Integrating Alfresco with Liferay 6.1

Hello Friends.  It's been a long I am posting to my blog. In my previous post Liferay Alfresco Integration , I explained how to integrate Liferay 6 (CE or EE) with Alfresco 3.3(or higher).  Both the integration methods explained in the post have their own advantages and limitations (which also I have mentioned in the post). The CMISHook was being used as a means to store Liferay's document library's low-level data.  This had two limitations: (1) It was showing up all these low lever information numbers in the CMIS Repository system which are not of any use from the user perspective and (2) If we change anything in that repository, it would screw up Liferay because things were not synchronized.


With the latest version (Liferay 6.1), Liferay has come up with some really cool features which makes it very easy to integrate Liferay with alfresco and many other CMS systems (like sharepoint, documentum etc). It eliminates all the limitations of CMIS Hook as well as it let's us mount multiple repositories to one document. 


Following are the steps to configure Liferay 6.1 (with tomcat bundle) with Alfresco 3.4d. 

1. Download Alfresco(Community or Enterprise edition) and follow the installation instructions. 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)

You can install it with an inbuilt tomcat and mysql bundle or you can install it on any existing application server and connect it to existing mysql database. I have done it with inbuilt tomcat bundle and connected to my existing mysql database. The installation wizard let's you configure all these stuff.

2. Download and install Liferay 6.1 (EE or CE). You can download it from http://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-portal/available-releases

3. Start Alfresco. 

4.  Liferay passes user credentials through CMIS to the alfresco in order to connect. To enable liferay to do so, we need to enter following property in portal-ext.properties which will allow liferay to store password in session. 

session.store.password=true 




4. Also one more thing we need to take into consideration is that: Liferay passes logged in user's credentials to CMIS Repository (alfresco here) as described in step 4. What this means is that userid/password in liferay must match userid/password in Alfresco. Alfresco by default uses a loginid (which is similar to screen-name in liferay) to authenticate user. So we need to make liferay also authenticate using screen name by making following entry into portal-ext.properties.

company.security.auth.type=screenName

5. Now we are good to move ahead. Let's start Liferay. 

6. Login as administrator and go to control panel. 

7. Click on Document and Media which will bring up a screen similar to following:

Liferay 6.1 Document Library

7. Click on Add -> New Repository as shown in following image. 

8. This will bring up following screen where you basically provide connection details to connect to Alfresco. 

9. Specify following details:

Name: Give any name you want to give to your repository view in liferay. For example, I will give Alfresco

Description: A brief description about it. 

Repository Type: You can connect either using AtomPub or using web services. For this example, I will use AtomPub. 

AtomPub URL: This will be the CMIS repository URL where you alfresco is running. In my case, it's http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/cmis (Note: In case of Alfresco 4.0, it will be http://host:port/alfresco/cmisatom) 

Repository ID: It is not required field.  It is basically used to connect to a specific repository incase we have multiple repositories available. If we do not enter a repositoryId, then it will just look for the first repository using the given parameters and set it to that.

10. Click on Save button. Liferay will try connecting to Alfresco using information we just provided in step 9 and will show success or failure message.  If it's failure, just make sure that the connectivity information we have provided in step 9 is correct. 

11. On successful connection, you will be able to see a folder view of your Alfresco in your Liferay's document and media as following. 

Now, you will be able to upload your documents from Liferay to Alfresco by simply uploading to this folder. This is synchronized completely. It means that if you upload any document from Liferay, you will be able to see the same from Alfresco's web portal. If you delete any document from alfresco's using it's web portal, it will reflect the changes in liferay's document and media section.  Isn't it cool ?

That's it for this post. Next, I'll try to connect alfresco using web services or may be share point with liferay. 

Feel free to provide any comments/suggestions/enhancements.