Alfresco Wcm In Hour

Alfresco WCM in an Hour Michael Farman www.alfresco.com

Agenda ●

Introduction

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Alfresco's Model for WCM ● Production Model ● Deployment

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What type of uses are supported?

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User Roles

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Authoring Content

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Previewing Updates

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Reviewing and Approving Updates

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Tracking Updates

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Deployment

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Demonstration

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Further Information

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Q and A

Alfresco WCM ●

Add-on Module to Alfresco Content Repository

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All DM and WCM capabilities available within a single repository ● Complementary Content and Web Content services

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Community and Enterprise Versions ● Community - Free to use • • •

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Enterprise - No license fees, annual support subscription • • •

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Limited QA NO support Use at your own risk! Production Ready Service Level Agreement Warranty and Indemnity

See Alfresco in an Hour in the Content Community for more information on core repository services.

Alfresco’s Model for WCM ●

Content Production ● Production Model • •

● ● ● ● ● ●

Sandboxes Transparent Layers

Workflow Roles Content Modelling Versioning Virtualisation Filesystem Projection

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Content Delivery ● Static v’s Dynamic Runtimes ● Alfresco Runtimes ● Deployment

Alfresco’s Model for WCM

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Low traffic

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High traffic

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Read / write

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Read mostly

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Alfresco focuses on:

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Alfresco focuses on:

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Ease of content entry Content QA (workflow / approval) Version control / rollback

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Deployment Flexibility Technology agnosticism Performance / scalability

Production Model

Production Model – Transparent Layers

● No changes yet made

Production Model – Transparent Layers

● Alice creates a new page called "products.html"

Production Model – Transparent Layers

● Alice edits "index.html" to add a link to her new page

Production Model – Transparent Layers

● Alice submits her changes (change set) to workflow, they are

approved and promoted to staging

Alfresco’s Model for WCM

Deployment In a Nutshell

?

What kind of sites can Alfresco manage? ● Static or Dynamic or Both ● ●

Static – HTML, Images Dynamic - JSP, ASP, Coldfusion, PHP…..

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S tatic

Dynamic

D elivery technology

Web s ervers

Application servers

P age compositing

S ubmission time

R eques t time

D eployment mechanism

Filesys tem

Alfresco R untime

P ers onalization

Limited

Unlimited

P erformance

Ultimate

Less than static

Application developer s killsets

Freemarker, X S LT, X S LT-FO

Any web technology

Alfresco Runtimes Runtime Repository (in production) Can be used:  As the search engine for the web site (applicable for both dynamic and static web sites)  As a runtime content store that can be queried by a dynamic web application. 



Web Scripts  REST (HTTP) Based – Technology Independent  Data Access API  HTML, XML, Text, JSON, Atom, RSS.....  Supports cached results  Authentication ● Can be used to provide: • Search • Navigation • Dynamic Page Assembly

A Hybrid Model? 



Hybrid – Mix Static and Dynamic Page Composition Options “Inside Out” • Each page is dynamic and includes all page components dynamically (regardless of whether those components are static or dynamic) “Outside In” • Each page is static HTML with static components already embedded, but dynamic components included via an inclusion mechanism (eg. server side includes)

Note: The tradeoff between these two models is management complexity vs runtime performance.

Deployment – Static

Deployment – Dynamic

Deployment – Hybrid

What types of users are supported? ●

Web Designers / Developers ● ● ●

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Application Developers ●

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XML-based publishing, transformation, preview

Content Reviewers ●

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Code versioning, testing, staging

Content Managers / Web Publishers ●

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Support any tool for authoring, development Support any number, type of website Integrated staging, preview, and deployment

Email-based task notification, management

Content Contributors ● ●

Drag-and-drop Word document Automatic transformation, publishing to Web

What types of users are supported? ● WCM Roles ● Content Manager ● Content Publisher

Editorial Power

● Content Contributor ● Content Reviewer

Role

Relative User Population

Content Manager

Few

Content Publisher

Some

Content Contributor

Many

Content Reviewer

Implementation Dependent

What types of users are supported? ● WCM Roles ●

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Content Manager ● Build Import content into the staging sandbox ● Invite users to the Web Project ● Perform any action in any user sandbox Content Publisher ● Create/Edit/Delete Content from within their own sandbox ● Submit to the Staging area

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Content Contributor ● Create/Edit content within their sandbox ● Submit content from within their sandbox to the Staging area

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Content Reviewer ● Edit content in their own sandbox ● Submit content from within their sandbox to the Staging area ● Note: Cannot create new content

Authoring Content ● Web Forms ● ● ● ● ●

XML Schema XForms Form Library and Form Configuration Templates (XSLT, Freemarker, XSL-FO, Custom) Multi-channel output (renditions)

