AOS and Alfresco login ticket

[pcuvecle2]

Hi,

We would like to integrate AOS with a custom application we are building on top of Alfresco. The goal is to allow the following use case :

1. Our custom web application retrieve a list of Word document from Alfresco and displays it to the user formatted as aos links

2. The user clicks on a link to edit a document, Words opens and the user can then save directly to Alfresco

Note that we have an Alfresco login ticket for the user

From what I understand here Considerations when using Alfresco Office Services | Alfresco Documentation  Login ticket is not part of the authentication possibilities.

Is there a way to pass this ticket to MS Office to let him use it to open the document if the user has the appropriate permission with this ticket ? and then have MS Office using also this ticket at save time ?

Thanks for your answers

[afaust]

Simply put: No, it is not possible. That's why the documentation states that login ticket is not one of the supported authentication methods for Alfresco Office Services.

It is not so much just a question of providing a prepared URL (which might include a ticket) to Office, but how the Office client then works with that URL. The entire set of exchanges between Office and Alfresco Office Services stretches over many different URLs for specific services within the protocol set, and some of them are being derived by the Office client while others are sort-of hard-coded in Office. Even if you could provide a prepared URL to Office, it would almost immediately drop the additional ticket URL parameter for subsequent requests and then the entire integration would fail on the spot.

To be fair, I implemented a login ticket based approach for a customer on the old Alfresco SPP module in 2015 - and it wasn't fun/easy. That was only possible because the SPP module was covered by Alfresco's Open Source licensing. Alfresco Office Services is not covered by that licensing and thus you would have a very hard time doing the same thing I did. It would involve decompiling / reverse-engineering the binary (which might potentially go against its licensing terms, I haven't checked) and leave you / your customer out-of-support (in case they are using Enterprise).

[pcuvecle2]

Hi Axel,

Thanks for this fast and very clear answer. Would you see an alternative way to achieve the same with Webdav for instance ?

Thanks

Philippe

[afaust]

Apart from the licensing difference (RFC WebDAV implementation is part of the open core), the same concerns apply to WebDAV. Also, RFC WebDAV is known to not work flawlessly with Office clients because Office clients use/expect a Microsoft-warped variant of WebDAV.