Alfresco is an open source Enterprise Content Management

(ECM) system for Windows and Linux-like operating

systems.
The year-on-year growth of business connections, contacts,
and communications is expanding enterprise boundaries
more than ever before. Alfresco enables organizations to
collaborate more effectively, improve business process
efficiency, and ensure information governance.
The basic purpose of Alfresco is to help users to capture and
manage information in a better way. It helps you capture,
organize, and share binary files.

What you will learn from this book

Understand Alfresco's architecture and
important building blocks
Learn to install Alfresco on various application
servers such as Tomcat and JBoss
Become familiar with various configurations
in Alfresco such as databases, filesystems,
e-mail, and audits

This book will cover the basic building blocks of an

Alfresco system, how the components fit together, and the
information required to build a system architecture.

Administrate Alfresco using the Explorer

Admin Console, Share Admin Console,
and Workflow Admin Console

This book will also focus on security aspects of Alfresco

such as authentication, troubleshooting, managing
permissions, and so on.

Understand how to integrate LDAP and

Active Directory with Alfresco for centralized
user management

It will also focus on managing content and storage, indexing

and searches, setting up clustering for high availability, and
so forth.

Learn how Alfresco environments can be

clustered for high availability

The target audience would be users with a basic knowledge

of content management system, and also users who
want to understand Alfresco from the administration and
high-level design perspectives.

Monitor and manage Alfresco systems

in production

$ 29.99 US
19.99 UK
"Community
Experience
Distilled"

C o m m u n i t y

Vandana Pal

Who this book is written for

Fully understand how Alfresco stores

content and easily retrieves any information
from Alfresco

Alfresco for Administrators

Alfresco for Administrators

D i s t i l l e d

Alfresco for Administrators

A fast-paced administrators' guide to Alfresco from the
administration, managing, and high-level design perspectives

Prices do not include

local sales tax or VAT
where applicable

Visit www.PacktPub.com for books, eBooks,

code, downloads, and PacktLib.

E x p e r i e n c e

Vandana Pal

In this package, you will find:

The author biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Understanding Alfresco'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Alfresco for Administrators

About the Author

Vandana Pal is a software engineer and author. She currently works as senior
consultant at CIGNEX Datamatics.

She has extensive experience working with Enterprise Digital Asset Management
and Content Management Systems. She has worked with various deployments of
Alfresco in various domains, such as media, finance, and healthcare, for different
organizations across the world. She has hands-on experience working with
architecture design, performance tuning, security implementation, integration,
and the orchestration of complex workflows in Alfresco.
She has more than 7 years of experience in software engineering. Her journey in this
field began when she started working with different open source technologies and
found them interesting. She holds a bachelors of engineering degree in information
technology from Gujarat University, India.
Vandana has also coauthored Alfresco 4 Enterprise Content Management Implementation.

Preface
This book focuses on the administration part of Alfresco. It also gives you a
high-level understanding of Alfresco and its capabilities from the perspective of
its architecture. This book provides you with details of how to administer and
troubleshoot problems in Alfresco. It also gives you an in-depth insight into
configuration, clustering, backup recovery, and maintenance. You thoroughly
understand Alfresco's repository structure and learn how to install, configure,
search, and administrate Alfresco.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Understanding Alfresco, gives you a thorough understanding of Alfresco's
architecture and its features.
Chapter 2, Setting Up the Alfresco Environment, explains the various installation
processes of Alfresco in different application servers. It also provides details
of best practices and troubleshooting for the environment setup.
Chapter 3, Alfresco Configuration, explains the ways in which Alfresco can be
configured to suit business needs. It gives you a detailed understanding of
the different components of Alfresco and how they can be configured.
Chapter 4, Administration of Alfresco, explains how the Alfresco repository can be
administered. It provides you with detailed steps for the administration of the
repository and the functions it can perform. The chapter gives you a thorough
understanding of the administration console, users and group creation processes,
node browsers, and so on.
Chapter 5, Search, focuses on the search component of Alfresco. It will provide you
with a detailed insight into the installation, configuration, troubleshooting, and
maintenance of the search server Solr.

