alfresco

By default, Alfresco uses credential cookies which are valid for only 60 minutes. This means that users may need to log in a few times during the day.

To increase the timeout, edit files /opt/alfresco-4.2.b/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/web.xml and /opt/alfresco-4.2.b/tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/web.xml:

<session-config>
   <session-timeout>1440</session-timeout><!-- 1 day -->
</session-config>

And restart Alfresco.

Increasing the value further is normally useless because the cookies sent by Alfresco (or actually Tomcat) are session cookies. These kind of cookies will be deleted when the user closes his browser.

By default, Alfresco or any other Tomcat application will run on HTTP port 8080. Because of this, users would need to go to, for example, http://alfresco:8080/share to reach the Alfresco Share website.

We can make this easier by configuring Apache proxy_ajp which will redirect port 80 to Tomcat and will make the "/share" path optional.

Install Apache and enable the necessary modules:

apt-get install apache2
a2enmod proxy_ajp rewrite

Create a virtualhost configuration file at /etc/apache2/sites-available/alfresco-reverse-proxy with the following content:

It's weird that Alfresco Share uses an OR search by default. If we want to find files related to the budget of the marketing department we would have to search for

budget AND marketing

There's an article and a bug report with information on how to change the default behavior to an AND search, but they require you to modify the Java code, which is quite complicated.

As long as this problem is not fixed in Alfresco, you may find it easier to make some JavaScript changes. Just edit file /opt/alfresco-4.2.b/tomcat/webapps/share/components/search/search.js and modifiy the _performSearch function as following:

Installing Alfresco 4.2 on Debian 6 is not so hard. Just make sure you install the necessary libraries for LibreOffice and pdf2swf, otherwise the thumbnails and previews won't work properly.

We need the packages listed at http://docs.alfresco.com/4.2/topic/com.alfresco.enterprise.doc/concepts/install-lolibfiles.html but also a few others:

apt-get install libice6 libsm6 libxt6 libxrender1 libfontconfig1
apt-get install libgif4 libjpeg62 libpng12-0 libstdc++5 libxinerama1

After that, you can simply run the binary installer:

wget http://dl.alfresco.com/release/community/build-04480/alfresco-community-4.2.b-installer-linux-x64.bin
chmod +x alfresco-community-4.2.b-installer-linux-x64.bin
./alfresco-community-4.2.b-installer-linux-x64.bin