Bridging the Gap for Drupal and Alfresco

This session has been declined by the session moderation team.

Topic: Advantages of Implementing and Designing a module for Drupal that will enable the Integration and Synchronization of Doucments with Alfresco plus endless other posibilities that will be the outcome of a unified platform.

Session sub topics

Real world scenarios and why we need to integrate with alfresco
Core module features
How the module will work (Main functionality of the module)
Sub modules and enhancements
Adavntages of the module
Demo with Drupal 6 module and building one for Drupal 7 and 8

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Real world scenarios and why we need to integrate with alfresco:

The need of better dcument management within organizations plus Real world scenarios where better document mangement is neeed. How Drupal and Alfresco makes Publishing and mangaing better

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What the module will do?

Features:
-- Admin interface for integration
-- Sync Drupal users with Alfresco (The synchronization is done to make sure all Drupal users are in alfresco as well. The sync is not needed in case a single sign on process or a LDAP integration is done)
-- Content type and filed integration with Alfresco
-- Synchronizaton both ways

Functionality:
How the module will share the content with alfresco and how the permission and users are synchronized

Pr-requisites:

-- A Generic Alfresco module to listen to Drupal's synchronous and asynchronous requests as well as synch changes to document through service calls to Drupal
-- How the Drupal Services module (https://drupal.org/project/services) will be used for Alfresco to Drupal synchronization

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Sub Modules:

Alfresco integration for Organic Groups: Organic groups is a very commonly used module among drupal users to create user groups. Once user groups are created there can be PUBLIC and PRIVATE groups which includes various group posts that may consist of Audio, Video, Documents,…etc:-. These posts can be integrated with alfresco in two methods

Create a Corresponding Folder structure on alfresco for each group created with the Drupal interface to sync the content/posts:

1.0 Group name
1.0.1 Documents
1.0.2 Audio
1.0.3 Video

….

Create a Alfresco site for each group created in Drupal and synch content in-between

NOTE: How alfresco comes into play in the scenario of user groups would be a very useful solution to websites that follow the concept.

Alfresco Search Integration: One main dis-advantage in a website is it cannot be equipped to search inside documents. So by bridging Alfresco into play we can improve the search functionality to also search inside documents. How we will make this happen will be to send the keyword to alfresco as well and when Alfresco comes back with matching results of nodes (Assuming the nodes are synched in both server by the use of node references). Combine and filter them with the current Drupal Result and display the result to the fronted

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Advantage of the module:

-- Better familiar interface for users (The users would not have to get familiarized with the alfresco interface but can still continue with the same old web interface)
-- Better search functionality with better results because of the capability to search inside documents
-- Better version control for documents since the document is saved in Alfresco as well (Enable version control in Alfresco)
-- Use of the webdav interface to create/edit/delete or even move (moving document among groups will enable copy paste OR Cut and paste options for documents) content.
-- Better security for documents
-- Better meta data extraction for document (May come in useful for audits)
-- Use of Alfresco functionality such as (workflows, rules…) plus Drupal functionality will certainly add value

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Demo with Drupal 6 module and building one for Drupal 7 and 8

A demo with a currently implemented module (A module implmented by our company (Zaizi Ltd http://www.zaizi.com/) and is currently used by clients like OXFAM International as well as UK MetOffice) for drupal 6 the demo willl consist of the following functionalities