Optaros Labs

Here’s yet another great demo from my colleague Jeff Potts. This time it’s an integration of Alfresco with Kaltura, the open source video management, mashup, browser-based editing, and viewing platform. This would let you use Alfresco workflow with video assets, and then publish them to Kaltura for distribution outside the organization.

(We’re using a Kaltura CDN and player here, so the full screen icon is the four arrows pointing out toward the corners, just to the right of the volume icon).

There’s a custom view in the Alfresco web client property sheet, which embeds FlowPlayer to watch videos in Alfresco spaces, as well as “publish to Kaltura” link which pushes videos from Alfresco into Kaltura for distribution, using the Kaltura API. Once videos are published to Kaltura, the custom view is updated to use the Kaltura version rather than the FlowPlayer.

The project lives here in the Kaltura community: Alfresco – Kaltura Integration

In this screencast (see Part One here) Jeff Potts walks through some additional functionality in Alfresco Share, including:

• How new share “sites” (collaboration spaces or communities) get created
• How sites can be customized, including adding and removing dashlets from sites

As promised, Jeff also shows us some custom components which demonstrate the types of custom development capabilities possible in Share:

• Status Update, which allows for rolling status updates across the team using the site, á la Facebook status or microblogging, including the ability to aggregate across collaboration groups in an enterprise
• Shared Bookmarks, which enables the easy posting and sharing of bookmarks across a collaboration site.

Hopefully these two screencasts give you a good sense of what Alfresco Share offers and how teams can use it to collaborate across an enterprise.

We hope to do many more screencasts on a variety of topics – thanks Jeff for setting the bar high with these first two!

One of the joys of working at Optaros is the opportunity to work with colleagues like Jeff Potts, who you may know from his blog (ECM Architect) or as the author of Packt Publishing’s Alfresco Developer Guide.

I asked Jeff to add his expertise to the Labs blog by way of a demonstration of Alfresco Share, which is a social collaboration platform built on top of the Alfresco stack.

In the below screencast, Jeff walks through a quick (~12 minute) demo of the core features of Share, including:

• Site Dashboards
• Joining Sites
• Wiki
• Blog
• Document Library
• CIFS
• Calendar
• Discussions

Since the screencast is mostly live demo of a working Share site, you’ll likely need to “full screen” the video for best viewing (click the icon to the left of the volume icon which looks like a small TV).

In part two of the screencast, which I’ll post early next week, Jeff walks through the customization options Share enables, as well as some custom components Optaros has written:

• Status Update, which allows for rolling status updates across the team using the site, á la Facebook status or microblogging, including the ability to aggregate across collaboration groups in an enterprise
• Shared Bookmarks, which enables the easy posting and sharing of bookmarks across a collaboration site.