Preface

Chapter 6, Permissions and Security, explores the details of the permissions required in
the Alfresco repository. It provides you with an understanding about the different
types of permissions and roles in Alfresco and how to integrate with different
third-party authentication tools.
Chapter 7, High Availability in Alfresco, explores the different ways in which the
Alfresco system can be made highly available. It covers the different methods of
clustering Alfresco and its backup and recovery process as well as troubleshooting
Alfresco's clustered environment.
Chapter 8, The Basics of the Alfresco Content Store, explains how Alfresco actually
stores content. The content life cycle is discussed in detail in this chapter as well
as the database structure in Alfresco.
Chapter 9, Maintenance and Troubleshooting, covers how to monitor and manage the
Alfresco system in production using JMX and other tools. It also provides details
about different ways to troubleshoot Alfresco. You will also learn about different
audit trails in Alfresco for the purpose of better administration.
Chapter 10, Upgrade, explains how Alfresco can be upgraded from one version to
another. It provides detailed steps in order to understand the process of upgrading.

Understanding Alfresco
Alfresco is one of the leading open source enterprise content management systems
(ECM). For more details about ECM refer to the Wiki; https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Enterprise_content_management. Alfresco allows you to manage content in
a simple and smart way. It provides enterprise solutions based on open standards,
and open source technologies for managing business critical content. As it is a very
stable player in the market and provides enterprise-level features and support,
Alfresco has been named Visionary by Gartner for five years in a row. Gartner is
a leading research company, which provides insight into technology; refer to
http://www.gartner.com/technology/about.jsp for more details about Gartner.
This chapter provides you with an introduction to Alfresco 5.x, its features, and its
benefits. It helps you to understand the main building blocks of Alfresco.
By the end of this chapter, you will have learned about:

An overview of Alfresco

Key features of Alfresco

Alfresco architecture

Using Alfresco for your ECM requirements

Overview of Alfresco
The Alfresco open source ECM system was founded by John Newton, co-founder of
Documentum, and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects, in 2005. Alfresco
is a very scalable and extensible solution. Alfresco comes in various flavors: Alfresco
Enterprise Edition, Alfresco Community Edition, and Alfresco in Cloud.

[1]

Understanding Alfresco

Alfresco Community Edition is only for small-scale development or research

purposes. It is not recommended for production systems as there are certain
functional differences. The Community version doesn't support clustering,
enterprise application servers such as WebLogic, enterprise databases such as Oracle,
encryption of content stores, advanced admin tools, advanced media management,
and so on. There is no Alfresco support provided for the Community version.
Alfresco Enterprise Edition is production-ready code. It has been load tested and
certified for use in production. The Enterprise build is fully supported by Alfresco.
Alfresco in Cloud is a SaaS (Software as a Service) version of Alfresco. More details
on this are given in later sections.
Refer to the following URL for more details about the differences between
Community and Enterprise versions:
https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Enterprise_EditionAlfresco

Enterprise Edition has various unique features, which distinguish it from other
ECM systems.

Enterprise and open source

As Alfresco is built upon open source technologies, it reduces the cost of overall
software acquisition, development, and maintenance. Due to this open source model,
Alfresco can use the best open source technologies on the market and build a strong
system at a low cost. Alfresco provides a very cost-effective solution.

Scalable
Scalability is a very important aspect for any ECM system. For enterprise organizations
in fields such as media, healthcare, finance, and so on, the amount of content grows
exponentially, so scalability becomes an important parameter. As Alfresco is built
using open source standards and technologies, it provides a very scalable architecture.
Alfresco Enterprise can be deployed on any platform, and supports multiple
databases such as MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on. It also supports multiple
application servers such as Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, and so on. Each tier in an
Alfresco application can be deployed on a separate machine, which allows the
vertical scalability of the system. Alfresco supports a clustered environment, which
allows it to scale horizontally.

