Alfresco integration

[putt1ck]

Hi all

To really put the icing on the cake of our new architecture, integrating Zimbra and Alfresco would be perfect. The sorts of things I'm thinking about are email archiving duties being handled by Alfresco (it's supremely logical that the project/customer emails are just with the related documents and images etc.), access to Alfresco spaces from within Zimbra (additional tab? instead of documents? not sure, but it should be as locked in as dates are to the calendar, but associated with client or project names) and for nirvana, the ability to right click an email and send it to the appropriate Alfresco space.

Maybe there are other areas, who knows? Any suggestions, volunteers for collaboration, news from Zimbra that this is now on the cards for version after next, or people with code to already do it... I know there is at least one other customer of both companies out there (H&R Block people, you out there?) and almost certainly others. Got to be a great solution tie-up.

Chris

[mobydick]

Can I endorse this view and also refer to an old thread/request:

[URL="http://www.zimbra.com/forums/developers/24-crm-document-mgm-knowledge-mgm.html"]

As an enterprise architect I am looking for an integrated approach. Zimbra notes and documents is like Exchange 2007 a little half hearted. The intent is good but there are many other much better solutions out there - and they are open source. Alfresco, Sakai, Moogle all manage content as part of their functionality. All support JSR-170 and offer the possibility of realising a single, consolidated storage options. As with many others I need to manage content and perform record keeping. There are compliance and real business needs to undertake this. If I had an ability to route communications (email, IM), on a rules basis, to predefined content folders within a JSR-170 repository; then this would be a much more powerful and flexible solution than folders 'locked away' within a particular product (MS Exchange or Zimbra).

In the higher education context I would love to be able to create a framework that supported;

Zimbra
Alfresco
Moogle

leveraging off a common repository for records/content management. This would provide a significant point of differentiation.

Any opportunity to explore this with the Alfresco and other communities? We don't want to create more silos than we already have in the open source world!

[JoshuaPrismon]

It's possible to extend just about anything in the ZWC using the Zimlet interface. It isn't documented (yet), so you will have some detective work to make it happen. I suggest looking at the ZmApp Code.

Originally Posted by putt1ck

Hi all
(it's supremely logical that the project/customer emails are just with the related documents and images etc.), access to Alfresco spaces from within Zimbra (additional tab? instead of documents?

The more time goes on, the more I have come to conclusion that this really isn't the case. Documents, images, etc are forms of "pull data", that is data that is required on demand, and generally has very little common structure.

Email on the other hand is push. It's almost always very well structured.

There is a bit more of a gap there that makes it awkward sometimes to centralize all of the data that a user needs access to.

[mmorse]

Originally Posted by putt1ck

To really put the icing on the cake of our new architecture, integrating Zimbra and Alfresco would be perfect. The sorts of things I'm thinking about are email archiving duties being handled by Alfresco (it's supremely logical that the project/customer emails are just with the related documents and images etc.)

Might be interested in: Alfresco Send Zimlet in AlfrescoForge

The Alfresco Send Zimlet project is a Zimlet, which sends mails from Zimbra to the Alfresco repository. After the installation of the Zimlet, after having logged in to the Zimbra GUI, you will see a Zimlet icon representing this application. If you drag and drop the mails onto this icon, the mails will be sent to the Alfresco repository.