Alfresco Connector

Alfresco Indexing Connector for Azure Search, Elasticsearch, SharePoint Online/O365, SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2013

Wikipedia describes Alfresco as a free/libre enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems.

Alfresco comes in three flavors:

  • Alfresco Community Edition is free software, LGPL licensed open source and open standards. It has some important limitations in terms of scalability and availability, since the clustering feature has been removed from the community repository and is only available in the enterprise edition.
  • Alfresco Enterprise Edition is commercially & proprietary licensed open source, open standards and enterprise scale. Its design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance.
  • Alfresco Cloud Edition (Alfresco in the cloud) is the SaaS version of Alfresco.

Alfresco includes a content repository, an out-of-the-box, web-based user interface for managing and using standard portal content, a CIFS interface that provides file system compatibility on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems, Lucene and Solr indexing, and Activiti workflow. The Alfresco system is developed using Java technology.

The BA Insight Alfresco Connector is built on the BAI connector framework, which is the platform used to build all of our connectors and provides secure connectivity to enterprise systems.

Alfresco Connectors for SharePoint

The Alfresco Connector supports both full and incremental crawls. Incremental crawls extract only content which has changed since the last crawl.

Some of the attributes of the Alfresco Connector are:

  • 1

    Support of unstructured content, structured data, large documents, and attachments.

  • 2

    Very high throughput, supporting large implementations. Many Alfresco customers have millions of documents or even hundreds of millions. Just 1 million documents indexed at 1 document/second would take over 11 days for a full crawl!

  • 3

    The architecture minimizes the impact on the source system to ensure there is no impact on the performance Alfresco.

  • 4

    Adherence to Alfresco’s security schema, only surfacing the content that users are permitted to see.

  • 5

    Alfresco retains the master information and the search index is only a representation. Users work on the original document when they click on search results.

Future-proof Your Investment

As new versions of Azure Search, Elasticsearch, and SharePoint Search are released, new features and functionality are introduced, and the same is true of new releases of Alfresco.

BA Insight takes on the burden of keeping the connector up to date for both Alfresco and the respective search engines.  The upgrades are easy to do and can be done by your IT organization.  It is simply a matter of accessing the BA Insight customer portal, downloading the latest release, and installing and configuring it. If desired, our professional services team can handle the upgrades.

Drive Productivity

By connecting Alfresco to your preferred search engine, you increase adoption of your intranet, improving organizational efficiency and productivity.