Integration between 4WS.Platform and Alfresco

Starting from the limits described in the previous chapter, the Rapid Application Development Environment 4WS.Platform has been extended in order to communicate with Alfresco and take advantage of all the benefits it provides and at the same time, replace those parts of the Alfresco suite which are limited or improvable. The integration between these two products is based on the web service and API layers provided by Alfresco: 4WS.Platform uses these tiers to send and receive data, metadata and documents.

Thanks to this integration, the web interface has not to be any more created using Share and consequently the costs and required skills involved with the construction of a custom user interface are dramatically reduced.

From the perpective of the document management, the main benefits coming from the Platform + Alfresco adoption are:

• reduced costs when creating the web interface to use within the organization

• the ability to mix data directly managed by the CMS with data coming from legacy systems and databases

• the chance to create a web solution not limited to the document management area only, by means of a unique tool and a unique and uniform user interface

• user authentication and authorizations can be delegated to external systems, such as an LDAP Server like Active Directory.