Getting Started With Alfresco Share

7/29/2019 Getting Started With Alfresco Share

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Enterprise 4.1.5

Getting Started with Alfresco


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Contents

Getting Started with Alfresco.................................................................................................. 3Logging in............................................................................................................................ 3Personalizing Alfresco......................................................................................................... 4

Customizing your dashboard.......................................................................................4

Updating your profile................................................................................................... 5Building a site......................................................................................................................7Creating your first collaboration site............................................................................7Customizing the site dashboard.................................................................................. 8Adding pages to a site................................................................................................ 8

Working with content........................................................................................................... 9Adding content items................................................................................................... 9Updating content..........................................................................................................9Creating site content..................................................................................................10Making content visible............................................................................................... 11

Being social....................................................................................................................... 12Scheduling events......................................................................................................12

Inviting members to your site.................................................................................... 12Engaging with content............................................................................................... 13Engaging with users.................................................................................................. 14

Sharing content externally.................................................................................................14Linking your site to the cloud.................................................................................... 15Sharing your content on the cloud............................................................................ 15Removing your content from the cloud..................................................................... 16

Do great work....................................................................................................................16


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Getting Started with Alfresco 3


For most of us, today's work environment means we spend much of our time working in teamsthat can extend beyond our workplace, and even our enterprise, to include partners, consultants,external agencies, and customers. To collaborate effectively, you need tools to facilitate

communication, share information, and run projects. Alfresco provides these tools.

This tutorial introduces you to the basic concepts of Alfresco, taking you through a scenario todemonstrate the flexibility Alfresco provides for working in a collaborative team environment.

In the tutorial you'll learn how to:

Personalize Alfresco with your own dashboard and user profile

Build a collaboration site for your team

Work with content and add it to your site

Be social! - invite users to your site, set up meetings and use social media-style features

Share content outside of your organization on the cloud

You'll also be shown other little tricks and tips to help you get more out of Alfresco.

We recommend that you go through this tutorial to familiarize yourself with the Alfresco featuresthat will help you to work and collaborate efficiently and effectively.

Logging inTo start the tutorial you need to log in to Alfresco.


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1. Enter the following on the login page:

a. Username: your username

b. Password: your password

2. Click Login.

This opens your personal Alfresco dashboard. You can now configure the dashboard sothat it shows the information most important to you.

Personalizing Alfresco

Having installed and signed into Alfresco, the first great thing you can do is to personalizeAlfresco to your own tastes and needs.

In this section you're going to update your dashboard and your profile.

Your dashboard is made up of personal dashlets - each dashlet displays summary information ondifferent parts of Alfresco, such as your latest updates, your tasks, or your Alfresco sites. There

are two different sets of dashlets available - one set for your personal Alfresco dashboard andone set that is used to customize individual sites that you set up.

As well as adding and removing dashlets you can also customize your dashboard layout.

Managing your profile means that you can create a personality that is visible to other Alfrescousers.

Customizing your dashboard

You can customize your dashboard to show the information that is most important to you.

To customize your dashboard appearance and content:

1. Click Customize Dashboard to show the Customize User Dashboard page.

2. Click Change Layout to display the available layouts.


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3. Click Select for the Three columns option.

4. Click Add Dashlets to display all the available dashlets.

5. Drag and drop My Profile and then My Calendar to Column 3.

6. Click OK.

If you look at your dashboard now you can see that it's been updated with your dashletchoices.

7. Now on the Welcome to your dashboard panel click Remove, then click Yes.

You can also resize dashlets to line them up nicely - just click on the bottom of adashlet then drag up and down to resize it.

Your dashboard is now customized exactly as you want it - this isn't fixed though, you can changethe dashboard whenever you like. You can click My Dashboard from anywhere in Alfresco to takea look at your dashboard.

This video shows the steps in the tutorial.

Updating your profile

Alfresco user profiles help you to identify a user's roles and responsibilities, or even find out who'swho in your organization by checking profile pictures.

The currently logged in user is displayed above the search field at the top of the screen. Whenyou click on the name (this tutorial is logged on as Administrator) a menu opens where you canupdate profile details, change your password, search the help, and logout.

To update your profile:

1. Click the user name and select My Profile, then click Edit Profile.


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You can also select View My Profile from the My Profile dashlet.

2. Enter all the details that you want to show in your profile, including a picture if you like,then click Save Changes.

3. Click My Dashboard and you can see the updated details in the My Profile dashlet.

4. And lastly you can add real-time customization by clicking the user menu on the toolbar,entering a message in the What are you doing? box, and clicking Share.

Click away from the user menu to close it again when you're done.

