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Our team is currently looking at integrating Liferay 6.1.0 CE and Alfresco 4.0 EE and am wondering how others have integrated the two regarding web content. I have scoured the web and only find case studies or mentions of integration but missing the implementation details. Damn consulting companies and their fees :P.

These and other sources seem to only leverage Alfresco for DM. Is this the typical approach?

We're following this design, but it has caveats like building portlets that are already available in LR OOTB.

So, LR is the presentation tier for web content and to leverage portlet support. All web content is going to be managed in Alfresco as it has better workflow features. For example, in Liferay, all web content is limited to one workflow. In Alfresco, the user can select different workflows based on the content type. We are restricted to having our internal users use a single tool for managing all documents and content, otherwise buy-in will fail.

Hurdles...

We can search Alfresco content but what's the best way to map it back to LR's friendly URL? Creating a custom aspect to store this reference in Alfresco would be a maintenance nightmare.

How to leverage LR's SEO features?

CMIS integration only works for documents and there's an issue referencing images in web content (https://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/12762396).

Integrating LR and Alfresco has to be very common. How is everyone else overcoming these types of hurdles? Is there an easy way to publish content from Alfresco (not using Web Quick Start) directly to Liferay? Is everyone else just forcing their users to use both tools?

Also, our end users will be using Alfresco for internal document process (not available on the web) so that also drives the "use Alfresco for everything" approach.

Community
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Hoon
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2 Answers2

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To me it looks like you're asking multiple questions at once, but in the end it all comes down to the age old question of 'how do I integrate application X into my portal'. The only correct answer to this in a portal context is that you need to develop a portlet as that is the only good way to integrate an application into a portal (don't get me started about iframes and the iframe/proxy portlet...).

The next question of course is then are there any (good) Alfresco portlets available? Not really. So you'd really need to develop one, which opens a whole new can of worms: which technology to use to create the portlet (JSP, Struts, JSF, Vaadin, ...) and how to connect to Alfresco (web scripts, CMIS, ...).

Personally I have created some small portlets that connect to an Alfresco repository and I've used CMIS to do that, but in my case the Alfresco repository mostly is a 'dumb' repository, which isn't the case in your scenario. Which brings me to a question of my own: why do you want to use Liferay; why do you need it?

Liferay and Alfresco mostly have a common goal and so things that can be achieved in one product can usually also be done in the other - sometimes easy, sometimes a bit more difficult. So my recommendation would be that unless you really need a portal and a lot of the stuff Liferay offers (that isn't available in Alfresco or would be hard to develop for Alfresco) I'd stick with Alfresco as my collaboration platform and develop the necessary functionality in Alfresco Share for example as it does a lot of the stuff Liferay also does.

fimez
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  • First off, thanks for replying. You're right. I am asking multiple questions. I suppose that's a no-no. Liferay provides a rich integration platform built on standards but lacks a robust workflow engine. Alfresco has that, but integrations aren't the best. I'd rather build portlets using Vaadin than dashlets. I'm sorry, but I will ask what you have against the proxy portlet? :) – Hoon Aug 13 '12 at 16:26
  • The newer Liferay versions have better workflow support. By default this is done via their own in-house developed Kaleo workflow engine, but as it is only 1 possible implementation of the workflow module, it can be switched out for e.g. Activiti (the workflow engine Alfresco uses - http://www.emforge.net/web/activiti-liferay/wiki/-/wiki/Main/BPMN+2.0+for+Liferay+with+using+Activiti+Plugin). The problem I have with the proxy portlet is that you basically say: here's of piece of the portal that will show 'some' URL and I don't have any real control over it - it isn't really integrating anything. – fimez Aug 14 '12 at 10:52
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I think this presentation may be of some help to you.

Rivet Logic is a long time partner of both Alfresco and Liferay with extensive experience in both.

http://www.alfresco.com/events/webinars/ecm-and-portals-best-practices-integrating-alfresco-and-liferay

Russ Danner
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