Book Image

Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation

Book Image

Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation

Overview of this book

Alfresco 3.0 has generated a lot of curiosity with its new content management features. Users have been waiting for a book that covers these concepts along with the security, dashboards, and configuration features of Alfresco 3. Alfresco 3 includes Alfresco Surf, a new N-Tier Architecture, which delivers scalability and accommodates more users on existing hardware resources. This new release also includes a draft implementation of the CMIS specification, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Protocol support. The new multi-tenancy features enable Alfresco ECM to be configured as a single-instance multi-tenant environment. This well-crafted and easy-to-use book is a complete guide to implementing enterprise content management in your business using Alfresco 3. It covers the enhanced document management, a new web-based collaborative application called Alfresco Share, and various integration options with external applications. Alfresco 3 offers true Enterprise Content Management (ECM) by providing an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, and Interwoven. It is the most popular Java-based CMS with over 1.5 million downloads, 50,000 live sites, 74,000 community members, and with more than 150 application extensions in forge. This book guides you through creating smart, collaborative content repositories and shows how to use Alfresco 3 to create more elegant document sharing, better collaborative working, and reliable automated workflow processes. The book also explains how administrators can set up Alfresco 3 for multiple business units as a single-instance multi-tenant environment. Business users can leverage Alfresco Share, a new built-in web-based collaborative content management application bundled with Alfresco repository. It simplifies capturing, sharing, and retrieval of information across virtual teams. This book shows you how to unleash the power of Alfresco 3 to create collaborative working systems in your enterprise
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation
Credits
About the Author
About the Co-Authors
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Advanced workflows


Simple Workflows are good for implementing content-oriented workflow processes. However, there are certain limitations of the Simple Workflow that are as follows:

  • They are unable to create multi-state workflow definitions

  • They are restricted to one or two exit transitions (approve, reject)

  • They are unable to define parallel workflows

  • They rely on folder structure for multi-stage workflow and action triggering

  • They have no notion of a task or assignment

To resolve these limitations, Alfresco has embedded the JBPM (JBoss Business Process Management) engine into its core. JBPM is an open source, standalone workflow engine. It can run in any servlet container, as it doesn't require the JBoss Application server. The JBPM engine is responsible for managing deployed processes, instantiating and executing processes, persisting process states, providing metadata to a relational database (via Hibernate), and tracking task assignment and task lists. With JBPM, the Alfresco platform...