Formtek to Deliver Engineering Data Management Webinar

Formtek to Deliver Engineering Data Management Webinar On February 3, 2011, Formtek's Chief Technology Officer, Dick Weisinger, will present a webinar, sponsored by Alfresco, entitled: Engineering Data Management Module for Alfresco. The Formtek Engineering Data Management (EDM) Module is a pre-packaged extension to the Alfresco data repository and Share application that is designed to improve the management, accessibility and search capability of engineering data. The EDM Module provides pre-configured content models specific to the needs of engineering organizations for the management of drawings and documents within the Alfresco repository. Within Alfresco Share, the EDM Module provides packaged view, edit and advanced search forms that enable engineering metadata to be displayed, edited and efficiently searched. The EDM Module also supports popular AutoCAD® file formats, including DWG, DXF and DWF. Thumbnails and Flash (SWF) previews of AutoCAD files are automatically generated for display and use within the Share Document Library. To register for this event, visit Alfresco's registration page. For additional information about Formtek's Engineering Data Management offerings, download the product data sheet or contact: sales@formtek.com.

About Formtek: For over two decades, Formtek has been providing mission-critical Enterprise Document and Content Management solutions and services to some of the most demanding industrial operations in the world. Our capabilities and experience, particularly in the areas of engineering drawing management, technical document management, and secure collaboration, have helped both small organizations as well as large global enterprises manage their most important information assets. Formtek solutions address real, day-to-day document management, content management, and records management requirements for worldwide customers in manufacturing, aerospace, defense, telecommunication, utility, and government.

JBPM Workflow in Alfresco Share 3.4a community release

There's some interesting improvements available for Workflow in the Alfresco 3.4a Share community release.  Alfresco community downloads are available here.  


Gavin Cornwell from Alfresco has updated the Alfresco wiki with information about 3.4 Share workflow.

Starting a Workflow in Share
Workflows can be started by clicking on the "Start Workflow" action links from either the document details page, from the actions along the right on an item row in the list of Document Library items, or from the select items menu which applies to all items selected in the Document Library page.



After clicking on that, the start-workflow page comes up.  It's a little bit sparse.  The main element is a button that lets you choose which workflow to assign from a popup list of all available Workflows that can be initiated.

The available workflows are those that have been registered with the JBPM engine.  The Alfresco wiki outlines the steps for adding a new custom workflow.  Once added, the new workflow automatically becomes available in this dropdown.  Prior to release 3.4 in Share, the workflow items that could be assigned in Share were hardcoded.


In the screenshot above we can see the new "Custom Lifecycle Review" workflow added using the code from the Alfresco wiki.

As an aside: The server-side Javascript file tomcat\webapps\share\WEB-INF\classes\site-webscripts\org\alfresco\components\workflow\workflow.lib.js that contains the code used on this page to query out the available workflows (getWorkflowDefinitions).


The list of scripts displayed are determined for the dropdown menu from the webscript:
http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow-definitions
Workflows can be filtered out from this list, for example, if you don't want to see WCM workflows.  These workflows are identified by the tag <hidden-workflows> in the tomcat\webapps\share\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\share-config.xml file, and also in the wcmquickstart-share-config.xml file in that same directory.

Form for Starting and Assigning a Workflow


After you select one of the workflows in the list, the form to enter the parameters that define the workflow is displayed.  I didn't expect to see too much when I selected the new Custom Lifecycle workflow since I had not defined a form for it, but it wasn't too bad.  The layout wasn't great, but everything seemed to work OK, and assigning the workflow worked too.

We can customize the look of this form easily.  For example, by adding the following code to the tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\web-extensions\share-config-custom.xml file, the layout can be changed.  (The file tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\web-extension\share-config-custom.xml defined where form definitions and overrides can be placed.)

The important thing here is to match the name of the workflow correctly in the condition for identifying the form that will be matched to it, like condition="jbpm$wfl:lifecycleapproval" in the example below.

