Blogs - Ixxus

Fully Booked: Ixxus ‘Future of Publishing’ Conference a Huge Success

Natalie Guest — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 09:44:00 GMT

Last week, we ran a successful event centring around the publishing industry - the Ixxus ‘Future of Publishing’ conference. Find out all about what happened on the day here.

Publishing in Alfresco 4 with the Ixxus Alfresco MarkLogic Connector

Tom Morris — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:51:00 GMT

The Ixxus Alfresco MarkLogic Connector is the missing piece of the content publishing puzzle. One simple installation and you're ready to enjoy the benefits brought about by unifying these two powerful content stores.

Creating Alfresco Share sites with JavaScript

Martin Bergljung — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:35:00 GMT

Some companies or organisations implementing Alfresco Share solutions have more than a couple of Alfresco Share sites that they need to create and manage. In the beginning it is quite natural to create the sites manually via the Alfresco Share UI.

Alfresco and Adobe InDesign

Chris Hudson — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:08:00 GMT

Within the publishing industry there are many tools to assist in the layout and production of formatted content, but one of the most prevalent is Adobe InDesign.

Creating a Custom Publication Channel in Alfresco 4 using the Ixxus MarkLogic Connector

Chris Hudson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:35:00 GMT

In Alfresco 4.0 there is a new Content Publish action that uses an extendable framework to allow users to set up channels that content can be published to. This has been introduced to be used with Alfresco's social content solutions and they have created channels that tie into the Spring Social API's to allow users to create publishing channels that can output to different types of social media.

Getting started with setting up an Alfresco cluster

Martin Bergljung — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:20:00 GMT

In this article I will try and get you started on clustering the Alfresco application. I will setup a basic Alfresco cluster with 2 nodes and for this I will use 2 Windows laptops and an Ubuntu workstation that I have at home.

The Importance of Testing in Agile

Barnaby Golden — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:07:00 GMT

I have noted in the past that with Agile, many processes are mutually supporting. A good example of this is testing and its relationship to the development iteration.

Using Browser Push in Grails

Robin Bramley — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:44:00 GMT

Browser Push is the collective term for techniques that allow a server to send asynchronous data updates in near real time to a browser. This article provides an overview of browser push and then provides a sample of Grails usage.

Online Publishing Revenues Beginning to Beat Print

Natalie Guest — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:33:00 GMT

It seems the tide is beginning to turn in the Publishing industry – prominent US publisher, Atlantic Media, is reporting that its digital advertising revenue is now beating print advertising revenue.

Companies using Enterprise CMS technologies over 5 years old should update, says Gartner

Natalie Guest — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:00:00 GMT

Within the fast-moving worlds of business and technology, every year brings changes, and that’s exactly what makes industry analysts such as Gartner such valuable resources. So when even they are saying “this year’s different” and advising not to compare this year’s reports against last year’s, you know it’s time to sit up and take notice.

Relevancy Driven Development with Solr

Robin Bramley — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:22:00 GMT

The relevancy of search engine results is very subjective so therefore testing the relevancy of queries is also subjective.One technique that exists in the information retrieval field is the use of judgement lists; an alternative approach discussed here is to follow the Behaviour Driven Development methodology employing user story acceptance criteria – I’ve been calling this Relevancy Driven Development or RDD for short.

Using JMS in Grails

Robin Bramley — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:13:00 GMT

The Java Message Service (JMS) API is one of the cornerstones of the Java Enterprise Edition that allows applications to reliably communicate using asynchronous messages sent via a message broker. This article provides an introduction to JMS, the JMS support in the Spring Framework and then provides practical examples of usage within Grails using the JMS plugin

Document Migration Tips and Tricks

Martin Bergljung — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:58:00 GMT

In this blog entry I want to document and recommend a few ways of migrating content into Alfresco. Depending on whether you are importing content from the file system, other CMS, or from another Alfresco instance there are going to be a number of ways to go about it. The trick is to know which migration method to choose so you don’t have to do more work than necessary. When I talk about the different migration methods, I use a flowchart as a way of deciding what method to use in a particular situation. The flowchart could also be used separately to decide which migration method to use

Alfresco Node Lifecycle

Tom Morris — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:46:00 GMT

The lifecycle of your average Alfresco 'node' isn't that complicated is it? A node (perhaps a document) is created, it gets changed, hangs around for a while, and is finally deleted at some point. End of story, right? From a user perspective that's correct, but what's actually going on under the abstraction that is the 'Object Content Repository'?

