As mentioned in a previous post, Alfresco got put on my stack of things to look at. We’ve decided to forget about integrating it into Liferay for the time being, and just use Alfresco as a standalone product (possibly with LDAP or NTLM authentication). So, I gave a brief demo to my boss and my director today, and it was somewhere just above blind leading the blind :)

Alfresco is some very nifty software. It operates at least three different ways to get data in and out of it – a standard web interface, WebDAV and CIFS. With a few clicks, I can add the ‘Versionable’ aspect to every document loaded into Alfresco, and this versioning works regardless of which interface you use. So I can create an HTML document using the TinyMCE editor, and it gets version 1.0. I can then WebDAV in, copy the file to my PC, edit it, copy it back, and it gets version 1.1. For giggles, I can browse to the network share, edit the file ‘on the server’, and it gets version 1.2. Unfortunately, only the web interface lets you set a version note to go with the version. There’s also a drag-and-drop target executable that allows you to check a file out and in – so only your changes apply.

The WebDAV interface works from Konqueror – I’m having name resolution issues with the CIFS interface for some reason. I’m pretty sure I could get FUSE to talk to Alfresco, giving me a local mounted directory with full access into the Alfresco server.

So, onwards and upwards. Alfresco looks to be a nice solution to our morass of scattered documentation.