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Thursday, 17 May 2012

New Features in Alfresco 4 (Alfresco Share)

Here are the list of the new features in Alfresco 4:


  1. Drag and Drop feature: We can now directly upload a document in our site by simply dragging the document from our hard disk and dropping it to the document library.
  1. Inline edit of the document title: We can directly rename a document in the document library.



  2. Social features: Alfresco 4 provide social networking features like follow, like, favorite etc.


  3. Avatar in My-Activities Dashlet: In Alfresco 4, my-activities dashlets shows the profile picture of the user whose activities the dashlet displays.


  4. More filter options in my-activities dashlet: Now we can get the data in the my-activities dashlet by using more filters like status updates, comments, memberships etc.


  5. Site Theme: We can change the theme of indiviual sites.


  6. We can set the logo to our own custom logo directly by uploading our custom logo.



  7. Dashlet help: Every dashlet comes up this its own help icon. We can even add this feature to our custom dashlets.


  8. Rename pages in sites: We can rename the default pages that are available in every site like wiki, blog, calendar etc.


  9. Invite members from site-members dashlet: We can invite members from the site-members dashlet. The invite link will redirect us to the invitation page.


  10. Document's previewer pops up in the recently-modified-documents dashlet: Hover over the document's avatar in the recently-modified-documents dashlet and the preview of the document pops up.


  11. We can download an image from the image preview dashlet. Earlier we could only view the image details.


  12. In Alfresco 4, we get both detailed and simple view in the recently-modified-documents dashlet.


  13. When we type the sitename while creating a site, it automatically generates the site url, if we have not mentioned the site url before.






For more new features in Alfresco 4 check out the link: 

http://mani-alfresco.blogspot.in/2012/05/new-features-in-alfreco-4-uploading.html









Tuesday, 15 May 2012

Enable the Alfresco FTP server


Sometimes it may be required to enable the Alfresco FTP server. Below are the basic steps by which one can easily enable the Alfresco FTP server:

1. Set up an FTP connection.
2. To enable FTP go to file-servers.properties file in {Tomcat-Home}\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\subsystems\fileServers\default.
3. Open the file-servers.properties file, set ftp.enabled=true and save it.
4. Open Command Prompt.
5. Type ftp {server-name} [for eg:- ftp localhost] and press enter.
6. Enter the username and password for the an account, say the administrator account.
7. Open My Computer.
8. In the address bar, type ftp://{server-name} [for eg:- ftp://localhost ] and press enter.
9. Enter the credentials again for the account, say the administrator account.

A site with no site-manager in Alfresco Share


This is one issue that I came across while working in alfresco v 4.x. Create a site with any user other than 'admin'. Lets say we have created a site "xyz" from user "abc". Any user who creates a site becomes the site-manager of that site. This way, "abc" becomes the site-manager of the site "xyz".

Now, lets suppose another user say "admin" joins the site "xyz". By default admin will have "consumer" role in the site "xyz". Since admin has the power to delete the user profile of any user, lets say admin deletes the user profile "abc". Now since "abc" was the site-manger of the site "xyz" and no other user was the site-manger of that site, nothing can be done with that site now. It cannot be modified, deleted or updated. Other users can only join that site but they will have "consumer" role by default as the roles can only be changed by a site-manager.

Since now there is no site-manger in that site, roles of the users who are joining the site cannot be changed. This site now cannot be deleted, not even by admin.
Users who are the only site-mangers of some site, admin should not be able to delete such users stating that the user should make some other user as site-manger before their profile gets deleted.

Monday, 14 May 2012

What is Alfresco? In short and simple words.- For novices..


Alfresco is an open source enterprise content management system. That means, Alfresco can be used to manage the content in an enterprise. Lets try and understand Alfresco in simple language.

Suppose there is an enterprise named “xyz”. It has many branches in many cities across the globe. The Director of the company wants to share a document with everyone in the sales department. One way to do this is to mail the document to every single person in the sales department. Better and simpler way would be to upload the document in a central repository such that every person in the sales department can access that repository through a login id and password. Alfresco provides this central repository where one can upload his/her document and make it available to his/her colleagues.

Basically in Alfresco there are spaces called sites. Lets say we create a site in Alfresco named “sales”. We can add as many members to this site as we want. We can add all the people in the sales department in this site. Every site has a document library. One can upload any document in that site. Once a document is uploaded in a site, everyone in that site will get a mail that a document has been uploaded in “sales” site by “abc”. Now everyone in the sales site would be able to view that document. This has made our work a lot easier.

Apart from this there are lots and lots of features that Alfresco provides. Above feature was just a minute example.

