Using Lotus Quickr for Portal with a Cloud Deployment of Alfresco 

Alfresco can be used as a simple Enterprise Document Management system for Quickr for Portal.
                  
There are two deployment methods for using Alfresco, on-premise and cloud.

The cloud deployment is a simple option that does not require the deployment of any additional software to work with your existing Quickr system.  As such, it represents a good low cost option for getting started with Alfresco and Quickr.

A supported cloud topology with Quickr is depicted here.  
 

 
 
With this deployment, you can use Alfresco in the following ways ,..

1. Access Alfresco using the Alfresco browser interface
2. Access Alfresco using zero footprint clients based on standard protocols such as WebDAV, IMAP or FTP   
3. Access Alfresco documents using the Lotus Quickr connectors
4. Publish Documents from Lotus Quickr to Alfresco  
5. Access Alfresco documents within a Lotus Quickr place using the Enterprise Library Viewer


Here are  Step by Step Instructions for deploying an Alfresco Amazon EC2 configuration that can be used with Lotus Quickr.   These instructions assume you already have Quickr and the Quickr Connectors installed.  They also assume you have signed-up for Amazon EC2 at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2, have read the Amazon getting started guide and have created an Amazon key-pair.  That is all free and easy to do.

1.  Go to an Amazon EC2 Console. This can be the console provided by Amazon at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home or it can be a console provided by a third party, such as Elasticfox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11626.
2.  Create a security group with the following ports enabled: 80, 6060 and 3389.   Port 80 is used for the Alfresco Web UI.    Port 6060 is used for the Quickr Connectors and for the Quickr ECM publish functions and  Port 3389 is just used to enable access to instance via the Windows Remote Desktop Connection application.  so you can later do things like change the passwords of the instance.  Note that in this example, I am using the Elasticfox plugin to create the Security Group.   note:  To simplify the setup, I am not enabling the ports you can use for the zero footprint clients such as IMAP but other ports could also similarly enabled for services like the FTP service

3.  Find the EC2 image containing Alfresco with the Quickr module. The name of this module is ami-112dc178.  You can also find the ID by just searching for the term 'quickr' or using the ami name.

4.  Using the console, start the instance.  From Elasticfox this can be done using the green launch button as illustrated.

5.  When prompted, add the security group you created in step 2 to the instance and remove the default security group, and then click Launch

6.  Once the instance has been launched you can watch the progress in the console.   At this point you need to wait until the instance is ready to use.  This usually takes about five to ten minutes.  You can check on the progress by right clicking on the instance and clicking 'Show Console Output'.   When the server is ready you will see console output that looks like this.

7.  Once you see that the server is ready you can use the Windows Remote Connection interface to connect to your server.  The instance id you provide in the connection dialog is the public DNS you see in the console.

8.  When you have connected to the WIndows 2008 server you just started, you should first login using the userid 'Administrator' and password 'alfresco' and then change your password.
9. To complete the integration, it is just necessary to modify some Alfresco configuration files so they know the location of the Quickr server, as follows ...

• modify the host name in C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\module\org.alfresco.module.quickr\context\lotus.properties to use your public Amazon DNS Host Name
• rename C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\module\org.alfresco.module.quickr\context\lotus-ws-context.xml to custom-lotus-ws-context.xml
• move  C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\module\org.alfresco.module.quickr\context\custom-lotus-ws-context.xml to C:\Alfresco\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\extension
• rename C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\module\org.alfresco.module.quickr\context\custom-lotus.properties.sample custom-lotus.properties
• change the host name in C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\module\org.alfresco.module.quickr\context\custom-lotus.properties to your public Amazon DNS Host Name
• move C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\module\org.alfresco.module.quickr\context\custom-lotus.properties to c:\alfresco\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\extension
• change the host name in C:\Alfresco\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\extension\custom-lotus.properties to use and add these two lines ...

                  

11. Restart the tomcat Windows service.
 
 Now you should be able to access Alfresco using both the browser interface and the Lotus Quickr Connectors.  

The first thing you can try is to login to the Alfresco server using this url.   


 
Note that the default userid in alfresco is 'admin' and the password is 'admin' which you can (and should) change.

Then you can create an Alfresco site and upload a few documents.     
 


To test the basic configuration for the connectors, point your browser to the url
 

 and you should see this kind of response
 

 
Then you can use the "Add Team Places" dialog from any of the Quickr connectors to pick an Alfresco site.