Download - WCM-5 WCM Solutions with Drupal and Alfresco
About Appnovation We specialize in the use of leading open-‐source technologies
Appnovation provides unparalleled expertise in creating
• Consumer facing and B2B websites • Corporate and gov’t intranets • Enterprise level back-end document management and workflow
processes • Mobile website optimization • Cross platform mobile applications • eLearning platforms • Ecommerce • Locations: Vancouver, BC & Atlanta, GA
Clients
Why Drupal?
• Thousands of modules and a large developer community • Lightweight webserver footprint • Highly scalable and expandable • Cloud hosting ready • Enterprise hosting and support from Acquia • Supports Multi-site and Multilingual deployments • Ease of use for non-technical users • Great in-context editing capabilities • Extremely Secure
Why Drupal?
Why Alfresco?
• Very rich document repository system with many great out of the box features ie. Versioning, Document transformation
• Excellent document search and retrieval capabilities using a Lucene (or Solr) document indexer
• Complex workflow structure can support any type of organization structure
• Great records management capabilities • Highly scalable and expandable and cloud hosting ready • Highly Secure • Supports open standards (CMIS, Web Services, Rest Api’s,
webdav, CIFS, JSON, JSR 168, RSS, Atom, etc… • Enterprise Support from Alfresco
Drupal • Focuses on the presenta8on of content
Alfresco • Focuses on the processes around content
Integrated Solu8on (Canopy) • Enables process AND presenta8on of content
Why Integrate?
Why They are Good Together?
• World class Open Source document repository application combined with highly scalable and popular Open Source website development tool allows for the best of both worlds
• Alfresco compliments Drupal by providing a feature rich UI for managing web assets, as well as providing full document and knowledge management for entire organizations.
• Drupal as the frontend provides Alfresco with a highly flexible presentation layer that can be used to build websites that would be difficult with Alfresco alone
Comparison: Canopy and CMIS
High Level Comparison of Canopy and CMIS
• CMIS • Documents are maintained only in Alfresco • Documents can be linked to a custom Drupal Content Type • Content cannot be “pushed” to Drupal from Alfresco
• Canopy • Documents are replicated across both Alfresco and Drupal • Documents are mapped to existing node types within Drupal (example:
blog posts, articles, etc). • Content can be “pushed” in either direction
Integrating Alfresco and Drupal with CMIS
• Use the Drupal “CMIS” contributed module as a starting point
• Create custom Drupal Content type such as “Alfresco Document” which includes a link to a CMIS document that is stored within Alfresco repository
• Content remains in Alfresco, with links to that content stored in Drupal
Simple Alfresco/Drupal Integration using CMIS
Integrating Alfresco and Drupal with Canopy
• Canopy custom code is installed on both Alfresco and Drupal
• Adds 2 new Actions to the Alfresco repository: “Sync” and “Sync to Preview”
• Data is pushed and replicated on Drupal into existing Drupal Content Types
• Data can also be pushed and replicated from Drupal to Alfresco
Diagram of Integrating Alfresco/Drupal using Canopy
Video Presentation...
Case Study: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Architectural Proof of Concept
Requirements
• AHRQ was looking to understand how to best leverage Drupal and Alfresco together in a complex Enterprise environment.
• The Drupal / Alfresco solution also needed to work with existing Enterprise technologies such as SSO, and operate across separate Cloud environments.
• Specific features, functions, and capabilities that are critical to support their business needed to work.
POC Architecture
Results
• Appnovation and Acquia delivered a fully functioning Canopy POC that demonstrated the stable and feature rich integration between Drupal and Alfresco in the context of AHRQ business.
• Canopy architecture integrated seamlessly with SSO, and operated across two separate Cloud hosting environments.
• This POC clearly demonstrated how to deliver the best value from both Drupal and Alfresco to AHRQ.
Canopy Architecture
Canopy Stack
Technical Details
• Data is passed between Alfresco and Drupal using a custom REST JSON interface
• Drupal JSON web service written as a Drupal module • Alfresco JSON service written as webscripts • Can setup custom sync Rules using Alfresco rules system
Canopy Services
Architectural Benefits
• Simple JSON REST API integrates easily into both Alfresco and Drupal.
• By replicating data between the 2 applications there are no weird hacks made to either application's data model or data access model.
• Because each application can talk with its own database as they were intended you get the full set of features of each application as they are meant to work.
• There are many options in terms of scaling the application, for example you can have a low end Alfresco implementation combined with a high scale large volume Drupal frontend.
Canopy Future Plans
• Plan to open source Canopy code • Improve customization interface (some customizations are still
at the code level, better to have them in a config file or separate module)
• More sophisticated authentication mechanism (currently single user integration).