Alfresco: The Swiss Army Knife at Macquarie University Chi Nguyen Digital Information Manager

Outline Background Use cases and adoption Customizations Workflows Roadmap

Macquarie University Established in 1964 New train station 20 minutes direct from Sydney CBD Located in a high technology industry corridor 4 (soon 5) faculty structure Over 10 Campuses in 4 countries 1/3 students are International 40,000 students 17 controlled entities Students 2300 Staff In 1967: 1271 students 245 staff

Information Management Challenges

Convenience Vs Compliance ing of sensitive data Portable back up drives Ease of use of “cloud” applications eg. Dropbox, Box.net, Google Drive, … Lack of resources Resistance to change Autonomous divisions, departments and administration units

Physical Archives Physical records: hard to ensure integrity, security and discovery Digitisation (where possible)

WHY ALFRESCO ? Product Maturity Large User Base & Community Extensible/Customisable Access to (Enterprise) Code Aspects and Behaviours Rules Metadata and Forms Server-side scripting Scalability Access Interfaces ( CIFS, IMAP, SMTP, Cross-browser support, CMIS….) Enterprise Licence and Support Integrated Workflow Engine

MQ: Truth

Records Management Use Cases Document Management Auditing Workflows Discovery,FOI & Subpoena Publishing User Groups Central Records/SPI Human Resources Marketing 4 Faculties PACE MGSM Committees Research Macquarie International Student Services Informatics

Adoption Statistics 2711 users assets folders

Adoption Statistics Records Management Central Records: records (covering over 7 million pages of scanned documents). Macquarie International: student records. HR: 6578 employee records (covering all active staff records). Property: All completed projects documentation for all buildings totaling files and folders. MGSM: 4013 student records Macquarie Applied Finance: 1010 student records Office of General Counsel: Complete records of all Legal Matters totaling files and folders. Document Management Informatics: files and folders Strategic Planning and Information: files and folders PACE: files and folders Global Leadership Program: files and folders Sustainability: files and folders MGSM: files and folders Students and Registrar (including Governance Services, Lifecycle team and Admissions Team): files and folders Faculty of Science: files and folders Faculty of Arts: 8904 files and folders Faculty of Human Sciences: files and folders Faculty Business and Economics: 8077 files and folders Access Macquarie: 1635 files and folders All autonomous units with different metadata, access control and accessibility requirements

Metadata Samples

Physical Archives? Access Records Management Secure long term offsite storage (minimal cost) Quick electronic retrieval (incur cost) Physical box retrievals (relatively high cost)

Customisations Unified enterprise information file plan Unique and persistent identifier “Bucket” file plan Self-managed group membership Audit log view

Unified Enterprise File Plan No Sites = No Silos

CIFS = Convenience Mac & Windows support Automatic versioning For each edit and save Pseudo.lnk file with unique ID URL

Unique and Persistent Identifier Problem: Saying this over the phone is difficult: workspace://SpacesStore/ e9ce df9-6d91571a3c64 Not persistent: document editing over CIFS & WebDAV changes the NodeRef Solution: “A Durable, Persistent Link For Every Folder and Content File” Restful API: Content / folder listing Document / Folder details Asset version retrievalhttps://truth.mq.edu.au/share/id/mqusufs/v/0.8https://truth.mq.edu.au/share/id/mqusufs/v/0.8 Module designed and developed Phillippe Dubois via Alfresco Consulting Services.

Unique and Persistent Identifier

“Bucket” File Plan Problem: How to organise and migrate hundred of thousands or more of electronic records from existing archives legacy repositories into Alfresco? How do you automate the creation of new records in the right folder? Users do not “browse” records – search is used instead Solution: “Bucket” – abstraction of a record or anything that requires “automatic” filing “Bucket” file plan consists of: “Bucket” root - root folder of the “archives” or records area “Bucket” type - folder under which records are of the same type “Bucket” leaf – the record folder itself and has a unique identifier across the whole record area.

“Bucket” File Plan Transactional – cannot rely on Lucene / Solr

Delegated Group Management Problem: Highly decentralised autonomous units with many different groups and subgroups. Group membership changes are very frequent Solution: Allow nominated person or team from each unit to manage all the groups for that unit by editing a text file System “cron” job running as admin checks for updates to the group files and make the necessary updates to those groups.

Audit Log Problem: Allow users with “Coordinator” role to be able to access the audit log of files and folders in their area. Solution: Utilise the audit framework from Alfresco and develop the necessary extractors, and Share’s module for viewing the required events log.

Audit Log

Audit Log View

Benefits of Integrated Activiti Ideal for document-centric business processes – lots of these! Single point of reference for all documents Versioning Customisable metadata, forms and controls “Codify” business processes – no ambiguity Rapid development with server-side Javascript / Rhino support Unified auth/z Audit trail of workflow tasks - who did what and when Notifications - customisable alerts to workflow participants Standard-based workflow specification - BPMN v2.0

Government Information Public Access (FOI)

GIPA Screenshots

Workflows with External Forms App, REST API & Rules

Other Workflows Postgraduate Coursework Admissions Assessment (10000 / year) International Agreements Assessment (100s / year)

Roadmap Workflows, workflows & more workflows … Automatic OCR (inc. existing non-OCR content) and automatic classifications and tagging Moving to Alfresco 5 Outlook integration MS Office & Sharepoint protocol support Reporting Analytics Solr 4 + faceted search PS: what happened to Desktop Sync? Scaling to 10 million assets – DAM support

Thank You