The best method to define content models

[zputnoky]

Dear All,

Working on an Alfresco implementation to manage documentation related to projects. So far collected all the documents created during the life of a project. These documents are organized by teams and by project phases. The global list had been checked with the team leaders and seems I have a 'final' list of appr. 200 different documents.

Took the list and groupped the documents into 4 main groups: Corporate, Project, Administrative, Engineering and removed the duplicates. The list got a bit more clear but still far from a content model defintion.

Wondering what is the best method to define content models.Example: Have a document 'Minutes of Meeting' which can be considered a type, however this document should behave according which teams generates and at which phase. In this case, do I need to define one type for each MoM? or create a global one?

My goal would be to reduce the content type list to appr. 15-20 different types.

How do you tackle the definition?

Your inputs are appreciated,

Zsolt Putnoky

[kalpesh_c2]

Hi , You can create multiple content modes / types in alfresco using by Model Manager,
refer this Tutorial: creating and using models in Alfresco Share | Alfresco Documentation ,

you can separate your document by applying document type  on each document .
Give document type names as group name or as your team name to separate your document and you can also save metadata with it.

Thanks,
Kalpesh

[zputnoky]

Hi Kalpesh,

Thanks for the reply. Guess I was not clear in the questions. Please see below my clarification.

Zsolt Putnoky

[cesarista]

Hi:

In the content model tutotial by Jeff Potts, there are some content model recommendations and best practices:

Working With Custom Content Types in Alfresco | ECMArchitect | Alfresco Developer Tutorials 

Model manager is quite fine for defining basic metadata content types/aspects, with a nice UI form configuration, fast importing between environments, and without many knowledge of content modelling. It may be a good starting point in development as Kalpesh commented, but it lacks of many things, for example, you can't reuse constraints or you can't access all parent types or aspects for inheritance (including your content types until they are not active). As far I remember, other tasks as settting mandatory aspects on a type, define associations or overriding properties are not possible. And more or less the same for localizing (i18n) property titles, or constraint lists values. If you missed some of these things you will need to create and deploy bootstrap content models (as shown in the link above).

What's new in Alfresco Community Edition 5.1? | ECM Architect 

Regards.

--C.

[zputnoky]

Hi Cesar,

Thanks for the reply! I guess my original question was not clear enough. I know how to define the models in Alfresco, no issue there. Where I had some problems is to figure out :

• how many models I need to define
• What are the relations between the models
• What attributes/properties to define

Here is what I did: collected all the different documents created for a project. This gave me a list of app. 150 document titles, grouped them by project phase and by the team who creates the documents. This list been presented to the project management team and been kinda cleaned up (all documents no managed by the EDMS removed from the list). Then for each document described the content with few words, based on this I was able to come up with appr 15 different models. With this, I was able to define somehow the initial list of attributes or aspects for each type, then model the relation between the models. With all this data, I can start to define the content models in Alfresco.

I am not sure that I followed the right process, or if there is a kinda better approach.

Hope the above gives some info what I am looking for.

Zsolt Putnoky