Alfresco Webdav + Samba?

As we transition to the new Hyland Community, some post links may be temporarily disrupted as we finalize redirects. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Details.

huang

Hi All,

I'm totally new to Alfresco.  There are a few questions on Alfresco's samba support before I start deep into the evaluation.  If someone kind enough to shred a light, that would be greatly appreciated  .

We’re currently utilizing Samba (with LDAP backend) to serve Windows shared drives in a LAN environment.  From what I read of Alfresco so far, it looks like Alfresco can greatly help us on document management side as well as WAN share access.  The questions are:
  1. Does Alfresco work with current samba shared drives, i.e. is there a way we can maintain the current samba shared drives, expose these share drives to Alfresco, then Alfresco can understand samba access configuration and present documents correctly in the web GUI?
  2. Does Alfresco’s WebDAV server support samba shared drives?
  3. If Alfresco doesn’t work with Samba, does it work if the above two questions move from Samba to CIFS/AD? (looks to me it will, but if someone who did it get me a confirmation, I would be very happy  )

Thanks,

Wesley

gnyce

1. Does Alfresco work with current samba shared drives, i.e. is there a way we can maintain the current samba shared drives, expose these share drives to Alfresco, then Alfresco can understand samba access configuration and present documents correctly in the web GUI?

No.  Alfresco exposes its' repository via CIFS (and WebDAV and FTP).  It is _not_ a general CIFS fileserver in the sense that it does not host/expose other filesystems.

2. Does Alfresco’s WebDAV server support samba shared drives?

No.  See answer above.  You aren't quite understanding.

3. If Alfresco doesn’t work with Samba, does it work if the above two questions move from Samba to CIFS/AD? (looks to me it will, but if someone who did it get me a confirmation, I would be very happy )

Again, no.  It seems as though you are trying to use Alfresco webinterface to "show" your Samba shares.  You miss the point - Alfresco has a repository back-end that holds files as well as metadatda, and quite a bit more. 

Rather, you might want to see if 1) Alfresco could replace your Samba shares (and you can still use the LDAP backend.  Or 2), you could use Alfresco side-by-side with Samba… so some drive letters are on Samba (e.g. user home directories), but some are on Alfresco (e.g. Shared/Departmental drives).  By using Alfresco, you gain the Share web interface as well as indexing/searching and quite a bit more.