When your colleagues view your profile they'll see all the details you've entered and know exactly

what you're working on.



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Building a site

Now that you've personalized your own dashboard and profile, you're ready to set up a site.

Collaboration in Alfresco is based around the concept of creating sites that teams can sharecontent in, but an Alfresco site is more than just a place to share and manage content. You can

schedule and manage meetings and calendars, publish blogs and set up forums where you canhave team discussions, and even write content online and publish it to wiki's.

Creating your first collaboration site

The first thing that you need to do is to create a site framework.

1. Click Create Site on the My Sites dashlet or click the Sites menu at the top of the screenand select Create Site.

Whichever method you choose will open up the Create Site dialog box.

2. Now enter site details as shown below. You'll notice that the URL Name is automatically

created. Name: Marketing Content

Description: This site is for sharing and collaborating on marketing content.

Type: Collaboration Site

Visibility: Private

By setting the site visibility to Private, only users that you, the Site Manager,invite will be able to see and join the site. See the Alfresco documentation formore information on site visibility settings.


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3. Click OK and the dashboard for your new site is now shown.

Now that you've created a site, you can start to customize it, in much the same way as youdid with your personal dashboard.


Customizing the site dashboard

A site's dashboard displays all information and activities associated with the site. You cancustomize the site dashboard just the same as you did with your personal dashboard.

1. Start off by clicking Remove on the welcome panel at the top of the site dashboard, thenYes to confirm removal, though you can use the panel to get started with if you like.

2. Next, click Customize Dashboard to open the Customize Site Dashboard page.

3. Leave the current layout as it is and click Add Dashlets.

Notice how the dashlets differ to those available for your personal dashboard - the

personal dashlets help you to configure what you want to see such as activity onsites that you're a member of, whereas the site dashlets are designed to help withteam collaboration.

4. Drag the Wiki dashlet onto Column 1 and click OK.

If you want you can resize the dashlets on the site dashboard as required. You're now nearlyready to add content to your site, just one more step first to customize the site even more.


Adding pages to a site

In Alfresco you can add functionality to your site such as a discussion forum, a wiki or a blog.These are known as page components.

At the top of your site dashboard are tabs for page components, or areas, of your site. By defaultyou have Site Dashboard, Document Library, and Members. You can add additional pagecomponents as needed for a site. If you look at the Wiki dashlet that you added previously, you'llsee that it says that no page is configured. You're now going to configure a wiki for the site.

1. Click More and then Customize Site.

2. Drag the Wiki and Calendar icons down into the Current Site Page area, and click OK.

Take a look at the Alfresco documentation for more details on these pagecomponents.

Back on the site dashboard you can see that the wiki and calendar have been added to the pagecomponents at the top of the site dashboard. You now have a site set up! It's time to start addingsome content...


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Working with content

Before you begin working with content in Alfresco, you'll look at the two different concepts ofcontent there are in Alfresco.

The first is content that is actually part of Alfresco page components themselves, for example,updates to a wiki, new blog posts, or forum discussions.

The second is content items such as documents, spreadsheets, or images that are stored in thecontent library. These can be uploaded or created directly from Alfresco, but are a content itemrather than content created within a page component.

So now that you know the differences in content types, it's time to start adding content to our site.

Adding content items

First you'll look at adding content items such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and

images to a site.

You're going to add two documents that you created previously to my site.

The tutorial will use two documents named "Marketing Material One" and "MarketingMaterial Two". To help you follow this example you can also create two documents namedthe same, or if you prefer you can just use existing documents that you have.

1. Click Document Library to display the document library.

You can see that Alfresco gives you lots of options for getting content into the library. Youcan upload files, create folders, drag and drop files and even create content directly fromAlfresco.

2. You're going to drag and drop the content in - go to the location where you saved yourtwo files, select them, and drag and drop them directly to the drag and drop area on theDocument Library.

3. Click OK when the upload is done and it's as simple as that. Your documents are nowuploaded to the site library.


Updating content

Updating your content in Alfresco is really easy to do and you can even select whether to edit

online or offline.

1. In the Document Library item list, hover your cursor over "Marketing Material One".


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This highlights the item and displays the actions available for that item.

2. Click More and then select Edit Offline.

Alfresco now shows a notification that the document is locked.

3. Select the Save File option and click OK to save the document in a location from whichyou can edit it.

The document is saved to this location with (Working Copy) added to the title.

4. Now open the document from this location using you're preferred software and add in thefollowing sentence: This document is now ready for release.

5. When you've done that save and close it.

6. Back in Alfresco, hover your curser over "Marketing Material One" and click More UploadNew Version.

7. In the Update File page click the browse icon and find and select "Marketing Material One(Working Copy)".

Once selected, it displays in the Update File page.8. Leave the version on minor changes and click Upload File(s).