Customising the Upload File(s) dialog in Alfresco Share

Martin Bergljung — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:51:00 GMT

In a recent project that I was involved in I was asked to customize the Upload File(s) dialog in Alfresco Share. This is the dialog where you can upload one or more documents into the Document Library via Flash. The dialog looks as follows (if you have not seen it before):

The Business Case for Enterprise Search and Information Access Technology

Natalie Guest — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 09:44:00 GMT

Information sources are proliferating rapidly, incorporating more and more forms of unstructured data such as emails, images and multimedia, with social and web-based content on top of that. This escalation of data and of data types can be an enormous boon to a business, diversifying information and helping them to build a richer picture of their own organisational mechanisms, internal and external communications, and customer/client behaviours. However, with these advantages come many challenges, especially when it comes to managing and controlling data

From the trenches - Troubleshooting Solr implementations

Robin Bramley — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:05:00 GMT

We were recently assisting a leading UK media publisher with a search relevancy issue. The powerful Apache Solr search service was utilised by their e-commerce package but their implementation suffered from a few common problems. On top of this were some more challenges caused by the umbrella package and, in particular, how it abstracted Solr

Configuring Alfresco for SSO with CAS and Securing Tomcat

Martin Bergljung — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:47:00 GMT

In my last Alfresco project I had to implement Single Sign On (SSO) with a CAS server (http://www.jasig.org/cas). This turned out to be a bit trickier than I initially thought. I found some resources about the subject that looked promising

The Business Case for Social Content Management

Natalie Guest — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 15:43:00 GMT

Businesses and organisations are facing increasing pressures when it comes to managing social content. With more and more of their competitors “going social”, there is a growing need for companies to engage simply in order to keep up, and to do so effectively in a way that promotes and raises awareness about their brand

Setting up a build project for Alfresco Explorer, Share, and WQS extensions

Martin Bergljung — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:03:00 GMT

Setting up a build project for Alfresco Explorer, Share, and WQS extensionsWhen I wrote my book I setup a build project that I used to build both Alfresco Explorer/Repository extensions (AMPs) and Alfresco Share extensions (JARs). Since then I have been using this build project quite a lot in several projects, making minor updates and additions to it. I have also added support for building Alfresco Web Quick Start (WQS) extensions.

The Second Wave of Unstructured Data & Ixxus Social Content Platform

Natalie Guest — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:08:00 GMT

First, a very brief overview of what unstructured data actually is – you may want to skip this bit, if you’re already familiar with the concept. ‘Unstructured data’ is basically a generic label which describes any corporate data or information that is not contained within a database; for example, textual data generated within email, Word, PowerPoint, instant messaging services, and non-textual data such as images, audio files and video files.

Navigating the social graph – Developing with the Social Content Platform

Charlie Halford — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:39:00 GMT

The Ixxus Social Content Platform enables web developers to implement an Alfresco-based content management solution that is tightly integrated with social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Options for Alfresco Storage

Paul Twelftree — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:52:00 GMT

Alfresco's muliti-tier structure allows a great deal of flexibility on system design and implementation architecture. With options (http://www.alfresco.com/services/subscription/supported-platforms/) for differing operating systems, databases and content location, the number of options can become overwhelming.

Externalising Alfresco Configuration – One Step further

Rich Hart — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:53:00 GMT

It is good practice to externalise configuration, to allow for changes to be more flexible, and remove the requirement of code changes, compile and redeploy.For example it’s not good practice to have a hard coded batch size which determines the size of batches of transfers between two Alfresco instances. Also, how often does it happen where a customer states they’d like everything to be batched in groups of x, to then, later down the line say they would now like it to be y.

