This document goes over Alfresco Cloud. A cloud service from the good people at Alfresco
that gives you Alfresco share, maintained and hosted by the Alfresco company..
Alfresco just had a few updates to their Alfresco cloud
offering. So I am updating this article
to replace the old one at http://www.whiteboardcoder.com/2013/01/alfresco-cloud.html
Sign up for the service
Alfresco cloud offers a free account with 10GiB of storage
to use for life. Also files can be no
larger than 50 MiB in size (for the free version, the paid one can go up to 2
GiB per file).
You can see their pricing model at http://www.alfresco.com/products/compare/details#cloud
[4]
This is a nice place to start testing it out to see if it’s
something your business want to pay to use.
Go to http://www.alfresco.com/products/cloud
[1]
Click on Sign up for Free
Enter your email address and click Get Started. You must use
a company email, you cannot use yahoo.com email or gmail.
After entering your email, you will get an email from the
nice folks at alfresco.
Click on Activate Account, which takes you to the alfresco
site.
Enter your information and click Continue.
The site is being set up "activating"
You are automatically logged into your Alfresco Share
Dashboard.
To logout click on your name on the upper right and select
logout.
To log back in go to
And log back in.
Testing
Add Content
The alfresco cloud creates a default site for you with your
name in it. Here is my Patrick-Test
Bailey’s Home.
Click on it to open it.
Here is this a share site.
Click on the document Library.
Click on new
Call it MY_TEST and click save
Open up this folder
Drag and drop a few files from your local system to this
alfresco folder.
The upload file prompt opens to show how fast it is
uploading
I uploaded a file that was 27 MiB in size, it took over 6
minutes… a bit slow, but for free can you complain?
You can see the uploaded file. And if you give it a minute and reload the
page the icon will be replaced with an image, if Alfresco can make a thumbnail
for the file type.
Invite a new User to your site
Let’s see if we can invite someone to this alfresco cloud
share site.
Click on the Invite people icon.
Enter the invitee email, which can be from a yahoo account
and select their role.
Here is the email they will receive. Click Accept invitation
They need to now create an account
So adding a user worked just fine, but you can’t add them as
a site admin (which is probably a good thing in most cases)
Sharing
Sharing allows you to create a URL for a file that anyone
can use. In other words you can share an
image or video with the world without them needing a username/password to the
Alfresco share site.
Open a file you added
Click on Share
Click View
That works
Folder Rules
Rules can be applied to a folder to allow it to do things
like start tasks or send emails out when a document is added, updated or
deleted from a folder.
To the far right of a folder click on the + button and
select Manage Rules.
Click Create Rules
Looking at the actions it looks like you only have a subset
of the possible out of the box rules,
for example you can’t email.
Here is a screen grab from a home installation of Alfresco
Share I have.
See all the additional options that are available?
Back to what we have,
I am going to create an action that moves a file.
Select Move
Click Select
Select the Sample Files folder and click OK
Click Create.
Review the action.
Now drag and drop a new file onto the "MY_TEST"
folder
After it uploads you will see that it is not there, the
action has moved it.
Open the "Sample Files" folder and you will see
the image you just uploaded. The action
moved it here.
Create a new share site
Click On Sites, at the top and then Create Site
Give it a name and click OK
The new site is created and it immediately opens.
Customize Dashboard
Click the tool icon and then click Customize Dashboard
From here you can change the layout, move dashlets around
and add/remove dashlets.
Click Change Layout
You can now change the view from 2 coloumns to 3, 4, 1 etc…
That is if you want to.
Click cancel to close it.
Click Add Dashlets.
From here you can gran any included dashlet and drag it down
to the column you want it to show up on.
For example I am dragging the Site Content down to the 1st
column
You can add or rearange them here. When you are done click OK.
Now on the share site you will see that the "Site
Content" dashlet has been added.
Alfreso cloud has fewer dashlets options than a custom
install.
If you look at a custom Alfresco install here are the
dashlets available.
Not a killer for me, there are a few dashlets I do like to
use like Web View that would be a bit of a bummer to miss out on.
Versioning
You can version documents by hand, but there seems to be no
easy way to automate it. There is an easy
way to accomplish this with folder rules, but the aspect portion has been
removed from the cloud offering so it cannot be done. So long story short versioning has to be
done by hand.
Tasks
You can assign tasks
Click on Task in the upper left hand
Click Create Task
There are fewer types of tasks you can assign, but more than
enough to keep you happy until you really need some customization.
Also I think these two task are named in a less confusing
manner than what is available out of the box with a custom install of alfresco
This is a screen shot from Alfresco 4.2 from a custom
install. Out of the box there are too
many tasks available, that are too wordy in my opinion so good job on the cloud
version Alfresco.
External Tools
There are a few external programs that can be used to access
your alfresco cloud or your custom alfresco install. Alfresco Sync, that syncs folders from your
alfresco to you own computers folders.
Alfresco for the iphone/ipad, which lets you access your alfresco
documents via the iphone/ipad
Allfresco Sync
This does not work for the free version of the cloud. In fact I only think it works for enterprise
users at this time. L
Alfresco
iphone/ipad app
I am not going to go over the setup and use
of this program here, I will just say the iphone app works the same with the
cloud or with a custom install. Even
using the free version of the cloud.
What are the
limitations between free and paid?
What are the limitation with this free version?
Looking at their own comparison chart at http://www.alfresco.com/products/compare/details#cloud [4]
The free version is a very nice place to test and if you
have very modest needs may be enough for your small business. You can only store up to 10GiB of
information. The largest file size you
can have is 50MiB and you have no support.
The Standard version is not a bad deal, for $50 you get 5
users up to 500GiB of storage and a max file size of 2GiB and some
support. You also can add a user for
$9/mo.
Summary
In summary the free version of alfresco cloud is great! It does a lot for free and does not hamstring
you from using it effectively. If it
works well for you or your business the $50 paid for version is very attractive
and may be all you ever need for your small business.
Alfresco cloud also works well with the Alfresco iPhone
program!
Even if you require a more custom install to help handle
your business document management needs Alfresco cloud is still a good place to
get your feet wet before diving into the expense of customization.
References
[1] Alfresco Cloud
Visited 8/2013
[2] Alfresco Cloud
login
Visited 8/2013
[3] Alfresco Cloud
Comparison Chart
Visited 8/2013
[4] Alfresco in the
cloud - SaaS Content
Visited 8/2013
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