Preface
As a system integrator and designer I always have a preference towards open source technology such as Alfresco. I have done several implementation of Alfresco for a few organizations, include educational institution and for service business using free edition of Alfresco.
After the age of windows file sharing, document collaboration platforms has come a long way more accessible. Today we have many matured document collaboration platforms such as EMC Documentum, MS SharePoint, KnowledgeTree, Liferay Portal, Alfresco etc.
About Alfresco
Alfresco is one of the leading open source ECM (Enterprise Content management) Platform, which can be used on-premise as well as in the cloud. Alfresco is feature reach, built on open standards. Alfresco implements technologies like Workflow, Business Process Integration, task management and assignment, Version Control, Online Previews, Repository access via CIFS/SMB, FTP, WebDAV, NFS and CMIS, On-premise to Cloud Sync (dropbox like sync), Desktop integration with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, Comprehensive Search, Pluggable authentication. These features are supported out of the box. Alfresco being an open Source, open standard product. Many other application integration is also possible with little effort.
About This Book
As the title suggests this book is written for Alfresco 4 Enterprise edition (commercial), however most of these examples should work on the free edition as well. “Alfresco 4 Enterprise content management and implementation” is probably the only Alfresco ECM book out in the market for “Version 4” as on Dec 2013. It is needless to say this book has no competition. Never the less this book is a well written one. Following Alfresco 3 Enterprise content management, which makes it the second version even more solid.
This Alfresco book covers but not limited to topics such as installation, getting started, security, workflow, other application integration, alfresco share, UI customization, search, imaging and Forms Processing and systems administration. The topics are explained with appropriate diagrams, configuration screen shots, example configuration files and java scripts; which makes this book easy to follow. This book can be used as a cookbook as well.
Audience of this book
Alfresco 4 ECM can be used by the beginners as well as advanced users. This book shall help users with implementation basics, application and process integration, systems administration, as a reference book or even as a cook book for implementing certain technology or integration. Basic linux administration HTML, XML, JavaScript knowledge will be useful while following this book.
Some of the chapters can be useful for business owner, process owners or project managers who wants to take full advantage of alfresco ECM, in terms of mapping business process to the application or leveraging application features in the business e.g. introduction to Alfresco, Implementing Business Rules, Implementing Workflow etc.
Hope you find this book useful as I did.
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How come the book is about Alfresco Explorer and not alfresco share?
Alfresco Share is just one component of Alfresco implementation. There is a chapter on Alfresco share in this book, “Chapter 10, Alfresco Administration Operations Using Alfresco Share, explains how you can administer Alfresco using the Alfresco Share user interface.” Just to learn about user interface with Alfresco share you may follow the alfresco youtube channel views, they are very helpful.