9. When the upload is finished click OK, and a modification update is shown on-screen.

10. Click Site Dashboard and you'll see update notifications in the dashlets.


Creating site content

Having already created the site wiki, you're now going to add some content to it to make it an

introduction on your site dashboard.

1. Click Wiki to open the Wiki page component.


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2. Click New Page and type Welcome to the marketing content collaboration siteas the title.

3. Add the following in the text area. This site is used to share marketing assets bothinternally and with our external consultants. By using this site as a unified library andmeeting place, we can collaborate and share our content, whilst keeping control overchanges, updates and versioning.

You can see that you have all the standard word processing features available to

you to create really visual content. You can keep it simple here, but in future you canformat text, add links, images and even smiley's!

4. Type collaborationin the Tags field and click Add.

You can add as many tags as you like to wiki pages - use these tags to keep controlof your content by applying appropriate tags to all your wiki pages.

5. Click Save and the page you just created is displayed. There's also the option to add morenew pages here if you want to.

6. Click Wiki Page List and you can see an overview of your page, including the tags.

From this page list you can easily find content on your wiki. For now though, click SiteDashboard so that we can go and add this wiki page as a site introduction.


Making content visible

Having set up your wiki, the next step is to show this content to users on the site dashboard.

1. Hover your curser over the Wiki dashlet and click the Configure icon.

2. When the Select Wiki Page displays click OK to select the page you just created.

When you've added more pages to the wiki you can select any of them from thismenu.

The Wiki dashlet displays the text from the selected wiki page.



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Being social

You've built a site and you've added some great content to it. The next thing you need to do it toget other users on your site, sharing and creating their own content.

In Alfresco you can schedule social events using the shared site calendar, and invite both internal

and external users to the site. You also decide how much power they have in the site, such aswhether they can just add content or they can actively edit content created by other users? Andthere's a full range of social features such as liking content and following favorite users.

Scheduling events

Having previously added a calendar to your site, you can now use it to schedule events for yourteam.

As part of the promotion for this collaboration site, I'm going to schedule a meeting to welcomenew users and discuss the purpose of the site.

1. Click Calendar to open the calendar.2. Click the Add Event icon ( ) on tomorrow's date and the Add Event page is displayed.

3. Add New Marketing Content Collaboration Site - Online Demoas the What; becauseyou're holding the meeting online you don't need to enter a Where, but you can enter adescription if you like.

4. Tomorrow's date will be pre-selected, with the time set at 12:00 till 13:00. That soundsgood to me so leave it and click OK.

You can see that the event has been created and scheduled in the calendar. And if youwant to increase visibility of the events you schedule you can always add a calendardashlet to the dashboard.

5. Click Site Dashboard and refresh your browser and you'll see the meeting in the SiteActivities dashlet.


Inviting members to your site

Now that you've created a site and added content, the next step is to invite other Alfresco usersto the site.

1. Click Invite at the top of the dashboard to open the Invite page.

You don't need to be on your site dashboard to do this - the Invite option is availablefrom everywhere in your site.


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2. In the Search for People section, type the full or partial name of a user you want to inviteand click Search.

An internal user is someone in your organization. This tutorial will add the test user,Alice Beecher, but if your Alfresco administrator has already set up users via theAdmin Console (administrators only - on the toolbar, expand the More menu andclick Users) you can add real users if you prefer.

3. Click Add to add the user to the Invite Users list.

4. Click Select Role and select Collaborator.

You can set different roles for different users; take a look at the Alfrescodocumentation for more details on user roles.

5. Click Invite.

An email invitation is sent to each person that you invited. Once they've accepted the invitationthey'll be able to start sharing content on your site.


Engaging with content

When you look at the site dashboard you can see site activity and details of content that has beenadded or edited.

1. If you aren't already on it, click Site Dashboard.

You can see on the Site Content and Site Activities dashlets details of activity on the sitesuch as adding documents and creating calendar events.

2. On the Site Content dashlet click the sorting menu - by default it shows content I'veRecently Modified.

3. Select My Favorites from the sorting menu.

You haven't marked any documents as favourites yet so the Site Content dashlet has

nothing to display. Marking items as favorites is a great way to keep track of items you'rereally interested in, so you're now going to select an item as a favorite.

4. Click the sorting menu again and select I've Recently Modified, to display the modifiedcontent.

5. Next you need to change the view - click the Detailed View icon on the Site Contentdashlet.

Once that's done you can see that the view in the dashlet changes and there are Favorite,Like and Comment options.

6. Now click the Favorite option for the Marketing Material One document.A gold star now indicates that this document is a favorite.