<config condition="jbpm$wfl:lifecycleapproval" evaluator="string-compare">
      <forms>
         <form>
<field-visibility>
               <show id="bpm:workflowDescription">
               <show id="bpm:workflowDueDate">
               <show id="bpm:workflowPriority">
               <show id="bpm:assignee">
               <show id="packageItems">
            </show></show></show></show></show></field-visibility>
            <appearance>
               <set appearance="title" id="" label-id="workflow.set.general">
               <set appearance="" id="info" template="/org/alfresco/components/form/2-column-set.ftl">
               <set appearance="title" id="assignee" label-id="workflow.set.assignee">
               <set appearance="title" id="items" label-id="workflow.set.items">
               
               <field id="bpm:workflowDescription" label-id="workflow.field.message">
                  <control template="/org/alfresco/components/form/controls/textarea.ftl">
                     <control-param name="style">width: 95%</control-param>
                  </control>
               </field>
               <field id="bpm:workflowDueDate" label-id="workflow.field.due" set="info">
               <field id="bpm:workflowPriority" label-id="workflow.field.priority" set="info">
                  <control template="/org/alfresco/components/form/controls/workflow/priority.ftl">
               </control></field>
               <field id="bpm:assignee" label-id="workflow.field.reviewer" set="assignee">
               <field id="packageItems" set="items">
            </field></field></field></set></set></set></set></appearance>
         </form>
</forms>
   </config>

User Task and Started Workflow Lists


The uppermost Share navigation toolbar has been redesigned.  A "More" button is available which now includes links to user areas like "My Profile", "My Sites", and "My Content".  Links to two pages that are new to the 3.4 release are also included in this dropdown list: "My Tasks" and "Workflows I've Started".  We'll talk about these two new features in just a bit.


Also included in this dropdown list are links to administrative functions like "Application" settings, "Groups", "Users", and another new-for-3.4 capability, "Replication Jobs".  These are grouped together in the menu in a category called "Tools".  I think that I would prefer that these administrative tasks be broken out into their own menu, but this layout is still workable given the current set of features in Share.

The "My Tasks" page presents a nice summary of the outstanding tasks for the user.  Filters along the left let you quickly zoom in on a specific set of tasks if there are many in your list.

A similar page exists for the user to see the workflows that they've started.  Unfortunately though, once the 'Task Complete' task is done it is removed from the list.  It would be nice to be able to review the workflows that have completed.

Inbound Emails with Windows localhost

In May I wrote a brief post that showed how you can post emails to the Alfresco server for automatic capture and upload into a specified Folder.  It's a great way to upload email content into Alfresco without having to bring up the Alfresco client interface.  This is powerful feature that I really like.

A few useful scenarios come to mind with this functionality:

1. You can compose a new email with information and add attachments that you send to an Alfresco folder.  You don't need to bring up the client and navigate to the correct folder/space.
2. You receive an email containing important information or attachments and you simply forward the email to the Alfresco folder.
3. You can just add the target Alfresco folder alias as a cc and capture into Alfresco important emails messages when you send them.  This is a very simple way to capture emails and requires very little overhead time for interacting with the repository.

So I wanted to be able to easily demonstrate this functionality.  My previous post showed how you can setup inbound email on a server exposed on the internet.  In that case I had Alfresco installed on an Amazon EC2 server.  But I wanted to also be able to show this functionality working just on an isolated installation of Alfresco on my laptop.

It's easy to setup and here are some steps in the variation of what I described previously.  With these changes I set up Outlook Express on my Windows machine to be able to send inbound emails to the Alfresco server installed on the same machine.

Step 1  Enable the Alfresco email server to run on port 25.  See step 1 of the previous post.

Step 2  Add localhost.com to the Windows hosts file.
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 localhost.com

Step 3  Configure Outlook Express (or other email client)

From the Tools menu, select Accounts...

Select the option to add a new Mail account.

Add the Display Name to use and click Next.

Add the email address.  This address needs to match the email address assigned to an Alfresco user.  In this case, I plan to use this while demonstrating as user admin, so I add the email address admin@localhost.com.

Then configure the Outgoing mail SMTP server to be 127.0.0.1.

Finally, enter the user name and the password for this account (admin and admin).

And then Finish the wizard.

Step 4  Setup user admin within Alfresco Share

The email address for user admin is set to admin@localhost.com -- which matches what was entered into the Outlook Express configuration.

And the user (admin) as added to the EMAIL_CONTRIBUTORS group.

Step 5  Set up an email alias folder name within Share.

Create and/or navigate to the target email folder within share.  In this case I have a folder named MailFolder within a Share Site documentLibrary area.  Add the Aliasable (Email) aspect to the folder.  Doing that will add a new metadata field that holds the name of the folder alias.

Everything is cool up until this point.  Unfortunately the email alias name field is not exposed from the Share interface.  You'll need to bring up the Alfresco JSF explorer client and navigate to the same space that you just created (or do all of this step in the Explorer client).  There you can enter the alias name for the folder.  In this case we call it 'mailfolder'.  Note that the alias name you choose is case sensitive.

Step 6   Send a Test Email

Next to test it, we send an email to mailfolder, the alias name in Alfresco that we just set up.  If we now navigate into the target Share site folder, we can see the document that was just sent.