Review : Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation

When I started reading this book (Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation) I had the sentiment it will be a comparison between the JSF UI client and Share. However, the authors guide the reader through the complete deployment lifecycle, from the installation of Alfresco and MySql to the usage of the exposed interfaces or protocols like CIFS, CMIS and the new Sharepoint protocol.

If you are new to Alfresco you can learn how to customize Alfresco UI or how to configure a SMTP server to work with Alfresco. Users, groups, permissions, roles, authentication and security are well explained, and there are enterprise use cases that can help the reader to put his hands in practice. Integration with LDAP (OpenLDAP and AD, chaining), JAAS, Kerberos, NTLM is completely described and SSO with CAS will help you to round the picture.

This book is not only about explaining what Alfresco is and can do, but it will help the reader to chose the best solution for his installation. Users migration is a big thing for a lot of companies and you will not regret to read this book in order to learn how to do that.

There are also advanced parts like creating custom models, categories, workflows with jBPM. In the chapter 9, the authors show how to integrate external applications with Alfresco. Integrations through webscripts with Droopal, Joomla, FLEX, emails, iPhone, Google, Facebook are very attractive and could be easily extended to a high level enterprise application.

In the next chapter (10), it is clearly explained how one can benefit from the MS Office integration with Alfresco and how to use the Sharepoint protocol, in order to be able to use several repositories with one user interface.

What I did like, simply because I do not have much experience with yet, is the OCR integration the chapter 13. So, scanning and optically recognizing text in documents could be one of the last steps in your document management integration and if you need video or audio transcoding than I can only recommend this book.

In my opinion this book could be useful for system administrators, new and advanced users, as well as managers willing to use a open source content management system in their company.

Book : Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation

I received a new book for review and before I read it and publish my comments here is an extracted article titled "Implementing Alfresco 3.0 Documentation" that could be of interest for some of you.

Are Javaspaces recognized?

After some long discussions with my partner about the JavaSpaces topic I still have no clue why JavaSpaces or at least the Space Based Architecture (SBA) is not adopted by the developers and/or the "architects".

Personally, when it comes only to Java, I think that JavaSpaces could offer a complete stack from the event driven approach to rule engines, with including transactions (local and XA). My question is, am I under/over seeing something or the JavaSpaces and JINI are not being enough marketed by SUN, or the technology is too complicated for us the "developers". For the integration with other technologies or programming languages I for sure do opt for REST or for an ESB.

I see the JavaSpaces as an Object-oriented DataBase and also that some other technologies could almost perfectly fit in, like JMS and maybe even a workflow engine. What is surprising to me is that JavaSpaces are not a new technology and that today when most people are talking about grid or cloud computing, nobody is mentioning JavaSpaces. For sure it is much easier to distribute an existing application with Teracotta than writing a highly scalable application with a good architecture behind.

I also wrote about JAIN SLEE in a previous post and such a "soft real time" technology could also fit in JavaSpaces, at least in my opinion. JavaSpaces seem to be used only in highly scalable environments like Banks need, but what is the difference with Document Management, there we also do need a highly scalable environment.

There is an open source project Blitz and a commercial vendor GigaSpaces providing a community edition, personally I would chose GigaSpaces as it is a company with a big knowledge on the matter and their engine offers a lot of interfaces and features than the JavaSpaces specification describes.

Well, I just wanted to put my thoughts in this post and to make a relation between those kind of possibilities, maybe I am totally wrong but I would like to hear or find a good reason for that.