[2]

Chapter 1

Rich media support

ECM systems should support any type of content, regardless of application or
organization. Alfresco supports the storage and management of multiple types of
electronic content, from normal documents to any multimedia files. It provides
automatic extraction of the information from files, associates it as metadata with
content, and enables easy searching.

Secured system
Security and content protection is critical for any ECM system. Alfresco has a
very strong authentication and authorization model. It provides an out-of-the-box
database membership system; it can also be integrated with identity management
systems like LDAP and Active Directory (AD), and have centralized security and
single sign-on. Alfresco provides full access control on individual content to ensure
that security and business integrity is maintained. Access control can be set at the
folder level or individual content.

Highly extensible
Because of its open source model, Alfresco can be extended and customized as per
requirements. Organizations can have a trained in-house team to maintain and
customize Alfresco as per their needs.

External integration
Alfresco supports open standard protocols for integration with external systems.
Alfresco can be integrated with any Java-based portal, such as Liferay (https://
www.liferay.com/products/liferay-portal/overview) using the CMIS or
REST protocols.
CMIS is a standard open source protocol to allow a document management
repository to connect with a web application. It defines an abstract layer so the
web interface can connect with any repository. For more details, refer to https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Management_Interoperability_Services.
The REST protocol allows an external application to access the repository using
the HTTP protocol using the same HTTP verbs, such as GET, POST, and so on. For
more details, refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_
state_transfer.

[3]

Understanding Alfresco

Alfresco provides integration with various scanning solutions, such as Ephesoft

or Kofax, which gives a complete end-to-end solution. It allows organizations to
perform document capture, extraction, classification, storage, and distribution
via a centralized environment.
For more details about Ephesoft and Kofax refer to these URLs:

http://ephesoft.com/products
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofax

Collaboration
Nowadays, due to social media, collaboration has become very important for any
organization as part of ECM. Alfresco, as well as content management, also provides
a platform for collaboration between users internally and externally with full security
and control over content. Powerful tools such as blogs, wikis, forums, and so on are
provided within the Alfresco system to provide collaboration within teams.
Each project can have its own space for complete collaboration and the sharing
of content.
Alfresco supports the publishing of content to various social platforms such as
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare, and so on. It also provides Google Doc
integration, which allows users to have real-time collaboration.

Business process management

Efficient business processes are an integral part of any organization. Automation
of this process helps organizations to streamline processes, improve efficiency,
and reduce cost. In organizations where the review and approval process of any
document is very important, there would always be a need for these documents
to be moved and accessed effectively.
Alfresco provides the Java-based, highly configurable BPM engine Activiti (http://
www.activiti.org/). It also provides graphical tools so that less technical persons
can easily design the process flow, allowing the faster rollout of processes.
As Alfresco can be accessed by any supported browser or mobile device, users get
the flexibility to perform their tasks from anywhere.
Alfresco provides easy configurable rules, which can help to trigger and control this
business process in a smart way.

[4]

Chapter 1

Cloud-based ECM
Alfresco provides a fully managed SaaS ECM solution, leveraging the power
of a cloud-based environment. Alfresco in Cloud is a ready-to-go Alfresco
implementation which requires no installation and minimal configuration by
customers. It allows full control over, and collaboration on, documents, similar
to what can be achieved by Alfresco deployed on-premises.
Alfresco also supports a hybrid model, where content can be synchronized from
your on-premises Alfresco to the cloud. This allows content to be always in sync and
easily available from any location. An Alfresco on-premises solution can be used for
long-term storage and compliance, and Alfresco in cloud can be used for sharing and
collaboration too.

Search
Finding the correct content within a system is very important for any content
management system. Alfresco provides searching with Apache Solr (http://
lucene.apache.org/solr). It provides full-text indexing of content, and metadata
indexing, which allows users to easily search and locate the content in the repository.
Alfresco also provides advanced search capabilities.
Alfresco also supports searches for archived content, users, and groups in
the system.

