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).