Tips and Tricks

Alfresco Maintenance message

Every once in a while you need to restart Alfresco. When you do, it would be nice if the user could be informed on why the system isn’t available.
For this purpose I have created a maintenance page to be used when you use Nginx as a front-end to Alfresco. It will detect when the backend (Alfresco tomcat instance) is not available (you get an 50x response) and instead display this page:

2014-02

Fix Alfresco Share quick search

Quick search in the Share (the little box in the top right) do not behave as most expect. When you enter multiple keywords, then Alfresco will search using OR. Which means that you get more hits with multiple keywords, not as you expect, results narrowed. So we need to get Alfresco to do AND by default between the keywords.

2012-08

Use Alfresco as a portal for web applications

Many of my customers has asked for a simple way to add existing web based applications to Alfresco, so that Alfresco is their main gateway to all applications. I have done this for them by customizing the Share Header to add menu links, and then by using an iframe. By using an iframe, you still have access to all Alfresco menus for easy navigation. Not all applications are iframe friendly, so those you can add as links that open in a separate window. And yes, putting application in an iframe is not true integration and does note make Alfresco a true portal, but for almost no cost at all it does add value.
2011-10

Disable a page in Alfresco Share

You have successfully installed Alfresco Share and now you want to expose Share on internet so that you can collaborate with external users. But you do not want them to access certain pages, like the repository page, for whatever reason you have. First thing you do is to remove the button or menu from the toolbar, having looked at the instructions found on the wiki about Share Header.
2011-06

CKEditor Plugin for Alfresco Share forms

Alfresco Share use as standard TinyMCE for inline editing of html files. I needed to customize the editor for a project, but the TinyMCE editor used has some specific Alfresco customizations. Instead trying to understand the Alfresco code, I started from scratch and used the CKEditor, ckeditor.com.
2011-05

Fixing the invite email template in Alfresco Share

In Alfresco Share you can easily invite both internal and external users to a Collaboratio site. Alfresco will create the user account with accompanying password if the user doesn’t already exist. The invite is sent as an email message to the invitees containint links to accept or reject the invite, from thereon the user can start to collaborate in information in the collaboration site.

2011-04

Google Site News dashlet with Drag and drop configuration

If you are looking for plugins to Alfresco Share, Will Abson (personal blog) has created an excellent collection of dashlets, themes and document actions available at Share Extras. To this collection I have contributed a dashlet, Google Site News, the first version created soon after the release of the initial release of Alfresco Share. It has been available as part of the Alfresco Developer Toolbox downloadable from the Alfresco web site.

2011-03

Previews of Outlook MSG files

Here is a quick tip for getting previews if you store Microsoft Outlook msg format files in Alfresco Share. By default it creates no previews, but all it takes is a little configuration, supporting transformers are already in place.

Create a file in tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension and name it msg-preview-context.xml, with content

2010-12
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