Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management

Chapter 17. Integrating with Other Applications

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding why applications use content management over a file system or database

• Examining options for integrating Alfresco with your application

• Investigating patterns of integrating content management into an application

• Integrating with Alfresco

The Alfresco system is both an application and a platform to build content applications or provide content capabilities to other applications. As an application, it can become a component of a much larger application or even become a framework for new applications. With Alfresco Share, you have seen how you can use and extend Share to create collaborative applications. Much of the work of creating menus, pages, and layout are already done and adding your components can become a matter of configuration.

However, just like database management systems and their use in many different types of applications for managing and manipulating data, a content management system like Alfresco can provide powerful application features for various applications and Web sites that would otherwise need to be built from scratch. Some examples of capabilities that can be added to otherwise–non-content applications include:

• Presenting relevant content and images—An application that is just data or short strings can potentially be deadly dull. You can enhance data with explanatory text or images that provide context. Data enhanced with analysis in the form of content becomes a much more useful ...