Alfresco 4 Enterprise Content Management Implementation

by Munwar Shariff, Snehal Shah, Rajesh R Avatani

Install, administer, and manage this powerful open source Java-based Enterprise CMS Overview In Detail Alfresco 4 has improved a lot with its new and advanced concepts for content management. Users have been waiting for a book that covers these concepts along with security, dashboards, and the configuration features of Alfresco 4. Alfresco 4 Enterprise Content Management Implementation is a well-crafted and easy-to-use book, and it is a complete guide to implementing enterprise content management for your business needs using Alfresco 4. It covers the enhanced document management, integration with standard productivity tools, and various integration options with proven external applications. This book will take you through a number of clear, practical sections that will help you to make a proper decision for your business needs using standard practices with Alfresco’s Document Management and various third-party integrations You will learn how to install, administer, and manage your entire application. The concepts of mapping your business documents by extending content models and achieving your complex business process using Workflow models and business rules will be discussed in this book. Integration with various third party tools like MS Office, Mobile Application, Outlook, Liferay, Ephesoft, and Kofax will also be covered. You will learn to create your own custom workflow using Activiti BPMN 2.0 Process Designer and also maintain and administrate the entire application. This book explains everything you need to know to manage your documents using standard processes and mechanisms. What you will learn from this book

Genres: Technical

514 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Faruque · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.
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.

You can read the full review on my Blog
Saad Faruque

[Andrea Barisone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Packt has gifted me with this book and asked to review it.
It is an update of the previous version 3 book which covers the changes and almost all relevant topics about Alfresco, since it would be impossible to cover them all.
The perspective of the book goes toward installing, configuring, managing and administering Alfresco than developing solutions: in fact a good programming skill would be required to
accomplish application development, and this is not the aim of this book. Also Alfresco Share is marginally mentioned.
Membership, security and Document Management are widely explained and discussed but obviously hands-on experience always makes the difference.
For someone new to ECM concepts this book could be challenging but it contains a lot of external references to available resources like wikis, forums and so on.
In general, for me, it is one of the best and comprehensive book about Alfresco 4 you can find around right now.

[Johnny Gee · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are new comer to Alfresco, then this book is for you. It covers all the basics for Alfresco 4.1.2 Enterprise Edition. If you are familiar with Alfresco 3 or you have purchased the previous version Alfresco 3 book, there is not really much of a change. In fact, the table of contents of Alfresco 4 is pretty much the same as Alfresco 3.

I got the most value out of this book from workflow and scanning solution integration.

Support for advanced workflows is now provided by Activiti workflow engine. The author does an excellent job introducing BPMN and workflow basics of Activiti workflow. There are step by step instructions on how to use Activiti Process Designer to define custom workflow as well as potential extensions to the individual tasks in the workflow.

There is a new chapter in this book that talks about the integration between Ephesoft and Alfresco. If you are not familiar with various scanning products like Captiva and Kofax, Ephesoft is open source product that integrates directly with Alfresco. Not only does it have basic features OCR and indexing, it also has ability to classify and automatically extract data from forms.

All of major ECM vendors have advanced workflow engine and integration with advanced scanning solution. With the introduction of the Activiti and tight integration with Ephesoft, Alfresco 4 is quickly catching up to EMC, IBM, and Microsoft. I am glad that the author covered these two topics; my only wish is that he would have covered them in more detail.