Version control
Maintaining all versions of a document is also a critical aspect of an ECM system.
Alfresco provides strong version management for documents. It maintains all the
version changes of a document and its associated metadata. Alfresco also has a
feature that allows you to revert a document to any version.

Auditing
Alfresco provides very strong auditing. Each and every action on content is captured
in an audit trail. This audit information can be easily retrieved and generated as
a report.

[5]

Understanding Alfresco

Alfresco architecture overview

Alfresco is the leading open source option for ECM. Alfresco architecture is designed
based on open standards JSR-170, JSR-168, and JSR-283. JSRs are industry standards
defined by the Java community for uniform repository access, using the Java
platform application programming interface. Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Content_repository_API_for_Java for more details.
Alfresco supports pluggable aspect-oriented architecture. It is lightweight, modular,
and scalable.
The following is a high-level diagram of the Alfresco architecture:

Alfresco Share

Mobile Application/
Portal

File System
(WebDAV, CIFS,
FTP)

Rest

Rest/CMIS

WebDAV,
CIFS, FTP

Alfresco Service
Solr Server

Alfresco Repository

Database

Content Store
(File System)

Solr Indexes

Alfresco Share
This is the collaboration content management platform in Alfresco. It is built
on the Surf framework. The Surf framework was developed by Alfresco, but in
2009 Alfresco began working with Spring Source and announced the Spring Surf
Extension framework. Later on, both Spring Source and Alfresco were collectively
developed and are available as plugins in Spring MVC 3.x.

[6]

Chapter 1

Refer to the following links for more details:

https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Spring_Surf
http://www.springsurf.org/

Alfresco Share simplifies document capturing and sharing, and the retrieval of data
for teams, resulting in better collaboration. This in turn increases the productivity of
teams and reduces the volume of e-mails.
Alfresco Share also provides advanced administrative tools. It supports modulebased extension, which supports the ability to remove, add, or modify any
component without changing any out-of-the box code.

Alfresco repository
This is the main core of Alfresco. Alfresco repository is a bundle of service
implementations based on the open standards of CMIS and JCR. This service
provides cutting edge content management features such as:

Content storage

Content retrieval

Content modeling

Query interface

Access control

Audit

Versioning

These services provide a public interface based on REST/CMIS or Java JSR-170

protocol standards which allows the client application to communicate with the
repository. Alfresco Share communicates with the repository using the REST
interface.
The content repository is more than a normal database application, due to the level
of control over individual content it provides. Access to content is wrapped by a
security layer which prevents any unauthorized access. The fine-grained security
control requires a more complex approach than a traditional database application.
In Alfresco, the actual binary stream of content is located in the file system. The file
folder structure and reference to this binary stream is maintained in the database.

[7]

Understanding Alfresco

Filesystem protocol (CIFS/WebDAV/FTP)

Access to content stored in a repository is very important for any ECM. Alfresco
supports various protocols, such as CIFS (Common Internet File System),
WebDAV, and FTP.
These protocols allow you to support the mapping of the same file folder structure
as the repository to a virtual filesystem. With these protocols, any tool that can
read and write a filesystem can read and write to an Alfresco repository. Users can
still use Alfresco as a locally mapped network filesystem. CIFS provides advanced
compatibility with the mapped operation system. With the CIFS protocol, Windows
users can use the Windows offline synchronization feature with an Alfresco
repository. These virtual filesystem protocols allow users to edit and view content
using their locally installed tools.

Database
The database holds all the content related information, such as metadata, content
association, content binary stream location reference, and folder structure. The
database also stores information related to users, workflow tasks, audits, and so on.
Alfresco supports various database vendors, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and
so on. Oracle is only supported in Alfresco Enterprise Edition. Database schema and
more information will be covered in Chapter 8, The Basics of the Alfresco Content Store.

Content store
The content store is a term used for the filesystem location where the actual binary
stream of content is stored. In Alfresco, only the reference to the content is stored in
the database. The actual content is stored in a filesystem. This filesystem can be any
normal NAS or SAN mounted drive. This architecture allows Alfresco storage to
grow exponentially and makes Alfresco scalable.