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7. Click Like as well to show that you approve of the document.

8. Next click Comment.

Alfresco switches to the Comments field in the document preview.

9. Type "This is great!" and click Add Comment.

Your comment is displayed under the document - you can use the comment feature tohave discussions with other users about content items.

10. Now click Site Dashboard and you can see in the Site Activities dashlet that youcommented on the document.

11. On the Site Content dashlet select My Favorites from the view menu, and now only thedocument you made a favorite is displayed.


Engaging with users

There can be many users of a system, so it's likely there will be some users whose activities willbe of more importance to you. You can choose to follow these users so that you can easily keeptrack of what they've been doing.

1. If you aren't already on it, then click Site Dashboard.

2. Click the sorting menu on the Site Activities dashlet.

By default it shows My activites, but you can see that there are other options availableincluding to only show activity from people I'm following and to show Everyone'sactivities.

To follow another user you just need to visit their profile. You can do this by clicking ontheir name in the Site Activities dashlet or by searching for them in the Members area ofthe site. You can see in the Site Members dashlet that no other users have accepted their

invitations yet, so you'll need to search for pending users.3. Click Members at the top of the site dashboard.

This opens the Members area where you can search for other site members.

4. Click Pending Invites, to display the users you've invited to join the site.

5. Click on one of the displayed names - if you used the sample user then click on AliceBeecher.

This opens up the user profile.

6. Now just click the Follow button and you are now following the user.

7. Click More at the top of the screen, then My Sites.

You'll see that the top of the page shows how many people you're following. Now just click on theMarketing Content site to go back to the site dashboard.


Sharing content externally

Having set up your site and added content to it, you can now use the Enterprise to Cloud Syncfeature to collaborate with your external partners.

In this scenario you will sync your marketing content to the cloud. Your marketing consultants willbe able to edit it without having access to your on-premise network, whilst you maintain visibilityof their edits. Once the updates are complete you will unsync the updated content from the cloud.


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The Enterprise to Cloud Sync feature is not available in Alfresco Community.

Linking your site to the cloud

You can create a link from your Enterprise site to your cloud account to enable cloud-sync.

Your administrator must have switched on the Enterprise to Cloud Sync feature.

To link your site to the cloud:

1. Open the user menu on the toolbar and click My Profile.

2. Click Cloud Sync and then Sign in to Alfresco in the Cloud.

3. Enter the email and password you use to sign in to your cloud account, then clickConnect.

If you have not set up a cloud account then click the No Account? Sign up for freeoption.

Thats it. You are now ready to share your content with your external consultants.


Sharing your content on the cloudYou can now sync your content to the cloud, so that your external consultants can make updatesto it.

To share your content on the cloud:

1. Click Document Library then hover your cursor over the Marketing Material Onedocument.

2. Click More and then Sync to Cloud.

The Sync to The Cloud page displays.


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3. Select the cloud network, site and path that you want to sync content to.

4. Click the Lock on-premise copy option, as you dont want any of your team to updatethis while the external consultants are working on it.

5. Click Sync, and a message will display informing you that the sync was created.

Now the marketing consultants can access your content from the cloud site that yousynced with, and edit it as required. Any changes they make will be replicated in theinstance of the document you access from your on-premise site.

If you want to add some edits of your own then position your cursor over the itemand click More and then View in Cloud.


Removing your content from the cloud

When your external collaborators have completed their work on your content, you can remove thecontent from the cloud.

To remove your content from the cloud:

1. In the Document Library position your cursor over the Marketing Material One document.

2. Click More and then Unsync from Cloud.

3. When you are prompted click the check box for the item and then click Remove sync.

A message will display to confirm that the sync has been removed. Now your externalconsultants no longer have access to the document.


Do great work

That brings us to the end of this set of Alfresco tutorials, and you should now be able to useAlfresco in ways that will improve how you work on a day to day basis.

In this tutorial you've learnt how to:

Customize your own Alfresco dashboard and user profile


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Create a site where your team can share content and collaborate

Work with different kinds of content and add it to your site

Invite users to your site, set up meetings, and use social media-style features

View and understand site activities

Share content on the cloud with external collaborators

This is just the beginnings of what you can achieve with Alfresco; we'd really recommend that youtake some time to look at our other learning resources and try out other features that will help youto do great work:

Read the documentation on other features

Watch the Alfresco 'How To' videos

Explore Alfresco in the cloud

Use other site components such as discussion forums, blogs, and data lists
http://docs.alfresco.com/cloud/topic/com.alfresco.cloud.doc/concepts/welcome-infocenter-cloud.html

Documents

Getting Started With Alfresco Share