Friday, February 24, 2012

Aegif releases Alfresco checkin/checkout plugin, open source


From an intranet office user's point of view, documents stored in Alfresco usually appear as a shared drive. The user opens its files manager, and can see for instance a "W:" shared drive below their "C:" drive. Employees on a business trip or working from home can achieve the same result by clicking a link to Alfresco's WebDAV interface, which also works in the file explorer.

Alfresco provides a convenient way to checkin/checkout documents, you just drop a file on "CheckInOut" to start modifying it, or push your modifications to the repository.

Problem: It only works on Windows.
That's why I started a project to have the same level of user-friendliness on Mac and Linux.

I finished implementing the Linux one, here is a short video showing it in action:

Aegif released this plugin as Open Source.

It runs on Gnome Nautilus, the default file browser in RedHat, Ubuntu, and most other Linux distributions. Internally, it uses the CMIS protocol to check out documents.

The source code is available so don't hesitate to modify it.
Also, we must find a way to write a plugin for MacOsX's Finder, but its close source nature is making it less straightforward. Any idea/contribution is welcome!
Nicolas Raoul

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