● Support for wizard-driven content authoring ● ● ●

Enforce rules for content authoring Enable complex authoring Enforce rules for content generation

Authoring Content ● Web Forms

Authoring Content Web Forms ●

Web Forms ● Simple Wizard based content authoring

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Form Definition ● XML Schema •

W YS IW YG editor with formatting options, Text area, C heckbox, S lider control, Time picker, R adio buttons, dropdown, As set picker and more

1) Generate XML - content

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Template Processing ● 1 – Many Formatting Templates ● XSLT, XSLT-FO and Freemarker • •

Multiple output Generate HTML, Text, PDF, JSP……

2) Generate assets - presentation

Authoring Content Web Forms Alfresco uses XML Schema to define web content entry forms. For this purpose it uses the Chiba forms engine, an open source implementation of the XForms standard.

Authoring Content Template Processing Alfresco provides 3 server-side templating languages: XSLT, XSLT-FO and Freemarker. After a content item (XML file) is created, each template configured for that content type is executed, producing an output file per template.

Typical output formats include HTML, JSP, PDF etc.

Web Forms Are Content Too! Managed in the repository Web Forms and their associated output templates are global to an Alfresco installation and must be associated to a Web Project before they can be used within that Web Project. You can view all configured Web Forms by navigating to: Company Home > Data Dictionary > Web Forms

Authoring Content File System Access ● Filesystem Projection ● CIFS projection provides: ● ● ●

Access to all available sandboxes (HEAD) Access to all available layers (preview, review) Access to all available snapshots Contained in special top-level VERSIONS directory Available as read-only views

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Access to all available file metadata Contained in special top-level METADATA directory Accessed as normal files Metadata file names, dir structure mimic regular site

Authoring Content File System Access ● Filesystem Projection

Previewing Updates ● Virtualisation ●

Isolated preview environment for every user sandbox and the staging sandbox • •

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No physical servers required Users only see their changes

Supports preview of modified content & code (JSP pages, class files, jars) Minimizes in-memory footprint

● User Sandbox ●

Preview, undo, check links for individual updates and sites

● Staging Sandbox ● ● ●

Preview all approved updates Review snapshots (previous versions) Revert to previous

Previewing Updates User Sandbox Preview All Updates

Preview Individual Updates Undo Updates

Reviewing and Approving Updates ● Change Sets and Workflows ●

Tasks

Contain an entire change set Includes deleted files and folders XML and generated output always associated within context of a task Cannot promote an XML or a generated without promoting the other associated assets

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Review Layers

Any change set associated with a task isolated in own review layer within user’s sandbox Reviewers see in-context view of user’s changes against current site User’s can continue to work in sandbox without breaking the reviewer’s context

● Workflow configuration ● ●

Workflows can be configured for each form or for any arbitrary set of non-form assets Sample n-reviewer serial and parallel review configurable OOTB Includes email notification and email-based task management

Reviewing and Approving Updates ● Submit Content ●

Submission details ● Change Set

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Check Links ● Link Validation Report • href, src, includes

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Workflow - Review, Approve and Publish ● Serial/Parallel ● Email integration

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Content Launch/Expiry ● Date & Time – Auto review ● Change set/individual assets

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List of submitted assets

Tracking Updates ● Versioning ● ● ● ●

File versioning Directory versioning Snapshoting Rollback

● Automatic support for site snapshots, rollback to any snapshot ● ● ●

Each submission versions each file & parent directories Each submission snapshots staging sandbox Each snapshot available for rollback Recovers deletions, moves, renames, etc. Allows website to rollback to any point in time

Tracking Updates Staging Sandbox Snapshots

Site Snapshots - Rollback to any previous version of the site

Deploying Updates Manual or Automatic ● Deploy Staging to 1 or more: ● ●

Remote File Servers Alfresco runtime servers

● Can also deploy any snapshots ● Monitoring and logging ● Transactional ● Incremental

Alfresco WCM In Action

Demo

Further Information ●

WCM Evaluation Guide ● Link from http://wiki.alfresco.com

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Content Community ● http://www.alfresco.com ● AMPs, Documentation, Tutorial, Tech Tips

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Alfresco Wiki ● Detailed technical information on configuration, administration and customisation ● http://wiki.alfresco.com

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Alfresco Forums ● Community Postings ● Alfresco Staff ● http://forums.alfresco.com

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Alfresco Forge ● Contributions from the community • •

E.g. Metadata extractors, transformations …. http://forge.alfresco.com

Q and A

Alfresco WCM in an Hour

Thank you for Attending

Alfresco WCM in an Hour Michael Farman www.alfresco.com

Alfresco WCM in an Hour Michael Farman www.alfresco.com