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Installation of Alfresco
(26 July 2009) - Following are notes and screenshots taken during the install of the Alfresco document management system. As always, please point out the errors, misspellings, and such.Why Alfresco?
My primary reason for using Alfresco is that it allows for in-document searching of text. I also experimented with the document management software from Epiware and KnowledgeTree. All three products basically provide a web front-end to a MySQL database, with the capability for seaching within documents. All three had some quirks in their installation. For any of the products, close attention must be paid to "pre-requisites".
I probably should add the following disclaimer: I consider all three products to be overkill as I was only wanting to be able to store and search specific documents. Each product has a number of features (many!) which I have no plan on ever using. I looked at these tools because they appeared to be the minimum that met my requirements.
My issue with Epiware is that it allowed for searching in PDFs, but not Word documents. This may have been a configuration issue but I'm not willing to spend hours troubleshooting something that should have been detected/alerted on during install. Additionally, Epiware balks at inputing large PDFs such as "Asterisk - The Future of Telephony".
KnowledgeTree's product suffers from their one-size-fits-all installation approach. The software insisted that another instance of Apache and MySQL be installed. While it did let me change the port numbers and complete the install, the practice is a massive waste of resources.
In the end, Alfresco won out, due to being able to "perform as advertised" with the least amount of tweaking during install. Even though I did have to install a JDK and I did have a path issue (see below), the installation was basically straight-forward.
Installation
To install Alfresco, download it and set its permissions so that it's excutable. Then execute the binary via sudo.
Alfresco will first ask you to select a language and then ask for confirmation.
Just to be sure, it will ask for confirmation again.
You will then be presented with a choice to perform a typical install or a custom one. The custom install basically allows you to choose what not to install. Unless you know what you're doing, use "Typical".
The install software favors use of the "/opt" directory. This is not mandatory. I dedicated an entire hard drive to the software. The following three screenshots show me changing the install directory.
Once you click "Next", Alfresco becomes very busy, installing itself in a folder called "Alfresco", in the target location selected above.
Alfresco then asks for your root password to MySQL and will let you know when it's successful.
This next step was the one stumbling block in the entire install process. I had to hunt around and guess at the location. Basically, it's searching for the location of OpenOffice's supporting binaries, not the ooffice binary itself. A quick way to find it is to search for soffice.bin. Select the directory which contains the "program" folder, not the program folder itself. The next three slides show me doing so.
The final install screen allows you to read some short info about the software.
Getting things going
At this point, you're ready to run the software. If you already have some other service listening on port 8080, you may want to edit tomcat/conf/server.xml in the Alfresco folder. There are two locations in that file where you have to change 'port="8080"' to your new port.
To start the software, cd into the Alfresco directory (wherever you installed it), and run
./alfresco.sh start
Alfresco starts two services: the document management service and the share service. To access the document management front-end, point a browser at it. For me, the URL was: http://192.168.2.175:8080/alfresco The share service is at: http://192.168.2.175:8080/share
Note:It takes a very long time for the service to start up and the browser to produce a screen. This is because Alfresco is configuring/building the backend (and is doing so on Java). Be patient, it will come up.
Note:It appears that "alfresco.sh" can be dropped into /etc/init.d/ and treated like a regular start up script. Again, it takes a bit of time for the service to start.
Note that no user is logged in yet. This is the "Guest" interface. The login "button" is on the upper-right.
Log in as "admin" with the password "admin" (be sure to change this before making the service generally available!).
From here, installation is basically done. You probably should change the admin password (better: create a admin-level user and disable the admin account) and create a regular user before attempting to add documents.
As I'm only interested in the document management part of Alfresco, I'll stop here. I was able to create a number of topic areas (Alfresco calls them "spaces") and upload various documents. My one wish would that the search function output would include excerpts of the discovered text.
There are a number of tutorials available which show how to use Alfresco as business tool (launching/coordinating sales efforts, etc.). I'll leave that to you. I am interested in the Alfresco book now though (to wife: hint! hint!).