Hi Everyone, Would like to know if Alfresco can help me as searchable knowledge base with full text search. Add if it can be integrated with Google drive or via any other API? Thanks in advance, Vivek

[vdangeti]

I have documents in my Google drive which my team uses; however the search functionally does not look into each file contents.

looking for any alternative application 

[kalpesh_c2]

Hi Vivek,

There can be two approaches to solve your concern:

[1] Migrate to Alfresco to leverage the tremendous search capability which includes not only the files/folders names, faceted and in-line text search but OCR and metadata based search as well. The last two search facilities need some customization but are very handy for the users.

(You can see a small demo video of OCR here )

Even if you use Alfresco, it will let you edit the docs in Google Docs by check-out and check-in facility.

[2] If you want to use Google Drive as the repository and Alfresco to be integrated with the same, the approach needs some work.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Kalpesh

ContCentric

[vdangeti]

Hi Kalpesh,

Thanks for your response.

I have a huge folder on my google drive with lot of sub-folders and

sub-folders with files in it.

The search bar is not able to do full text search when I am looking into

file contents as well.

From your response, I could vouch upon Alfresco. However could you provide

me some more details on

1. Approach 1 - Metadata

2. Approach 2 - do we need any 3rd application for Google Drive and

Alfresco integration?

Thanks in advance,

Vivek

[kalpesh_c2]

Hi Vivek,

Let me through some more light on both the approaches.

1] Approach 1: Metadata

We can define a set of metadata fields for certain document types or sub-folders or folders. 

E.g. A folder/ subfolder contains all the contract notes prepared with your vendors. It can have a metadata like a vendor name, contract start date, contract end date. The document will automatically attach the relevant metadata on the upload of the document in that folder. The user will be able to update the metadata fields manually. A report can be customized to see the information on basis of certain metadata e.g. the contract end date between 1-Mar to 31-Mar-18. We can also customize the search page to search the document on basis of metadata. E.g. If you want to search the contract note of vendor 'x', just go to the search page and put 'x' in the specific search filed. 
I am not aware of your business use case. But, if you have a volume and variety of documents accessed frequently by the users, the above-mentioned customization will make your life easy.

If you are challenged in terms of IT infrastructure, you can install Alfresco in a cloud. So, your documents will also remain there.

2] Google Drive Integration:
I didn't come across any API which would readily integrate Google Drive and Alfresco. So, this approach seems to be a development from scratch. Would not be able to comment much on the same.

Let me know if you need any help!

Kalpesh

ContCentric