Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation [Paperback]

Munwar Shariff (Author), Amita Bhandari (Author), Vinita Choudhary (Author), Pallika Majumdar (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1847197361 | ISBN-13: 978-1847197368 | Publication Date: June 10, 2009 | Edition: 2nd edition

Munwar Shariff is an experienced software trainer for CIGNEX Technologies Inc. He has trained many users, administrators, and developers in Alfresco and many other CMS systems. This book distils the hands-on approach of his training courses into a concise, practical book. The emphasis is on getting up and running fast and discovering the scope and power of Alfresco 3 incrementally through practical examples. This book is designed for system administrators, experienced users, and business owners who want to install and use Alfresco in their teams or businesses. Because Alfresco is free, many teams can install and experiment with its ECM features without any upfront cost, often without management approval. The book assumes a degree of technical confidence but does not require specialist system administration or developer skills to get a basic system up and running. Alfresco is particularly suitable for IT consultants who want or need to set up a flexible enterprise content management system for their clients, be that for demonstration, development, or as a mission-critical platform. This book gets you to that result quickly and effectively. Though this book is not a developer guide, various examples in the book will help developers to extend Alfresco functionality and to integrate Alfresco with external systems.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Munwar Shariff is the CTO and VP of Business Development at CIGNEX. CIGNEX is the leading provider of open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions for businesses and government agencies. He has worked as the chief architect and manager of engineering teams for 15 years in the areas of system software, Internet applications and mobile commerce applications for customers in the United States, Japan, Germany, and India. He is an expert in Content Management Systems (CMS). Since co-founding CIGNEX in late 2000, he has successfully delivered more than 50 CMS applications using various open source technologies. He has written a number of articles on open source CMS, he is an experienced trainer, and a frequent speaker at conferences related to this topic. Munwar earned his MS in Digital Electronics and Advanced Communications from REC Surathkal, India. Munwar is the co-author of the book on Plone Open Source Content Management System called Plone Live.

Amita Bhandari is a consultant at CIGNEX. As a senior developer, she has rolled out numerous Alfresco deployments world-wide. She has extensive experience in implementing Enterprise Web Applications using J2EE technologies such as JSP, Servlets, EJB, and MVC Frameworks. She has worked with clients in media and gaming, healthcare, and e-governance. She has trained many students in Java and advanced Java technologies. She holds a Masters in Computer Applications from Rajasthan University, India.

Vinita Choudhary is a senior consultant at CIGNEX. She has extensive experience in working in a variety of environments with cross-functional, multi-cultural teams. She has re-organized existing documentation repositories, written guidelines for document creation, filing and change control, written reference material for software developers, and published the same. She is involved in providing pre-sales support to the sales team and has worked on process streamlining for the company and various documentation aspects.

Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing; 2nd edition edition (June 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847197361
• ISBN-13: 978-1847197368
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #984,899 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #13 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development > Content Management

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Integrate Alfresco in your business, September 4, 2009

By 

Daniel Gradecak (Zagreb, Croatia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation (Paperback)

When I started reading this book 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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Good read, February 10, 2011

By 

Paras Jain (Reston, VA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation (Paperback)

This book is a good read for Alfresco beginners as well as for the people having prior knowledge of Alfresco. It covers basic installation instructions as well as relatively advanced topics like WebScripts, Workflow management, Share etc.

I have not read the whole book but only a few chapters. It has given me good conceptual understanding of various topics.

The book is not complete by any means. In my opinion, no book on Alfresco can. Because there are so many settings and configurations you have to take care of that couldn't be covered in a book. You will have to resort to google, forums and other sources. But this book is a good attempt towards that. I like that the authors have included many screenshots and code-snippets of configurations etc. It would be very helpful for the beginners.