WCM-5 WCM Solutions with Drupal and Alfresco

About AppnovationWe specialize in the use of leading open-‐source technologies

Appnovation provides unparalleled expertise in creating •  Consumer facing and B2B websites •  Corporate and gov’t intranets •  Enterprise level back-end document management and workflow processes •  Mobile website optimization •  Cross platform mobile applications •  eLearning platforms •  Ecommerce •  Locations: Vancouver, BC & Atlanta, GA

Clients

Why Drupal? •  Thousands of modules and a large developer community •  Lightweight webserver footprint •  Highly scalable and expandable •  Cloud hosting ready •  Enterprise hosting and support from Acquia •  Supports Multi-site and Multilingual deployments •  Ease of use for non-technical users •  Great in-context editing capabilities •  Extremely Secure

Why Drupal?

Why Alfresco? •  Very rich document repository system with many great out of the box features ie. Versioning, Document transformation •  Excellent document search and retrieval capabilities using a Lucene (or Solr) document indexer •  Complex workflow structure can support any type of organization structure •  Great records management capabilities •  Highly scalable and expandable and cloud hosting ready •  Highly Secure •  Supports open standards (CMIS, Web Services, Rest Api’s, webdav, CIFS, JSON, JSR 168, RSS, Atom, etc… •  Enterprise Support from Alfresco

Why Integrate? Integrated Solu8on (Canopy) •  Enables process AND presenta8on of content Alfresco Drupal •  Focuses on the processes around •  Focuses on the presenta8on of content content

Why They are Good Together? •  World class Open Source document repository application combined with highly scalable and popular Open Source website development tool allows for the best of both worlds •  Alfresco compliments Drupal by providing a feature rich UI for managing web assets, as well as providing full document and knowledge management for entire organizations. •  Drupal as the frontend provides Alfresco with a highly flexible presentation layer that can be used to build websites that would be difficult with Alfresco alone

Comparison: Canopy and CMIS

High Level Comparison of Canopy and CMIS •  CMIS •  Documents are maintained only in Alfresco •  Documents can be linked to a custom Drupal Content Type •  Content cannot be “pushed” to Drupal from Alfresco •  Canopy •  Documents are replicated across both Alfresco and Drupal •  Documents are mapped to existing node types within Drupal (example: blog posts, articles, etc). •  Content can be “pushed” in either direction

Integrating Alfresco and Drupal with CMIS •  Use the Drupal “CMIS” contributed module as a starting point •  Create custom Drupal Content type such as “Alfresco Document” which includes a link to a CMIS document that is stored within Alfresco repository •  Content remains in Alfresco, with links to that content stored in Drupal

Simple Alfresco/Drupal Integration using CMIS

Integrating Alfresco and Drupal with Canopy •  Canopy custom code is installed on both Alfresco and Drupal •  Adds 2 new Actions to the Alfresco repository: “Sync” and “Sync to Preview” •  Data is pushed and replicated on Drupal into existing Drupal Content Types •  Data can also be pushed and replicated from Drupal to Alfresco

Diagram of Integrating Alfresco/Drupal using Canopy

Video Presentation...

Case Study: Agency for Healthcare Research and QualityArchitecturalProof of Concept

Requirements •  AHRQ was looking to understand how to best leverage Drupal and Alfresco together in a complex Enterprise environment. •  The Drupal / Alfresco solution also needed to work with existing Enterprise technologies such as SSO, and operate across separate Cloud environments. •  Specific features, functions, and capabilities that are critical to support their business needed to work.

POC Architecture

Results •  Appnovation and Acquia delivered a fully functioning Canopy POC that demonstrated the stable and feature rich integration between Drupal and Alfresco in the context of AHRQ business. •  Canopy architecture integrated seamlessly with SSO, and operated across two separate Cloud hosting environments. •  This POC clearly demonstrated how to deliver the best value from both Drupal and Alfresco to AHRQ.

Canopy Architecture

Canopy Stack

Technical Details •  Data is passed between Alfresco and Drupal using a custom REST JSON interface •  Drupal JSON web service written as a Drupal module •  Alfresco JSON service written as webscripts •  Can setup custom sync Rules using Alfresco rules system

Canopy Services

Architectural Benefits •  Simple JSON REST API integrates easily into both Alfresco and Drupal. •  By replicating data between the 2 applications there are no weird hacks made to either applications data model or data access model. •  Because each application can talk with its own database as they were intended you get the full set of features of each application as they are meant to work. •  There are many options in terms of scaling the application, for example you can have a low end Alfresco implementation combined with a high scale large volume Drupal frontend.

Canopy Future Plans •  Plan to open source Canopy code •  Improve customization interface (some customizations are still at the code level, better to have them in a config file or separate module) •  More sophisticated authentication mechanism (currently single user integration).

WCM-5 WCM Solutions with Drupal and Alfresco

by Alfresco Software on Nov 15, 2011

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WCM-5 WCM Solutions with Drupal and Alfresco — Presentation Transcript