Think about Share as an Extranet web app

It’s interesting to notice that Alfresco Share has been primarily designed as an Extranet web application, built on top of the Alfresco Document Repository.

The more I study Share, the more I understand that it has been designed as a front-office for Alfresco DM.

In the current version of Share, most of the “admin” task are managed through the Alfresco DM web UI (JSF client):

For instance, if you want to setup notification rule for Share Site “testsite”, you have to connect to Alfresco DM, and then go to “Company Home / Site / testsite”, and then apply rules on the sub-spaces which corresponds to the Share pages (like Blog, wiki, etc).

Each “page” of the Share site corresponds to an Alfresco Space. So each time a Site is created, the following spaces are automatically created in the DM:

– blog
– calendar
– discussions
– documentLibrary
– links
– wiki

So you can choose to apply notification only for the Space “Calendar”. This is really as simple as applying any rule on Space in the DM. (I think you could also transform all your Share Blog post in .pdf …to be tested).

Another example, is that when you create a new Site, Share leverage the Alfresco DM security and automatically creates User Group associated with your Site. You can see all these groups if you connect as admin in Alfresco DM (and go to the Group management interface). Assuming your site is named “testsite”, then you will see the following Group sctructure:

site_testsite
 site_testsite_SiteManager
 site_testsite_SiteCollaborator
 site_testsite_SiteContributor
 site_testsite_SiteConsumer

Then, when you invite a User in “testsite” (and give the consumer role), this will automatically add this User as a member of the corresponding group site_testsite_SiteConsumer.

 

So consider Share as the front-end, and Alfresco DM as the back-end, and this will help you to understand how these 2 web app are coupled together.