Alfresco 3 Web Services Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I browsed through the book as soon as I received my review copy to get a feel for its contents. It appeared to a be a handy reference for building applications or integrations with Alfresco using its web service interfaces. While this impression held well as I went through the text, I made some additional observations.
At a high level, this book is organized into three parts - SOAP-based access to Alfresco, REST-based access to Alfresco, and CMIS. I would have loved to see this organization made explicit as Parts 1, 2, and 3. Currently, the description of this organization is hidden in a small paragraph in the preface, which many readers may miss. An introductory chapter relating the high-level concepts and introducing Alfresco would have made the book significantly more reader-friendly. I felt that the book assumes certain knowledge of content management concepts and of Alfresco, but this assumption is not made explicit in "Who this book is for".
The book does well when it comes to getting into the details of features and capabilities. These details are made accessible to the reader using examples and real products as diverse as Alfresco SDK, FreeMarker, Apache Chemistry, Google Web Toolkit, and MyLyn WikiText parser. The book uses a Book Shop model for a large number of examples, but it also refers to other smaller examples depending on the context.
It also does a good job of introducing the concepts and standards related to SOAP, REST, web scripts, FreeMarker templating, Atom, AtomPub, and CMIS. CMIS deservedly gets a lion's share in the text as it is a standard means of interaction with any content repository implementing this interface. As many of the content management heavyweights have backed CMIS, it is likely to be supported widely. The discussion on CMIS includes AtomPub and Web Services bindings, CMIS query language, and an example of building a complete CMIS client application.
The bookshop example is used as a key example in the book. The details of the example appear somewhat contrived to enable explanation of the relevant concepts. There is nothing wrong with an example being contrived in this manner; actually, it serves well to illustrate how to accomplish the desired effects. I just expect the text to make it clear that the example is a contrived one. The book, however, refers to it as a "real case". I am wondering why I would implement a bookshop web site on Alfresco in real life. There could be a plausible reason but it was not explained. In my mind, I would need some content management requirements to use Alfresco, and I would probably limit the role of Alfresco to that extent in the commercial web site. Further, the example was mostly focused on metadata, and I kept wondering why I wouldn't just use a database rather than a content repository.
I am not belaboring the bookshop example for its own sake as I admitted that it does well to illustrate the interface details. In my mind, it represents a missed opportunity for the book. In general, the book could have provided more advice on when to do something in addition to how to do it.
CONCLUSION
Overall, I found the book to be a handy resource for anyone working with Alfresco or content management web services. If you know the specific things that you need to do it can be an excellent resource showing you how to do it. If you need to make choices before implementation, you may need to utilize additional resources. If you are new to Alfresco and content management, you may want to look at additional resources first.

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The book is a detailed guide to building integrations on top of Alfresco filled with tons of examples and sample code. It is intended to be a complete overview to help developers choose a specific API with related method invocations. If you are a web developer who wants to build business applications on top of Alfresco, then this is the book for you. Basic understanding of XML, Web development concepts (HTTP, MVC) and Web Services is required.

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Alfresco 3 Records Management Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)My first impression of the book was that the author did an excellent job in presenting RM concepts, describing how Alfresco implemented the RM features in Share, and how you could customize this features if necessary. The author also included "How does it work?" section at the end of most of the chapters and I found it very helpful if I was interested in the technical details of how the feature was implemented.
Chapter 9 is the BEST chapter in the book. If you only have time to read one chapter, this is one that you need to read. The author reviews various RM concepts and then describes various scenarios and what-if situations that a record can be in. Other topics include: freeze/hold, unique record ID that Alfresco creates for each record, and the two cron jobs that the RM module uses to support RM functionality.
I really liked this book compared to other Alfresco books I have read. It provides a good mix of records management concepts and technical details for developers. My only suggestion for the author is that it would have been nice if he provided a fictitious use case that could be referenced throughout the book. Other Alfresco books that I have reviewed include such samples and I feel that it can be very helpful to readers who are trying to pick up a new concept.

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This book is structured in a sequential way that walks you through the steps necessary to set up your Alfresco Records Management system. Chapters follow a logical progression with each chapter building on the knowledge and implementation details learned in earlier chapters. If you are a records manager, business analyst, or a software developer, and want to implement the Alfresco Records Management program for your organization, then this book is for you. You don't require any prior knowledge of Alfresco Share software to follow this book.

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Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)When I started reading this book I had the sentiment it will be a comparison between the JSF UI client and Share. However, the authors guide the reader through the complete deployment lifecycle, from the installation of Alfresco and MySql to the usage of the exposed interfaces or protocols like CIFS, CMIS and the new Sharepoint protocol.
If you are new to Alfresco you can learn how to customize Alfresco UI or how to configure a SMTP server to work with Alfresco. Users, groups, permissions, roles, authentication and security are well explained, and there are enterprise use cases that can help the reader to put his hands in practice. Integration with LDAP (OpenLDAP and AD, chaining), JAAS, Kerberos, NTLM is completely described and SSO with CAS will help you to round the picture.
This book is not only about explaining what Alfresco is and can do, but it will help the reader to chose the best solution for his installation. Users migration is a big thing for a lot of companies and you will not regret to read this book in order to learn how to do that.
There are also advanced parts like creating custom models, categories, workflows with jBPM. In the chapter 9, the authors show how to integrate external applications with Alfresco. Integrations through webscripts with Droopal, Joomla, FLEX, emails, iPhone, Google, Facebook are very attractive and could be easily extended to a high level enterprise application.
In the next chapter (10), it is clearly explained how one can benefit from the MS Office integration with Alfresco and how to use the Sharepoint protocol, in order to be able to use several repositories with one user interface.
What I did like, simply because I do not have much experience with yet, is the OCR integration the chapter 13. So, scanning and optically recognizing text in documents could be one of the last steps in your document management integration and if you need video or audio transcoding than I can only recommend this book.
In my opinion this book could be useful for system administrators, new and advanced users, as well as managers willing to use a open source content management system in their company.

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Munwar Shariff is an experienced software trainer for CIGNEX Technologies Inc. He has trained many users, administrators, and developers in Alfresco and many other CMS systems. This book distils the hands-on approach of his training courses into a concise, practical book. The emphasis is on getting up and running fast and discovering the scope and power of Alfresco 3 incrementally through practical examples. This book is designed for system administrators, experienced users, and business owners who want to install and use Alfresco in their teams or businesses. Because Alfresco is free, many teams can install and experiment with its ECM features without any upfront cost, often without management approval. The book assumes a degree of technical confidence but does not require specialist system administration or developer skills to get a basic system up and running. Alfresco is particularly suitable for IT consultants who want or need to set up a flexible enterprise content management system for their clients, be that for demonstration, development, or as a mission-critical platform. This book gets you to that result quickly and effectively. Though this book is not a developer guide, various examples in the book will help developers to extend Alfresco functionality and to integrate Alfresco with external systems.

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