At several of our clients, we have integrated the Google Search appliance into a Portal.  In order to accomplish this integration we could take 1 of 2 approaches:

1.     Utilize GSA’s built-in ability to format the presentation logic via a XLST.

At several of our clients, we have integrated the Google Search appliance into a Portal. In order to accomplish this integration we could take 1 of 2 approaches:

1. Utilize GSA’s built-in ability to format the presentation logic via a XLST.

2. Utilize GSA’s ability to return straight XML.

Both approaches work well and can suit the needs of a portal. Option 1 though will not work if you need to sort the entire result set prior to displaying it to the users. The reasons for this is as follows:

After being involved with recent Alfresco-based enterprise portals, Iʼve begun reflecting on best practices in regards to integration with the popular open-source CMS.  This article describes some learnings on integrating Alfrescoʼs Document Management (DM) and Web Content Management (WCM) repositories with an enterprise portal.

In order to provide searching within the portal a strategy had to be defined with how to integrate Alfresco with GSA. There were two approaches considered:

1. Utilize the traditional approach and have GSA crawl Alfresco through either a webscript mechanism or via CIFS.

2. Utilize the GSA Feed based approach.

After careful review we decided upon the feed base approach for the following reasons:

1. Meta Data: In order to support the Faceted searching, we need to find a way to attach metadata to each content item. Given that our HTML code is just snippets and does not contain a header with this information and that we are indexing documents, the only way to reliably accomplish this was via the feed.

On my current project, we are using Alfresco and working on an integration with JBoss Portal. In this case we were building a component that allowed for the browsing, uploading, moving, renaming, and deleting of files. We had built all the Alfresco Web Scripts to support these operations. In order to ensure the proper auditing of the changes, we needed to implement a WebScripts component that performed impersonation of the user that was executing the action. After some Google searching, we found the following common solution to the problem:

public String impersonate(String username) {
String currentUser = AuthenticationUtil.getCurrentUserName();

It pays to use a separate web form for each web content type.

My client uses web forms in Alfresco 3.0E to create web content.  This means that when users want to create HTML (web content), they open an "authoring" form (defined ahead of time using XSD), populate its fields with the desired content, and save it.  On save, Alfresco does two things:

• saves the content item as an XML file;
• transforms the XML to HTML using an XSL rendering template (also written beforehand).

Over the past 9 months my colleagues and I have been developing an enterprise portal using JBoss Portal and Alfresco.  Currently, Alfresco does not offer out of the box content portlets so we created our own.  Working closely with Alfresco we chose to use their new WCM product for its user sandbox and workflow approval features.  This article explains some interesting findings related to performance and scalability when integrating with Alfresco web content.

I needed to rename several web content items in an Alfresco web project.  Alfresco WCM does not support renaming of content.  I needed a fairly painless way to rename these items without having to go through the exercise of creating them from scratch, filling in all the required fields in the web form, tagging the content, etc.  This is what I came up with:

Steps:

On my current project, we are using Alfresco and working on an integration with JBoss Portal. In particular, we were creating our own version of Alfresco WebForms editor that is built into their web client.