Alfresco configuration items are completely exposed as XML files, so you can override the default out-of-the-box Alfresco configuration items by customizing individual configuration items.

<alfresco-config>
...
...
  <config evaluator="string-compare" condition="Advanced Search">
    <advanced-search>
      <custom-properties>
        <meta-data aspect="rma:filePlan"
                             property="rma:recordCategoryName" />
        <meta-data aspect="rma:filePlan"
                       property="rma:recordCategoryIdentifier" />
        <meta-data aspect="rma:record"
                               property="rma:recordIdentifier" />
        <meta-data aspect="rma:record"
                                      property="rma:orginator" />        
      </custom-properties>
    </advanced-search>
  </config>
...
...
</alfresco-config>

  <alfresco-config>
    <config evaluator="string-compare" condition="Advanced Search">
      <advanced-search>
        <custom-properties>
          <meta-data aspect= "cm:effectivity" property="cm:to" />
        </custom-properties>
      </advanced-search>
    </config>
</alfresco-config>

   <config evaluator="xx" condition="yy" replace="true">

   <config evaluator="string-compare" condition="Languages" 
      replace="true">
      <languages>
         <language locale="fr_FR">French</language>
         <language locale="de_DE">German</language>
      </languages>
   </config>

   <config evaluator="string-compare" condition="Languages">
      <languages>
         <language locale="fr_FR">French</language>
      </languages>
   </config>

If you have installed the enterprise version of Alfresco, then you have to install the enterprise license file. Otherwise by default the Alfresco enterprise software expires in 30 days after installation.

Get the .lic file from Alfresco. Copy the .lic file to the shared/classes/alfresco/extension/license folder (for example, for Tomcat it is tomcat/shared/classes/extension/license). With fresh installation you don't have the license folder, you need to create the folder. Once in place, restart the Alfresco server. Information about the license being set will be visible in the logs; also the license file is renamed with .installed. The Administration Console within Alfresco also gives details of the license status.

Administrator is the super user of the system. The administrator user ID is admin, and the password is also admin. The following are the different ways to change the default administrator password

Alfresco stores the content (binary files) and search indexes in file system. By default, on Windows platform, this location is the <tomcat_install>/alf_data folder.

You can manage the file system storage locations by editing the alfresco-global.properties file in the tomcat/shared/classes/ folder. The main property to edit is dir.root, which points to the file repository location.

If these properties are not listed in your alfresco-global.properties file, then copy these properties from the tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/repository.properties file into the tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco-global.properties file and edit accordingly.

For example:

dir.root=C:/Alfresco/alf_data

The best practice is to use an absolute path such as ./alf_data to avoid confusion.

Logfiles hold very important runtime system information. For Tomcat installation, the logfiles are located at <install_folder> itself. Tomcat application server creates a logfile per day. The current logfile is named alfresco.log and at the end of the day, the logfile will be backed up as alfresco.log.YYYY-MM-DD (for example, alfresco.log.2008-12-22).

You can configure the logfile by creating a new custom log4j.proprties file in the tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension folder and make your logger entries. Your filename should always end with the suffix –log4j, for example xxx-log4j.properties. Custom log4j file overrides the default configuration provided in the log4j.properties file in tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes.

The following is the sample logger entry in the custom log4j file.

log4j.logger.org.alfresco.util.exec.RuntimeExec=debug

You can set the level of logging as either info, debug, or error, based on the amount of information you need (for example, log4j.logger.org.alfresco.web=info). For example, the option debug will provide you very detailed information; however, it creates performance issues in high traffic installations.

While using the Alfresco Explorer, you would have noticed the Alfresco logo appearing in login page, and in web client toolbar as shown in the following screenshots. You can configure custom logos as per your branding requirements.

All the logos that appear in the web client application are kept in the logo's folder in the file system. In Tomcat installation, the logo's folder is <install_folder>\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\images\logo.

Examine some of the logos in this folder:

To customize these logos, first rename the existing logos to AlfrescoLogo32_OLD.png, AlfrescoLogo200_OLD.png, and AlfrescoFadedBG_OLD.png respectively, for backup purposes. Create three new logos with the original names with the same sizes. For example, a custom site logo with the filename as AlfrescoLogo32.png (32 x 30 pixels size).

