Keep your library "Alfresco"

I know the word "Alfresco" doesn't have any meaning for people from outside Italy but, let me explain something. When you say "alfresco" ("al fresco") in Italy means either you keep something cold in the fridge, or you put someone in jail. 

Today I don't want to do both of those things, I just want to talk about one of the most powerful and well known Open Source Document Management, ALFRESCO.

In a BIM company one of the biggest challenge is to keep updated and fully compliant the BIM family library. Every day someone is coming to my desk asking for this pump, that valve or those supports and is really hard keep track of all the families and all the requests.

Sometimes I receive a request about a family already available in the server, only because is difficult to find and search in the tons of folders.

There're couple of commercial systems able to perform this task, one of this is UNIFI (http://unifilabs.com/) and if you looking to someting cloud based, professional and completely integrated in Revit, you have to choose this!

But today I'll give you a simple solution, completely free, extremely powerful and fully customizable. Let's start from the beginning: where to find an Alfresco distribution?

Simple BITNAMI website (https://bitnami.com/). On this website you can find tons of web applications already packed into one installation file.

To find an Alfresco installation just search for it and you'll find one installation package; download and install.

After installation you'll have a fully function platform with Tomcat server, Apache Web Server, Mysql Database...cool!

Now you're ready for login and explore the platform.

Ok, I'll not go too much into details because the platform is really simple and it takes 5 minutes to understand everything. Just I want to show the two most important features of this solution.

After the login you'll find couple of menus as Administrator, just go to "Sites" to create you brand new site. Actually this site could be different things: company site if you want to manage a central library, different countries sites if you want to keep separate those libraries and so on. 

For this example I'm using a company site accessible from all the project around the world. The site is moderated that means that only selected users can access.

Once the site is ready, the second step is to start to create folders. Just go back to the home and then click on the site created.

As a result you'll jump into the "Site Dashboard" and you'll find 3 main link on the top right of the page:

• Site Dashboard (where you're now!)
• Document Library
• Site Memebers
  

Go to Document Library to start to create folders, just try to avoid spaces between words because is a Linux webserver and it doesn't like blank spaces!

Now that your folder is ready you can edit some properties like tags, yes I love this! you can assign as much tags as you need to facilitate the search.

Now is just a matter of creating sub-folders, uploading files, give to them tags and the repository is ready.

Since now nothing that you can do with most of the cloud repository that are already available (Google Drive, Dropbox, One Drive, Autodesk A360). But what if someone want a new element not available in the library? Yes of course they can send an email but is really hard to track this request and apply to this request a review workflow. Is here that Alfresco gives to you the power of a document management.

To show this functionality I'll login as a simple user. The dashboard is different from the administrator and is possible to customize the position of all the widgets.

To ask for a new family we have to create a "New task" from the menu

In the new task we can write a description, a due date, a priority, to who we're asking for this task, we can attach drawings or other reference documents (data sheets, dwg, other family models, etc.), then we can start the workflow. Just think about the power of this feature: you can assign the same task to different "families creator" or just to the BIM Manager and then he can forward this task to other people located in different part of the world. The first user who will start the job, will change the status of the task as "in progress"

Now I'm again as Administrator cause I've assigned the task to this user and you can see that I've a new task to be performed.

I can just enter the task to see the details and change the status and/or assign to other users.

Of course when the task is completed we'll close the task and our collegue will receive an email as alert that the task is completed.

I know...you love this and is just blowing your mind! Other fnctionalities for shared document and user management are just around the corner.

I'll not proceed more explaining users and group creation because is really simple and I want you to explore these areas. There're lots of other functionalities that you can add with external application or with a small investment in customization.

Remember that everything in this tutorial is part of the basic installation of Alfresco so let's go and keep you data "Alfresco"

Bye

Cesare