cimt develops prototype for application integration with Alfresco
cimt has developed a Java connector prototype for integration of SAP with Alfresco (document management). Communication to the repository is established with the CMIS standard.
Founded in 2005, open source ECM project Alfresco has reached a serious market position and is in productive use in more than 1,000 installations worldwide. This ECM system was developed in Java EE and implements numerous open standards such as the Java Content Repository (JCR), the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) or eXtensible Access Method (XAM) which is a guided initiative of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) for the transparent access to storage systems. The open source solution benefits from the use of other open source projects like Spring of SpringSource, Hibernate and JBoss jBPM.
Based on their extensive experience in Java application development and ECM solution consulting cimt has picked up this trend. Cimt made much profit from building up knowledge with products from different manufacturers (including IBM Content Manager, Easy ENTERPRISE.x) over years. Prototypes were developed in the context of student work. These prototypes were used as model for the integration of unstructured information in individually developed applications or standard ERP systems like SAP.
As first prototype we selected a case study for integration of documents inside a mail workflow. The documents were filed automatically in an ECM system and linked with the data inside of an enterprise application. Figure 1 shows the components and the protocol connections. Communication to the repository is done via CMIS, so that other ECM solutions can be connected using this standard.
Picture 1: Prototype integrating documents of inbound email
The second prototype demonstrates the integration of Alfresco as a content repository for storing SAP-generated documents. As use case we chose the storage of bills converted to PDF documents. The SAP ArchiveLink interface was implemented on connector side to provide the required functions for this use case. Additional SAP data besides the document can be acquired via configurable SAP JCO interface. In conclusion the Alfresco web client offers efficient access methods to the document archive and enhances integration with other enterprise applications without using the SAP GUI. Communication to the repository is achieved via CMIS interface which alternatively can be used for integration with other ECM solutions.
Picture 2: Storage of SAP documents in Alfresco
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