Now your Alfresco application displays new custom logos, instead of the default old ones. In some browsers you might not be able to see the new logos due to the fact that the old logos are cached in the browser. Refresh the browser cache to view the new logos in Alfresco Explorer.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files define how to display HTML elements, in other words, the look and feel of Alfresco Explorer. The font size, font color, background color, font style, text alignment, and table structure, everything is controlled by the CSS files.

The CSS files are located in the file system <install_folder>\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\css folder. You can customize the look and feel by changing the values in the main.css file. For example, you can customize the title look and feel by editing the following block in the main.css file:

headbarTitle
  {
    color: #003366;
    font-size: 11px;
    font-weight: bold;
    margin-bottom: 5px;
  }

Directly modifying the files in Alfresco WAR folder is not a good way. As part of best practice you should deploy any changes to Alfresco using the AMP (Alfresco Module Package) file. With the use of AMP, it gets easier to revert back any changes. More details about packaging the files in AMP and deploying AMP file is provided at https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/AMP_Files.

Configuring multilanguage support

You can configure Alfresco to support various languages such as:

• Chinese
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Russian
• Spanish

The support for other languages is being developed. The beauty of a true open-source development is that most of these language packs are developed and donated by community users.

The following are the steps to configure a specific language support for your Alfresco application:

1. Download Alfresco language packs from Alfresco add-ons site, http://addons.alfresco.com/search/node/language. (Alfresco's official language translations are managed by the collaborative tool CrowdIn (http://crowdin.net/project/alfresco).)
2. Copy the required language packs to the tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/messages folder in the file system.
3. Edit the web-client-config-custom.xml file in the extensions folder and include the following XML code to configure the specific languages:

   <!-- English is the default language.  Add additional languages to
       the list in the login page -->
     <config evaluator="string-compare" condition="Languages">
       <languages>
         <language locale="de_DE">German</language>
         <language locale="es_ES">Spanish</language>
         <language locale="fr_FR">French</language>
         <language locale="it_IT">Italian</language>
         <language locale="ja_JP">Japanese</language>
       </languages>
     </config>

4. Restart Alfresco.

Alfresco web client login screen displays all the configured languages in the drop-down list. The languages appear in the login option and will be in the same order as they are defined in the configuration file. Select the language of your choice as shown in the following screenshot:

Subsystems, as the term suggests, are independent components embedded within Alfresco. Each subsystem wraps a functional module of Alfresco, for example, authentication function is designed as one of the subsystems in Alfresco. Each subsystem has its own separate Spring Application Context and configuration file, which leverage us to start, stop, or configure the subsystem without affecting the main server. Subsystem can have multiple instances of implementation.

A few main subsystems are as follows:

Each subsystem has category and type:

Default configuration of subsystem is located at <install_folder>\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\subsystem\<category>\<type>.

For example, all files for authentication subsystem with LDAP will be located at <install_folder>\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\subsystem\Authentication\ldap.

Each subsystem folder mainly has *-context.xml and *.properties configuration files. These files will be loaded by the subsystem's application context.

Subsystem works as an abstract system, it hides its implementation. In Alfresco, main server accesses the subsystem by mounting them. This is achieved with declaration of bean with the ChildApplicationContextFactory class. Instance of this class encloses the Spring Application Context of subsystems.

For example, GoogleDocs subsystem is mounted to main server using the following bean definition in the bootstrap-context.xml (<install_folder>\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco) file. The id of the bean is the category of subsystem:

<bean id="googledocs" class="org.alfresco.repo.management.subsystems.ChildApplicationContextFactory" parent="abstractPropertyBackedBean">
        <property name="autoStart">
            <value>true</value>
        </property>
    </bean>

You would have folder with name as category within subsystems <install_folder>\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\subsystem\googledocs.

Configuring the audit subsystem

Your content could be one of your most valuable assets. Based on the regulatory and compliance requirements, you might want to have a full audit trail and accountability of user activities in your content management system. Auditing subsystem helps you to achieve this in Alfresco. All user and system activities are logged and made available through the server auditing system.

