with the fact that not all the Explorer functionality is currently available in Share, then I'd go with Share. However, if there's a feature you absolutely must have that's only in the Explorer client, then go with that one.

It's perfectly acceptable for an admin to switch between the two for admin tasks, but I'd try to get your users on one or the other.

Thanks,
Mike

[anuvatec]

Wow! that was very helpful. so it sorta sounds like command line vs GUI (circa Windows 3.1 or maybe 95). I'll get the fellaz on /share

thanx!

[anuvatec]

I've got another question… how can users use their home user space in Share?

Also what's the point of Data Dictionary and Web Projects in Client/Explorer?

[beren]

Web Projects is a folder for working with web content management and "studio" projects.

The dictionary is another space for managing templates, custom scripts, and a bunch of other things like saved searches and stuff.

[gronfelt]

I've got another question… how can users use their home user space in Share?

They currently cannot, they can only browse the Document Library of each site, not anything higher up in the hierarchy.

I find this unfortunate and we´re currently looking at setting up a personal site for each user, to be used as a home user space, but in the long run I hope to be able to solve this by extending the document library web script to access the user home space.

[mikeh]

I find this unfortunate and we´re currently looking at setting up a personal site for each user, to be used as a home user space, but in the long run I hope to be able to solve this by extending the document library web script to access the user home space.

It was a (product management-led) design decision taken early on in the 3.0 development cycle. Share deliberately has no concept of "user spaces" - everything is grouped by Site.

You're obviously welcome to try and extend the document library scripts, but be aware both the repository and share web scripts assume a site/container/path structure for content, rather than arbitrary path from companyhome. If you do go ahead, I would be interested to hear feedback from this exercise.

Thanks,
Mike

[gronfelt]

I find this unfortunate and we´re currently looking at setting up a personal site for each user, to be used as a home user space, but in the long run I hope to be able to solve this by extending the document library web script to access the user home space.

It was a (product management-led) design decision taken early on in the 3.0 development cycle. Share deliberately has no concept of "user spaces" - everything is grouped by Site.

You're obviously welcome to try and extend the document library scripts, but be aware both the repository and share web scripts assume a site/container/path structure for content, rather than arbitrary path from companyhome. If you do go ahead, I would be interested to hear feedback from this exercise.

Thanks,
Mike

That's actually very good to know, because that makes me reconsider my approach on this. I really don't need to access the User Home space per se, but I need a place that users can use to store their own files. We'd like to use Share as our basis for document storage and therefore we'd like to include a personal storage space for files that are not meant for sharing (or that are not ready for sharing yet) but that still needs indexing, versioning and other benefits that comes with Alfresco.

Given the info above it seems to me that the best approach to this would be to simply create a specialized, "limited site", which is automatically created for, and limited to, each user and that is reachable from the top panel. Would there  be any obvious drawbacks to that strategy, that could be useful to know about?