Liferay Alfresco Integration

With the time, Liferay and Alfresco have matured in terms of capabilities, both the products have their own focal point in terms of offerings. Where liferay's main focus is collaboration features, Alfresco is better in document management and record management.  With this said, there are many scenarios where need rises to integrate both the systems in order to provide better software solutions and architectures.  

There are multiple ways we can integrate alfresco with liferay. I will explain two of them which I have used along with benefits/drawbacks which I know. 

Method-1. Integrating Alfresco with Liferay using CMIS 1.0

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) - is a standard protocol which consists a set of web services for sharing information among different content management systems to provide interoperability and integration for people and applications using multiple content repositories.

Liferay 6 and Alfresco 3.3 both provides CMIS support. Here I will explain how to integrate Alfresco 3.3 (or higher) with Liferay 6 (Tomcat Bundle). 

1. Download Alfresco(Community or Enterprise edition) share.war and alfresco.war (version 3.3 or higher). You can download it from following URLs.

Community Edition: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Community_Edition

Enterprise Edition: http://www.alfresco.com/try/    (30-Days trial version)

2. Download and install Liferay 6 (EE or CE). ou can download it from http://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-portal/available-releases

3. Copy alfresco.war and share.war from $ALFRESCO_HOME/tomcat/webapps to  $LIFERAY_HOME/tomcat/webapps.

4. Create a database alfresco in MySQL. (Assuming you are using MySQL database)

drop database if exists alfresco;

create database alfresco character set utf8;

grant all on alfresco.* to 'alfresco'@'localhost' identified by 'alfresco' with grant option;

grant all on alfresco.* to 'alfresco'@'localhost.localdomain' identified by 'alfresco' with grant option;

5. Create a database lportal in MySQL. (Assuming you are using MySQL database)

drop database if exists lportal;

create database lportal character set utf8;

grant all on lportal.* to 'lportal'@'localhost' identified by 'lportal' with grant option;

grant all on lportal.* to 'lportal'@'localhost.localdomain' identified by 'lportal' with grant option;

6. Create a file named portal-ext.properties at $LIFERAY_HOME/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes and add following lines in portal-ext.properties.

dl.hook.impl=com.liferay.documentlibrary.util.CMISHook

cmis.credentials.username=admin

cmis.credentials.password=admin

cmis.repository.url=http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/cmis (NOTE: This URL will be the URL where you alfresco is running. Change the value accordingly)

cmis.repository.version=1.0

cmis.system.root.dir=Liferay Home

7. Add Database entry in portal-ext.properties (Assuming you are using MySQL database)

             ## MySQL
             jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
             jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF- 

            8&useFastDateParsing=false (Change according to your DB settings)
            jdbc.default.username=lportal (Change according to your DB settings)
            jdbc.default.password=lportal (Change according to your DB settings)

8. That's it. Start Liferay and you are through. Whatever documents you create from Liferay Document Library will directly get stored into Alfresco. 

Advantages:

This integration method enables us to run both liferay and alfresco independently from each other and still have a nice level of integration for document management.  

Disadvantages:

a. When any document is created/uploaded in liferay document library it stores document meta-data in liferay data store and actual document in Alfresco. 

So if you store any document directly from Alfresco, it doesn't get reflected in Liferay document library. 

b. Alfresco maps the document hierarchy with it's own numeric notations: For example, if a document named MyInfo.pdf is stored under Document Library -> My Docs -> Personal Info -> MyInfo.pdf in liferay, alfresco maps it similar to following: 

Liferay Home -> 10232(this is liferay instance id) -> 10280 (this is liferay folder id) - > 1 (numerically named folder created for each document uploaded from Liferay) ->1 (Actual document named as 1)

This mapping notation makes it very difficult to track the documents directly from Alfresco.  Also since the meta-data information is stored in liferay, when we try to open document directly from alfresco, it fails. 

c. When we delete any document from liferay, it only deletes the meta-data information. The actual document remains stored in alfresco. 

Method-2. Integrating Alfresco Web Client as portlet in Liferay

This method deploys alfersco.war (web client) as portlet in liferay.  Following are the stes to achieve this:

1. Download Alfresco(Community or Enterprise edition)  alfresco.war (version 3.3 or higher). You can download it from following URLs.

Community Edition: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Community_Edition

Enterprise Edition: http://www.alfresco.com/try/    (30-Days trial version)

2. Download and install Liferay 6 (EE or CE). ou can download it from http://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-portal/available-releases

3. Extract(Unzip) alfresco.war to any directory of your choice.

4. Update dir.root in $ALFRESCO_HOME/ WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/repository.propertes.

      

     dir.root=../../alf_data

5. Create a database alfresco in MySQL. (Assuming you are using MySQL database)

drop database if exists alfresco;

create database alfresco character set utf8;

grant all on alfresco.* to 'alfresco'@'localhost' identified by 'alfresco' with grant option;

grant all on alfresco.* to 'alfresco'@'localhost.localdomain' identified by 'alfresco' with grant option;

6. Remove the file from WEB-INF/lib/portlet-api-lib.jar 

7.  Add /WEB-INF/faces-config.xml to the faces config files list at $ALFRESCO_HOME/WEB-INF/web.xml like

     <context-param>

      <param-name>javax.faces.CONFIG_FILES</param-name>

      <param-value>/WEB-INF/faces-config.xml,/WEB-INF/faces-config-app.xml,/WEB-INF/faces-config-beans.xml,/WEB-INF/faces-config-navigation.xml,/WEB-INF/faces-config-common.xml,/WEB-INF/faces-config-repo.xml,/WEB-INF/faces-config-wcm.xml,/WEB-INF/faces-config-custom.xml</param-value>

</context-param>

8. Download and add files: faces-config.xml, liferay-display.xml, liferay-portlet.xml, portlet.xml to WEB-INF. You can

      download these files from http://liferay.cignex.com/palm_tree/0387/sso/liferay/alfresco-portlet/

9. Package all files as a WAR: alfresco.war and copy it to $LIFERAY_HOME/deploy folder.

10. Start Liferay and you are through. All the alfresco portlets will be available under Alfresco category from the Add dropdown menu. 

Advantages:

This method lets you run alfresco web client directly as portlet under liferay and removes complexity of maintaining two separate systems.   

Disadvantages:

We have to manually edit the source files of alfresco.war. 

Feel free to provide any comments/suggestions/enhancements.