Creating a blueprint for your application
Now that the configuration is done, the next step is to create the blueprint for your application. The blueprint is nothing but creating a skeleton application on Alfresco without the actual content. This includes the security framework, folder structure within Alfresco repository, categories for taxonomy, workflow, and business rules.
Enterprise intranet as a theme
Build intranet for your enterprise, where each department has its own space, document management and security, and business rules. All departments collaborate to create effective enterprise knowledge management portal.
This example solution is extended in all the chapters. Hence reading the chapters in the same sequence would help you to understand the features of Alfresco in a systematic manner. While reading each chapter, you will get the concepts of Alfresco, and at the same time you will be developing the solution. Though the extended sample is related to enterprise intranet, it is created in such a way that you would learn all the features of Alfresco.
Let us name your enterprise as Have Fun Corporation, which has the following groups of people:
- Administrator: Manages membership, groups, categories, security, business rules, workflow, and templates
- Executive: Has highest authority on the content and manages approvals
- HR: Manages corporate policy documents
- Corporate communications: Manages external PR, internal news releases, and syndication
- Marketing: Manages website, company brochures, marketing campaign projects, and digital assets
- Sales: Manages presentations, contracts, documents, and reports
- Finance: Manages account documents, scanned invoices and checks, and notifications
- Engineering: Collaborates on engineering projects, workflow, XML documents, and presentation templates
Features you are going to implement
These are the high-level features you are going to implement as a part of solution:
- Security and access control: Give decentralized control to each department to manage their own content and yet share with others.
- Document Management: Including version control, check-in and check-out, categorization, notifications, bulk upload, advanced search, and other features. Every group will use these features.
- Space templates: For engineering projects and marketing projects. Each engineering project will follow a standard structure, workflow, and security rules. Similarly each marketing project will follow specific workflow, transformation, and publishing rules.
- Content transformations: For marketing and sales material.
- Imaging solution: The finance group will use this feature to handle scanned invoices and checks.
- Presentation templates including dashboard views: The corporate communications group will use this to display news and latest PR files, the finance group will use this to have thumbnail views of scanned checks, and the engineering group will use this to display XML documents.
- Automated business rules: Each group uses it in a specific manner. For example, the HR group might send an e-mail notification to a specific group when a document is updated, the sales group will automatically convert a PPT to Flash, the finance group will trigger an approval process whenever a scanned check gets into the system, and so on.