cmdbuild

Tutorial: Use CMDBuild webservices to connect to Alfresco

It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog. Hoping to get back to it and post more often this year!

This post is a follow-up to my old post (Connect to Alfresco from CMDBuild) and gives a short intro on using the CMDBuild web services to connect to Alfresco. The REST/SOAP endpoints provided by CMDBuild are invaluable in building additional connectors/interfaces of your own. The web services (refer here for the manual) can be used for all basic CMDBuild functions – add/update/delete cards, add/update/delete relations, and so on. CMDBuild also provides a few web services to work with card attachments (that are internally stored in Alfresco) – upload/download/delete attachments, update attachment descriptor and get attachments list.

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Installing Shark Workflow (TWS) for CMDBuild

CMDBuild is an amazing configuration/asset management tool that takes its support of the ITIL way of doing things a big step forward, by providing links to a generic workflow engine, Shark (Enhydra Shark, now called Together Workflow Server). This way, CMDBuild is able not only to manage the update of the asset inventory and their functional relations, but also to enable the definition and control of the processes for IT service management.

shark1201
A process includes an activity sequence, carried out by operators and/or computer applications, every application represents an operation that has to be carried out within the process. In keeping with their system flexibility, CMDBuild provides a generic workflow engine to model processes case-by-case, rather than implementing a series of rigid and predefined processes.

Here we take a look at how to install Enhydra Shark for CMDBuild.

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Connecting Alfresco DMS & CMDBuild

CMDBuild (http://www.cmdbuild.org/en) is a open-source configuration and management tool: It comprises a completely configurable web application to model and manage a database containing assets, and handle related workflow operations. CMDBuild can be used as an asset management system for any kind of assets, as it gives the administrator full flexibility over the asset model and inter-relationships between assets. CMDBuild also provides connectors to other open source components that can be used to extend the usability of the tool, and add features such as document management, automatic inventorying, external authentication, reports, workflows, GIS features, etc. Alfresco DMS can be connected to CMDBuild and used to store “attachments” for any assets defined and tracked within CMDBuild.  Refer to my earlier post here to see how to manually install Alfresco on your Tomcat server. Both Alfresco & CMDBuild can be installed on the same instance of Tomcat if needed. I have on my to-do list a set of posts on CMDBuild itself, and how to install/build/configure it. For this tutorial, we assume you have both CMDBuild and Alfresco DMS up and running already on your server. (more…)