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Share vs Explorer

bcoulson

All

So I have been evaluating Alfresco for about a month and am beginning to get my head around it and how to configure/customize/extend it. However, the one piece that I am really struggling with is the difference between Alfresco Share and Alfresco Explorer. Why is there a distinction between these two web applications? When is it appropriate to add content to the Explorer and when is it appropriate to use Share? We are looking to replace an existing content management and workflow system with Alfresco and as such, will be doing quite a lot of heavy customization. We have a complex workflow model for creating, reviewing, editing and disseminating documents.

Any insight as to the difference between these two interfaces would be invaluable.

I am using Community Edition 3.4c
Regards
Brenda

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Comments

mrogers

They are two different user interfaces for the alfresco repository so its probably unhelpful to think about "adding content to "Explorer".

The main difference is technology stack and the fact that share is a remote interface whereas Explorer is embedded into the alfresco war.

If you are starting out with a new project I'd suggest you look at Share first.

bcoulson

Thank you for your quick reply. I am still slightly confused then. So, if I shouldn't think about adding content to the Alfresco respository through Explorer, what is the purpose of Explorer? Also - I do not entirely understand what you mean by Share is a remote interface whereas Explorer is embedded in Alfresco war. Are you referring to the fact that Share has the ability to access documents in the repository via SharePoint protocol? Thank you again for your help in clarifying this. It definitely seems as if Share is more geared towards the end-user whereas Explorer is geared towards and administrator.

mikeh

The piece of background information you might be missing is that Explorer existed from Day One of Alfresco. Share is a more recent addition (introduced in v3.0).

Thanks,
Mike

mrogers

What I mean by "Share is a remote interface" is that you can have one or more instances of Share talking to an alfresco repository, you may want to do that for performance or management reasons. With Explorer the user interface is embedded within the alfresco application so you can't don't have that option.

You are getting confused between the difference between a user interface and the repository. You can use whatever user interface you want including rolling your own. Alfresco Share is one user interface, Alfresco Explorer is another user interface and there are other third party interfaces like Fred and Flex.

In addition and you have already mentioned accessing alfresco via SPP so you can also access alfresco from MS Office.

excitedbynoise

I've just started to get into Alfresco and CMS in general and I am asking myself similar questions. I'm trying to discover more about how to best utilize the platform and how to best utilize it for my company. We don't have the budget for developing custom solutions and we need out of the box functionality. We are a small company and we are utilizing alot of community software. However, we look for platforms that have the potential to grow if we grow.

Alfresco Share utilizes the repository, but it seems to be it's own product in many regards and focused around collaboration. It peaked my interest because it was easy to access through Liferay via the DocLib portlet. We had been using Liferay in limited capacity for collaboration, but it's built in document library worked poorly in my opinion. I wanted to leverage Alfresco share's document library, but utilize Liferay for everything else.

Traditionally we were trying to use the Liferay document library for all purposes. Document collaboration, document libraries, records management, etc. It seems with the addition of Share, Alfresco has given options to the users on how utilize the repository. This is where my question comes in: Which UI is best suited to handle the different CMS needs? I basically have two needs: storing financial, HR, and company documentation and also providing collaborative areas for projects, proposals, and business development.

I know the answer isn't probably straight forward. I'm trying to research CMS and Alfresco some more just wrap my head around how to best utilize it. Right now we have windows shares and I want to establish a content management system for our company to grow on.

mrogers

The answer will be dependent upon your needs so there's no easy answer I can give.

And Liferay + Alfresco is another good combination.

But perhaps the easiest first step is just to replace your "windows shares" with alfresco.

janvg

The confusion came with the introduction of the concept of sites, which where not part of the normal repository structure (which at first was not accessible in Share at all)

Sites also had a weird and different use of roles/groups and users. Enabling a site results in the creation of specific site groups. When you work with a Active Directory/LDAP bases usermanagement, you loose control.

In my opinion Share would have been much more usable if 'Alfresco Spaces' could be upgraded to sites, keeping them in the logical repository structure and respecting the heritage of the companies ACL

For us sites are very difficult to manage, which means we don't use them, which means we can not use the Share features (like lists, wiki, …) This is a pitty !

bcoulson

Thank you for clarification on the difference between Share and Explorer in terms of Share being a remote interface. I was not aware that you could have multiple instances of Share running against the same repository. I did think they were both just two separate user interfaces. So, just to be perfectly clear, I can basically take the Share webapp and deploy it in another application server and have it point back to my Alfresco repository. However, I can NOT do this with Alfresco Explorer. Correct?

mrogers

Yes correct.

hds

Hello, I'm currently investigating the use of Alfresco as a system for handling documents and this share and explorer was causing me some confusion as well. What I am after is mostly just a way to keep track of documents (office mostly) and to have automatic versioning, hopefully some automated rules as well to make PDFs automatically when uploading/approving a new version and such. I gather the explorer interface is more suitable for this than the share interface?

joepittsburg

Most of my friends are using Alfresco in their system and they want me to use it also because its really handy and useful. I said to them as of now I'm researching more on Alfresco to combine with mine. Thanks for the post.

glangue

Hello,
We use Alfresco since few years now, but we just update the version 4.2.3.
We make all possible to use only Share since we know on the version 5.0 Explorer is not existing anymore.
My post concerne the version 4.2. We noticed that many options are NOT available anymore, as the possibiliy to make a link on a document ! Or to get the URL from the version "pre-version" (the latest version -also current version- get a URL who will be used as versioned when a new version is registered, and we chose to use this URL for our document in place of the current version, to be sure the right URL won't change when a new version is uploaded.
We also DON'T WANT the versioning activated, but in Share it comes automaticly by default, and impossible to changed it !

So we follow using Explorer…

As senior engineer, do you know if those kind of options could be available again ?
Or maybe someone could help us with those 3 problems ?

Thanks for the help.
Kind regards.

Alfresco_no-version-available.jpg

Alfresco_Pre-version.jpg

tulfoer8888

Thanks for this post. Im using Alfresco right now and the above comments are very helpful

paolochen5015

I actually started using Alfresco Community Edition since its a free version now, we are using the Alfresco Cloud Edition, just saying.