Alfresco is totally built on JAVA. So that also makes it special because it inherits the features of JAVA

More on Alfresco? You can always search it on the internet..;)



Search Engine Submission - AddMe

Dashboard customization for existing user dashboard and site dashboard using FTP in Alfresco Share


While working in Alfresco and getting to know more and more about Alfresco, I have found it really amazing how Alfresco has developed over the years. One of the requirements that I was working on during one of the projects was to customize the dashboard layouts of all the existing users and the existing sites. To be specific, my requirement was to change the dashboard layout of all the existing users and all the existing sites to a 3- column layout.

Moreover, in case of the user dashboard, the 3rd column had to be fixed with two particular dashlets for all the users such that the users cannot add or change dashlets in the third column neither can they change their dashboard layout. In case of the site dashboard, the first column had to be fixed with two particular dashlets such that the site manager cannot add or change the dashlets in the first column neither can they change the dashboard layout of that site. And there were some 8000 users and 300 sites in the system.

To set the dashboard layout and dashlets in specific columns for new users and new sites, we can do the desired changes in the presets.xml file. But to do changes for the existing users and the existing sites is not that easy. One of the ways to achieve this is through FTP.

The basic thought of customizing the dashboard layout of the existing users and sites was that there must be a file that has the details of the dashboard layouts and dashlets to be called when the dashboard is loaded for the first time. If we are able to let alfresco ignore that file and use the settings defined in presets.xml file then our work is easily done. We can define our desired dashboard layouts and desired dashlets in the presets.xml file and then somehow call this file for all the existing users and all the existing sites.

Well, the file which holds the details of the dashboard layouts for the existing users and the existing sites is dashboard.xml and this file can be accessed via ftp through AVM.

Here is how you can do it. First lets see how we can customize the dashboard layout for the existing USERS:

____________________________________________________________

1. Set up an FTP connection.
2. To enable FTP go to file-servers.properties file in {Tomcat-Home}\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\subsystems\fileServers\default.
3. Open the file-servers.properties file, set ftp.enabled=true and save it.
4. Open Command Prompt.
5. Type ftp {server-name} [for eg:- ftp localhost] and press enter.
6. Enter the username and password for the administrator account.
7. Open My Computer.
8. In the address bar, type ftp://{server-name} [for eg:- ftp://localhost ] and press enter.
9. Enter the credentials for administrator account.
10.Open location ftp://{server-name}/AVM/sitestore/HEAD/DATA/alfresco/site-data/pages/user/
11.There you'll see individual folders of every user.
12.BackUp and Delete all the folders.
13.Restart the server.
14.Now the dashboard layout and the dashlets will be imported from the presets.xml file.

____________________________________________________________

After following the above steps, you will be able to set the dashboard layout and the dashlets positions
as you have mentioned in the presets.xml file for the user-dashboards.


Now lets see how we can customize the dashboard layout for the existing SITES:

____________________________________________________________

1. Set up an FTP connection.
2. To enable FTP go to file-servers.properties file in {Tomcat-Home}\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\subsystems\fileServers\default.
3. Open the file-servers.properties file, set ftp.enabled=true and save it.
4. Open Command Prompt.
5. Type ftp {server-name} [for eg:- ftp localhost] and press enter.
6. Enter the username and password for the administrator account.
7. Open My Computer.
8. In the address bar, type ftp://{server-name} [for eg:- ftp://localhost ] and press enter.
9. Enter the credentials for administrator account.
10.Open location ftp://{server-name}/AVM/sitestore/HEAD/DATA/alfresco/site-data/pages/site/
11.There you'll see individual folders of every site.
12.BackUp and Delete all the folders.
13.Restart the server.
14.Run the below mentioned web script.
14.Now the dashboard layout and the dashlets will be imported from the presets.xml file.

____________________________________________________________

enable-sites.js

function main()
{
var sites = null;
var result = remote.call("/api/sites");
model.status = "fail";
if (result.status == 200) {
sites = eval('(' + result + ')');
var globalPreset = "site-dashboard"; // sitePreset
var tokens = new Array();
if(sites != null && sites.length > 0)
{
for(var i =0; i < sites.length; i++)
{
tokens["siteid"] = sites[i].shortName;
sitedata.newPreset(globalPreset, tokens);
}
model.status = "ok";
}
}
}
main();
(This is just the javascript code. Make the corresponding xml and ftl files to make it a web script).


After following the above steps, you will be able to set the dashboard layout and the dashlets positions as you have mentioned in the presets.xml file for the site-dashboards.

Before applying the changes to all the users and sites, try to apply the change to a single user dashboard and a single site dashboard.