Auditing system has the following main components:

• Data Producer: This component defines components which would generate data that might be used for auditing, irrespective of whether it would be stored or not.
• Audit Filter: This component filters out the data generated by Data Producer for auditing based on the filter parameters. We can configure these filters.
• Data Extractor and Generator: This component extracts the filtered data and generates it in a format required to be stored.

Let's learn how we can configure audit.

Enable audit

To enable auditing, add the following highlighted property in the alfresco-global.properties file.

audit.enabled=true

(This property enables the audit framework in Alfresco, which is by default enabled.)

audit.alfresco-access.enabled=true

This property controls the generation of the audit data, which can be viewed from Alfresco Explorer and Share. It is by default disabled.

Configure Audit Filters

Once the audit Data Producers generate the data for any event, filters are applied to either accept or reject the event. The following is a sample filter configured out of the box in the repository.properties files at <alfresco>/tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco:

audit.filter.alfresco-access.default.enabled=true
audit.filter.alfresco-access.transaction.user=~System;~null;.*

audit.filter.alfresco-access.transaction.type=cm:folder;cm:content;st:site
audit.filter.alfresco-access.transaction.path=~/sys:archivedItem;~/ver:;.*

Each filter has the list of regular expressions separated by a semicolon. As per the previous setting, events generated for any content or folder, not under path archive and version, would be recorded. List of expressions for each property is evaluated from left to right, which allows filtration of various combinations of audit data.

To override any filter, copy the respective property in alfresco-global.properties and make the changes are per your need. Sample configuration is as shown in the following line of code:

audit.filter.alfresco-access.transaction.user=.*

Here we are accepting audit data generated by any user.

View audit trail

To view the audit trail of any content from Alfresco Explorer, locate the content and use the Preview in Template button, and select the show_audit.ftl template from the drop‑down list. The following screenshot shows sample audit trail of content:

Many a times we have requirement where we need to transfer content from repository to any remote file system. Alfresco provides this facility to transfer content from Alfresco repository to any target, such as remote file system.

Perform the following steps to configure File System Transfer Receiver on external file system, where you want to transfer the content.

Once the File System Transfer Receiver is started, your remote file system can now receive the files transferred from Alfresco.

Multi-tenancy (MT) is a software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor's servers, serving multiple-client organizations (tenants). With a multitenant architecture, a software application is designed to virtually partition its data and configuration so that each client organization works with a customized virtual application instance.

Alfresco ECM can be configured as a true single-instance multi-tenant environment. The Alfresco instance is logically partitioned in such a way that it will appear to each tenant that they are accessing a completely separate instance of Alfresco.

Enabling multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy comes preconfigured in Alfresco but disabled. It gets enabled on creation of first tenant.

The default Alfresco admin user can be considered as the "super tenant". All tenants can be administered by this super tenant admin user with the Tenant Administration Console.

Log in to Alfresco Explorer (http://<servername>:<port>/alfresco) using the admin user ID and password. The URL to the tenant administration console is http://<Alfresco Explorer URL>/faces/jsp/admin/tenantadmin-console.jsp, which is http://localhost:8080/alfresco/faces/jsp/admin/tenantadmin-console.jsp, as shown in the following screenshot:

To test the multi-tenancy features, create a tenant account using Tenant Admin Console.

create funcorp.com pwmike /usr/tenantstores/funcorp

Where funcorp.com is the domain, pwmike is the tenant administrator's password, and funcorp is the name of tenant store. Now <admin@funcorp.com> will be the administrator for the tenant account funcorp.com.

There are few limitations of multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy is not supported when we use SOLR with Alfresco. CIFS, Record Management, LDAP authentication, and IMAP doesn't support multi-tenancy.

In real-time scenarios, we have large-scale system where high availability of the system becomes a must. System should be available with minimum downtime. Alfresco provides high availability with clustering. Cluster is collection of multiple instance of Alfresco, each known as node. With simple configuration we can achieve clustering of nodes. The following components of Alfresco need to be synchronized across each cluster:

Let us consider a scenario where we have two separate web applications accessing the same repository (database and content store). Each web application has its own local indexes and cache. Refer to the following diagram:

Perform the following steps to set up such clustering:

Verify the clustering by creating content on one node. It should be automatically synchronized on a second node.