There's no such thing as Social Media

Natalie Guest — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:19:00 GMT

It’s time we all accepted the inevitable: social media isn’t going to go away. It is not a fad. It is here to stay. And – bear with me here, whilst I go out on a limb – it doesn’t really, actually, exist. At least, not in any truly meaningful way.

Ixxus – Globally Agile

Steve Odart — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:51:00 GMT

I was pondering the other day how the profile of our client engagements has been changing over the past couple of years. It is now the case that probably over 50% of our projects are globally based, and yet the Ixxus team have barely batted an eyelid.

How to configure different Themes for Alfresco Share sites

Martin Bergljung — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:59:00 GMT

A client recently asked if it was possible to have an Alfresco Share theme applied to one particular site and not to the rest of the sites or user dashboards? What they wanted was basically to be able to configure a different theme per site. So for example, a training related site would use one theme (e.g. blue inspired) and a knowledge base site would use another theme (e.g. green inspired).

Surfing with CMIS

Ben Dougherty — Tue, 17 May 2011 11:31:00 GMT

Ixxus were recently commissioned by a well established firm to develop a small publicly accessible web site. The goal of the site was to increase customer numbers for their subscription service and improve public awareness of who they are and what services they provide. The site had to be lightweight, fast, SEO friendly, and produced in a relatively short period (No change there!). To develop this site the framework would need to support rapid development but also be stable enough to produce a robust web facing site.

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

Chris Hudson — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:01:00 GMT

What is CMIS?

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a specification for accessing content management systems. It is an open specification maintained by the standard body OASIS which consists of contributors from many of the main ECM suppliers including Alfresco, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft to name a few.

Alfresco Transfer Service 3.3.3 - Getting Started

Rich Hart — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:07:00 GMT

As part of a customer requirement to expose publications to multiple Alfresco repositories, along with a recent version upgrade to Alfresco 3.3.3, we decided to implement and extend the Alfresco Transfer service. Initial findings found it very easy to get going, and soon had an out of the box transfer service between two Alfresco instances configured with one class - the custom action, and a couple of spring context file changes to wire up the beans. What is particularly nice is that no configuration is required to turn on the transfer service at either the source or target end.

A searching question...

Robin Bramley — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:28:00 GMT

How can you efficiently index content without polluting or tightly coupling your business logic to a search engine API?

Crawling is one option, but it isn't necessarily that efficient nor do you have fine grained control over the fields that are stored in the search index documents. For one customer project we built an elegant asynchronous event driven indexing mechanism.

2010 – a content interoperability odyssey

Robin Bramley — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:19:00 GMT

At the start of a new year it’s always interesting to look back at the year that has just gone - arguably the most important event for content management in 2010 was the ratification of CMIS 1.0 in May. Content Management Interoperability Services is an open standard to enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems and is built on top of other proven open web standards such as Atom and OpenSearch. Alfresco has been at the forefront of CMIS and Alfresco 3.3 provided full support for CMIS 1.0 (some of the earlier versions implemented drafts of the CMIS standard).

Alfresco for Not for Profit

Paul Twelftree — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:31:00 GMT

The Not for Profit (NFP) sector faces many unique challenges in choosing and providing technical solution to their everyday, and often complex, processes. Financial pressures are often at the core of many of these hurdles but so too is external appreciation from suppliers that the NFP sector is unique - not only in its requirements but also in its approach to technology.

Monitor and Manage Alfresco via JMX

Martin Bergljung — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:24:00 GMT

The Java platform, Tomcat, and Alfresco comes with support for a technology called JMX that enables monitoring and management of application resources.

Alfresco AVM Store Behaviors and Policies

Horia Chiorean — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:32:00 GMT

Alfresco provides a powerful way of customizing content via user-defined behaviors. These behaviors allow you to create reusable pieces of code which gets executed each type a custom "actions" happens on your content. These custom actions include: creation of content, updating of content, adding aspects and more.

