You can configure AOS for your environment with a global path to access Alfresco, and you can configure property mapping for injecting custom properties and metadata into Office documents.
Setting up a global filepath to access Alfresco
In Windows Explorer, you can set up a Group Policy to manage Favorites on client machines, or share a .lnk file in your Links folder. This can be useful if you want to preconfigure the folder that users will need to access the repository from Microsoft Office (http://servername:port/alfresco/aos
).
On a Windows 7 machine, the contents of Favorites in Windows Explorer is assembled from the .lnk files in C:\Users\username\Links
. You can create a .lnk
file in your Links
folder and distribute this to the Links
folder of other users, or preferably, you can use a Group Policy to manage Favorites on user machines.
To use a Group Policy:
-
In the Group Policy Management Console, navigate to
User Configuration\Preferences\Window Settings\Shortcuts
. -
Create a new shortcut (Group Policy Object) to a folder (not a link to a URL) with the following UNC target path:
\\servername@SSL\DavWWWRoot\alfresco\aos
Alternatively, you can specify
@port
instead of@SSL
, but not both. The default port is443
.For more information, see Configure a Shortcut Item.
Configuring mapping properties in Alfresco Office Services
Property mapping in AOS allows you to inject custom properties and metadata into Office documents. Property mapping is deactivated by default. Follow these instructions to activate property mapping.
Property mapping is different from the standard metadata extraction mechanism and should be carefully configured to ensure that different properties are set up. Properties stored in the repository are injected into Office documents when these files are read through AOS, and equally properties are extracted from Office files written through AOS and then updated in the repository.
Note: Injected properties form part of the document. If the document is removed from the organization, for example, anyone outside the organization reading the document can view all the properties that have been mapped into the document.
Note: Property mapping in Alfresco Office Services doesn’t work for password protected Microsoft Office Open XML files and will generate an exception. To ignore property mapping for password protected Microsoft Office Open XML files, set the property
aos.contentFilter.ignoreOOXMLProtected=false
in thealfresco-global.properties
file.
Take note of the following:
- Single value properties only can be mapped in Office documents. Multi-value properties are ignored.
- Accepted data type properties are
text
,mltext
,int
,long
,float
,double
,date
,datetime
andboolean
. Other data type properties are ignored. - The following constraints are supported:
MINMAX
for numeric data types,LENGTH
for text, orLIST
for text. Properties that have other constraints are ignored; for example,REGEX
for text. - Property mapping is only available for OOXML files (
.docx
,.xlsx
,.pptx
) and OLE files (.doc
,.xls
,.ppt
). OLE files do not support read-only properties and are ignored. Protected properties are available in OOXML files only.
If any ignored properties are declared as mandatory, then users will not be able to save documents.
It is possible to define a list of types for new documents. Whenever a user creates a new document with the Save As dialog, Microsoft Office displays this list to choose from. If the type contains mandatory properties, Office enforces values for these properties before the file can be saved. Files created outside of Office (for example, in Windows Explorer) are created with a type of cm:content
.
Alfresco provides basic configuration of four patterns, includedTypesPatterns
, excludedTypesPatterns
, includedAspectsPatterns
and excludedAspectsPatterns
in the aosBaseDataModelMappingConfiguration
abstract bean.
-
Rename or copy the
<classpathRoot\>/alfresco/extension/custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml.sample
file to<classpathRoot\>/alfresco/extension/custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml
.This sample configuration file activates metadata mapping for the basic
cm:content
type and all its sub-types, except for some system types. All type properties and all applied aspects (except for some system aspects) are mapped into the documents. -
In
custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml
, check your file type based on theincludedTypesPatterns
andexcludedTypesPatterns
properties.Both properties contain a list of regular expressions that are applied to the fully qualified QName. A file is valid for property mapping if its type is accepted by one of the regular expressions in the
includedTypesPatterns
list and does not exist in theexcludedTypesPatterns
list. For more information on regular expressions, see Class pattern. -
In
custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml
, check the file aspects based on theincludedAspectsPatterns
andexcludedAspectsPatterns
properties.If a file is valid for property mapping, aspects applied to this file are filtered further depending on the two properties,
includedAspectsPatterns
andexcludedAspectsPatterns
. Property mapping occurs only if the file type is included in theincludedTypesPatterns
list (even if there are aspects that are included in theincludedAspectsPatterns
property). -
In
custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml
, check theincludedInstantiableTypesPatterns
andexcludedInstantiableTypesPatterns
properties.These properties define the list of types that are available to users for document creation in the Save As dialog. If the
includedInstantiableTypesPatterns
is empty or not set, new documents are always created with the default type. If no system type matches the types configured inincludedInstantiableTypesPatterns
, the base typecm:content
is used by default. If exactly one type matches the configuration, this type is automatically used for all documents created with the Save As dialog in Microsoft Office.