Solr indexes
Searching is a very important aspect of any ECM system. Alfresco supports searches
using Apache Solr. All content, metadata, and permissions associated with content in
Alfresco are indexed in Solr, which allows fast searches and access to content stored
in a repository.
Solr can be bundled with Alfresco on the same machine, or it can be installed as a
separate tier. This design allows the horizontal scalability of the search tier. Alfresco
and Solr communicate with each other asynchronously.
[8]

Chapter 1

Business use cases of Alfresco

Alfresco as a true ECM system provides a simple and smart way to manage your
content. Alfresco provides various systems as solutions to support document
management, record management, collaboration, and so on, in order to solve
organizational challenges.

Alfresco as a document management solution

Alfresco can be used as a document management solution for any organization
where the documents are business critical, and storing and retrieving them
effectively is very important for the business. For example, contracts are very
important documents for many firms. All contracts can be stored in a central location
within Alfresco. Strong access control can be applied to each contract document,
so only authorized users can view/edit the contract.
Metadata information from the contract document can be extracted and indexed
in Alfresco, which allows users to search any contract easily. As Alfresco supports
full-text searches, users can search the contract document based on its content. The
versioning features of Alfresco can be leveraged to ensure that all the versions of
the contract are kept.
Alfresco provides a strong audit trail, so all the actions taken on the contract by any
user can be captured and an audit report can be generated from them very easily.
Alfresco also supports integration with various scanning and OCR solutions, such
as Ephesoft, so any paper contracts can be scanned, classified, and stored in the
repository.
For contracts, the review and approval process is very important. Alfresco has strong
business process management which can be leveraged to automate this process,
reduce the length of the approval cycle, and improve efficiency. As Alfresco can be
accessed from the Web, users can view documents and perform operations from
any location.

Alfresco as a record management solution

Alfresco record management is a great solution for any organization where
compliance is important. It is simple and very user-friendly. Users can adopt this
system easily.

[9]

Understanding Alfresco

It can be extended to create a single centralized repository to manage all kinds of

electronic records. Alfresco provides strong access control, so all records are secure.
The policies for record use, storage, and disposal can be easily defined with Alfresco
record management.
Alfresco record management is designed based on United States Department of
Defence 5015.2 record management standards.
With Alfresco, you can easily drag and drop records into the system. Business rules
can be defined to classify and mark them as records. A disposition policy can be
defined and automated, which includes the transfer of records or their complete
destruction after a given period. In addition to this, there is strong auditing that
captures all actions on the records.
Alfresco provides different reports that show recent records, records due for expiry,
records due for destruction, and records due for transfer.

Alfresco for collaboration

Alfresco can be used in collaboration solutions within an organization, along with
content management. For example, a marketing team can work on different projects.
Alfresco Share can be used as a collaboration platform. Each marketing project
can be created as a different space. Only members of that project can have access
to that space.
Teams can upload, share, and discuss content within this space. There are
dashboards which can be configured as per user needs to see the activity in the
project and notifications. Alfresco acts as a central repository to manage all
types of marketing documents.
Alfresco provides a feature for publishing content to any social platform, including
Twitter, SlideShare, and Facebook, which can be leveraged and content can be
published directly.
With Alfresco, content can be shared with external users in a secure and
controlled way.
For more case studies on Alfresco, you can refer to http://www.alfresco.com/
customers.

[ 10 ]

Chapter 1

Summary
Alfresco is one of the leading open source ECM systems. The key features of Alfresco
are security, stability, and a scalable architecture. Due to its open source model,
Alfresco can use the best open source technologies on the market and build a strong
system at a low cost. Alfresco provides a very cost effective solution.
Alfresco architecture is designed based on JCR open standards. It is lightweight,
modular, and scalable.
Alfresco can be used in the cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid. The next chapter will
cover details about the installation of an Alfresco system on various platforms.

[ 11 ]

Get more information Alfresco for Administrators

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