Alfresco Portlet for IBM WebSphere Portal (JSR-286)

 

Alfresco document management features now available for IBM WebSphere Portal

 
Alfstore (www.alfstore.com) is proud to announce the release of a new Portlet for Alfresco that has been certified to run on IBM WebSphere Portal, and other JSR-286 Portal containers (as Liferay).

The treeview portlet exposes the content of an Alfresco space in the tree-view way. It provides all in-line editing features for documents and folders.

The user can then easily access to his/her documents, through a portal, using an ajax-style view. Only the common document management operations are exposed, to make the interface as simple as possible:

Actions on documents:
– Create (upload), Update, Delete,
– Edit : user can edit and save a document directly online from the portal (using the CIFS or the WebDAV protocols).

Actions on folders:
– Create, Delete, Refresh, Rename.

An advanced configuration mode allowing flexible appearance and functionality tuning. For example, the CIFS protocol can be disabled, and the user can select a specific space as the “root folder” to start the navigation.

So the “complexity” of the Alfresco standard interface is hidden, and this Portlet can really be used by none advanced users.

The Portlet layout is light and small so it can be integrated on a multi-column page with others portlets.

Technology:
– This Portlet was written for the IBM’s WebSphere Portal first of all (and fully tested on it), but does not use any WebSphere specific functionality, so it can run on others JSR-286 portals.
– The Portlet uses the standard Alfresco Web Service, and is compliant with Alfresco DM v2.x, 3.x.

Support:
– A free (not supported) open source version can be downloaded on Alfresco forge (http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/alftree-portlet/).
– A basic SSO mechanism is provided, so Portlet can be easily tested.
– The Enterprise version will be available shortly (end of Oct. 2010)for Alfresco customers.
– The Enterprise version will be fully supported by Alfstore and will be updated in lock-step with new versions of Alfresco and/or WebSphere Portal.

Enterprise version:
– Along with a professional support, the commercial version will include more advanced features, like:   
– Support for Enterprise SSO solutions (SSO CAS, IBM, Siteminder),
– Search features (search Alfresco documents from Portal),
– Multi-file upload,
– etc.

Learn More:
– Please feel free to contact us (info@alfstore.com) for more information.
– The detailed roadmap of this component will be updated on the Alfresco wiki.
– A webinar will also be presented in the near future.
– Company website : http://www.alfstore.com

Alfresco Share “DocLib” Portlet for Liferay and JSR168 Portal

 

Our company (www.alfstore.com) is about to release a new Portlet for the Alfresco Document Management software (next week).

Our new component will especially be tested and supported with IBM WebSphere Portal (and of course Liferay), and will be JSR286 compliant.
The v1.0 open source version will be delivered next week in the Alfresco forge, and the supported (commercial) release is scheduled end of October.

I will describe our Portlet for IBM WPS soon in a next blog post, but before that I would like to present the “Share Portlet” recently published by the Alfresco team: Alfresco Share Portlets for Liferay and JSR-168 Portal

The “Share DocLib Portlet” is already well documented by Alfresco (see all links at the bottom of this article), so I will only give you the main principles:

Functionnaly the purpose of this “DocLib Portlet” is to expose the Share interface into a Portal.
As per the webinar presentation, it seems that almost all the rich document repository browser capabilities of Share have been “portal enabled” so far.

So the Share Portlet is a good choice if you want to fully expose the Share features and look & feel into a portal page (full window view).

Please note that some Share features are not “portal enabled” for the moment, like blog, wiki, etc. Also, as far as I know there is no search feature exposed.

Technically the Alfresco Share Document Library (and surf webscripts) have been “portletized” and can be deployed as a Portlet (.war file) into the Portal runtime.

The Share Portlet is not based on CMIS, but uses the existing Share webscript, because with CMIS it is still not possible to manage advanced feature like versionning, preview, etc (which are exposed in Share UI and in the Share Portlet).

The “DocLib” Portlet will be available for the following Alfresco version:
– Alfresco server components installable against Alfresco Enterprise 3.3.1 (already available).
– Alfresco Community 3.4.x (I think it will be included only in 3.4.c ?).

Initial Supported Stack:
– It will be supported by Alfresco only for Liferay Portal CE & EE 5.2.3 (Others TBD),
– As per the webinar it is not tested on other Portal (like IBM WebSphere), but it seems to mostly works on Weblogic.

SSO:
The current version use use the standard Liferay ability to pass the portal UserID to Alfresco, and a special authenticator on Alfresco side accepts the credential passed by Liferay.

The webinar demo of the DocLib Portlet was really impressive, and the Alfresco team has done a great work ! Hope you will like it (more info below in the Useful links section).

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Useful links:
Alfresco Share Portlets for Liferay and JSR-168 Portal
http://www.alfresco.com/products/integrations/liferay/

Read wiki documentation
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Portlets

Watch video, Portlet Installation and Configuration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypw7oCjUPKo&rel=0&hd=1

Webinar recording:
http://www2.alfresco.com/l/1234/2010-09-21/O1ZM3

New Portlet Development Options for Alfresco!
http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/luissala/2010/02/24/new-portlet-development-options-for-alfresco/