Customising ECM to allow user to view, open, move and save files through Windows explorer file system

[ethan_wong]

Hi all,

I was just wondering how many of the community users had customised their installation to allow their users to view, open, move and save documents by interacting through the windows file explorer (as like the users own c-drive)?

Is this a good idea? If not, why did you not allow it?

The requirement was users work with standard documents templates and they would edit them to record specific client needs.  The user would then need to save these edited documents into the clients respective folders as they would have if they are editing and saving the document in their respective local C-drives.  Are we designing it correctly?  Does anyone else have similar requirements and what would be your suggestion how this should be done?

Much appreciate your feedback or inputs.

[mehe]

Hi Ethan,

yes, I usually open up the dms system via a "mapped Network drive". But I don't do that for the whole alfresco system.

Especially not for the sites because users that are not sooo it-agnostic get confused by the sites subfolders and don't understand why they have to use the "document library".

So I normally declare a directory under "company home" as rootPath for the protocols and webdav. Under Windows there are the possibilities to map a drive via alfresco cifs, webdav or the sharepoint protocol (enhanced WebDav).

WebDav and Sharepoint have the advantage (and disadvantage) that they work over http(s), so they are a bit slower but  it's easier to map them, if you are using a "remote" alfresco server. CIFS seems to be faster, but you never know what happens on the windows side (upgrades) and it does not support the latest smb protocol.

When using a local alfresco server, it's handy to import the domain users via ldap and configure some kind of ssh/autologin - ntlm, kerberos, passthru or external auth. Your users shouldn't be bothered by adding their login credentials when using the network drives. It's always good to use https for webdav or sharepoint protocol so you won't have to change Windows registry keys (basicAuth) and it increases security.

Very handy: write a webscript that you can connect to Windows federated search - you can easily customize the returned Data.

You can use rules on some sub-folders to automagically add and populate metadata for the files.

The advantage of the mapped drive(s) is, your users will accept and adapt your DMS in no time.

The disadvantage: looking like a fileserver makes the users expect that they can use it like a file server and this can be a problem in operations - imagine someone that uploads a whole directory tree to your dms. You will have a lot of files you don't like to exist in your alfresco system - thumbs.db, big zip or pst files and so on.

Also the refreshing of the directory content is not as expected by a file server. You would have to do more manual refreshes...  - oh I didn't manage to access the version history of a file via explorer, maybe that's not possible, but I didn't put much effort in this...

Conclusion: Now I use the network drive just as "interface" for legacy applications and as easy to use in/outbox for the users. The other functions are handled by AngularJS pages.

good luck,

Martin