What is Usability

Ollie Godwin — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:12:00 GMT

The term “usability” is often applied to objects and digital user interfaces, people generally understand this to be “the ease at which a person can interact with a product” and at a high level this is fine. However, to understand how usability affects the success of a product, such as a web site, the term needs to be broken into various components

What's New to Alfresco 3.4?

Tom Morris — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:42:00 GMT

At Ixxus we've been investigating features new to Alfresco version 3.4, and have started to use them in real world situations. This release contains so many interesting features, that's hard to list them all in detail. Of particular interest to me is the alternative new approach to using Alfresco for WCM applications

The Golden Age of Open Source

Steve Odart — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:50:00 GMT

I have already seen the change happen in the world of content management. As we came out of the summer of 2009, hard on the tail of a global economic meltdown, something changed in the take up of open source ECM in the blue chip arena of business. Our projects suddenly shifted from strategic, point solutions leveraging the open source model of Alfresco to become main stream, enterprise adoptions of Alfresco as a chosen, strategic enterprise content management platform across global corporations and organisations. Not just on one or two occasions, not just in one or two sectors, but across the board.

TinyMCE Extension for Alfresco

Rich Hart — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:02:00 GMT

A recent customer requirement was identified in the Document Management side of Alfresco (as opposed to the WCM side). The requirement I refer to; was to embed content from the DM repository directly into new content being created via the WYSIWYG editor. After thinking about it for a little, I went about producing a solution that was based on the WCM version.

Principle of the Cloud

Jonathan Alemayehu — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:25:00 GMT

The cloud is historically a metaphor used to describe the internet. You will recognise the cloud from common depiction of any network diagram as the fluffy thing/the internet that the firewall or router piers out to.

Alfresco DotNetNuke Integration

Adrian Cumiskey — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:31:00 GMT

A recent client of ours had an existing portal and CMS solution based upon the Microsoft .NET DotNetNuke (DNN) open source web content management system.

Building an e-commerce platform on top of Alfresco

Steve Odart — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:38:00 GMT

More and more of our clients are seeking to expand their online presence and as such we have received a number of requests from various clients to add an ecommerce platform on top of their installed Alfresco ECM platform.

Alfresco Online Data Rooms

Rich Hart — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:41:00 GMT

Our online data room solution came about from requirements gathered from past and present customer engagements.

Running the WCM example on Tomcat 6.0.x

Mike Sciabarra — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:47:00 GMT

If you try to deploy the example for the alfresco WCM contained in the alfresco-wcm-example-3.2.0 in a Tomcat 6.0.x servlet container, you will have a number of issues. Put simply, it does not work as it is most likely because it was built for a previous version of Tomcat.

Easily Edit Content with Alfresco and the Ixxus Web Framework

Matt Dunn — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:43:00 GMT

One of the difficulties when editing content with Alfresco is locating the document within the Alfresco web interface to begin your edit. Often, content is placed into deep, complex structures that can take time to learn and navigate. This is not only frustrating for the content editor, but wastes unnecessary time.

Creating a Twitter Component with the Ixxus Web Framework

Matt Dunn — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:01:00 GMT

Creating components with the Ixxus Web Framework is easy. Here I explains the steps involved in creating a custom component and explore some ideas for additional functionality.

Adding aspects to Share

Chris Davidson — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:47:00 GMT

I was look at adding an aspect to Alfresco today. I have done that many times before but today I am using 3.2 and I want to see it in the Share interface.

Alfresco Share Customisation – The Ixxus Application

Diane Loizou — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:46:00 GMT

One requirement often asked in relation to Alfresco Share is “can we make it look a bit more like this….”

Replacing Open Text with Alfresco

Steve Odart — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:07:00 GMT

Open Text clients are migrating to Alfresco, to avoid large Annual Support and Maintenance costs.

Alfresco Records Management – certification and beyond!

Chris Davidson — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:34:00 GMT

I have been having a look at Alfresco’s new records management functionality that will be available in Alfresco v3.2. They are heading towards testing against the DoD 5015.2 (Department of Defense) specification in September. Here I look at the issues raised.