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Rich Client Interface (Desktop Application) for Alfresco?

turgayz

Hi,
Is there any plan/interest for a rich client interface (desktop application) for Alfresco? For example, a rich client built on Eclipse RCP.

Do you know if other ECM products (Documentum, FileNet…) have a rich client interface? If so, is it an advantage for them?

The Alfresco web client interface is very easy to use, but is there any use case you can think of, for which it would be better to have a rich client?

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Comments

ero

Hi,
One thing that would be nice would be to integrate flash (e.g. using openlaszlo) in web client interface.
Documentum has rich client interface but it seems they plan to stop it…

mfeldstein

One possibility to consider is the Open Source, Eclipse RCP-based jLibrary: http://jlibrary.sourceforge.net/. It has Apache Jackrabbit built in so it should be possible to make it work with Alfresco's JCR implementation. Anybody up for trying it out?

paulhh

Hi

We are looking at a number of AJAX technologies - when we find something that is stable enough; open source; fits in with JSF - then we'll start to use it within the web client.

Cheers
Paul.

mfeldstein

One of the aspects that interests us is further enhancement of offline capabilities. WebDAV/CIFS are both great, but we'd like to see synchronization/replication of entire directories for offline editing purposes. That's why an Eclipse-based solution appeals.

turgayz

One possibility to consider is the Open Source, Eclipse RCP-based jLibrary: http://jlibrary.sourceforge.net/. It has Apache Jackrabbit built in so it should be possible to make it work with Alfresco's JCR implementation. Anybody up for trying it out?

I think that jLibrary's purpose is different. It is a content repository itself, so I am not sure if it would be an easy task to use jLibrary to access an Alfresco repository.
A project can be opened in the forge for developing an Eclipse RCP solution or maybe an Eclipse plugin to access an Alfresco repository. I don't have the time right now, but I can work on this later. My initial idea was that a RCP client would be much more easy and faster to use, but I think that this could lead to some more interesting possibilities like "offline editing" you mentioned.

mfeldstein

I just had a brief email exchange with the author of jLibrary. He believes that it wouldn't be too hard to connect jLibrary with Alfresco. (In fact, he has experimented with connecting it to Magnolia, another JCR-compliant Open Source CMS.) The 1.0 release, which should be out within two weeks, has an RMI connector that he believes would make the task easier.

paulhh

Hi

Perhaps it goes without saying it, but you can use Window's Briefcase and Synchronization features in conjunction with the CIFS interface of Alfresco to get offline content (complete folder structures, if needed).

Cheers
Paul.

mfeldstein

Briefcase works as long as you only care about Windows. Also, a rich client repository solution like jForum would allow for offline editing of the metadata as well as the content itself. If I recall correctly, you currently have to go online to do that in Alfresco.

unknown-user

Personally I would be more interested in a lightweight single user version of alfresco with everything in it where we can:
- checkout a complete folder (e.g. a customer claim file) and work on it offline
- have a synchronization of all webapp functionality (suppose we develop new pages to show xml documents
- have an auto-update mechanism of the "offline" version of alfresco

Developing a rich client application in addition to the online version is not of interest to us, unless the online version also uses the rich client application (which still needs an update mechanism.

No, give me a small tomcat/hsqlsdb based installation of alfresco with the above sync mechanisms

Ronald

mfeldstein

A single-user, offline version of Alfresco with sync capabilities would work too. I don't see why it's an either/or solution. An existing client that is integrated with Jackrabbit and supports RMI strikes me as low-hanging fruit, but maybe it wouldn't be too difficult to get Alfresco running on a desktop (or even a USB key drive).

unknown-user

hmmm… complete on a usb stick… nice idea. You come into the office, do not have to boot up your laptop to synchronize, grab a usb stick from the rack, go out, to customers all day, manipulate documents there, come back into the office and stick the usb stick back into the rack. Everything is syncd then, including the application itself.

hmm… this would be great for insurance companies with their assessors.

Ronald

mfeldstein

I have JBoss and MySQL running on a key drive right now. I wouldn't exactly call the performance "snappy", but it works well enough.

Now. If you added to your Alfresco key drive the ability to provision it with software updates remotely, you'd really have something.

grantcc

A rich-client that can function offline and allows delayed synchronization with the content management system would be a huge leg-up in making Alfresco the ECM solution.

The ideal of always-on, speedy, & seamlessly available networks isn't quite here even with todays 3G and WiFi technology. Reception is never 100% nor is access instantaneous. Login-in often requires the cumbersome process of re-establishing a corporate VPN connection, etc.

All this adds up to a prohibitive usability barrier. People would rather resort to using unstructured/uncontrolled local storage than have to always work out of a "network drive" of an ECM. If (e.g. by using briefcase) users can access files but not seamless submit meta-data changes (e.g. versions, ownership, etc.) they will also fail to adopt the ECM. Unfortunately, network effects in ECM's are critical so high adoption rates is critical.

In my organization (an sizable professional services firm), the lack of offline availability has already been identified as the reason that Outlook is still our de facto ECM solution!

tajensen72

So I'm new in the developer community (like BRAND new

, but this is exactly the kind of project I would be interested in doing. Tell me, how would I go about moving something like this forward?

Travis